The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down a major property-rights challenge to rent control laws in New York City and elsewhere that give tenants a right to stay for many years in an apartment with a below-market cost.
A group of New York landlords had sued, contending the combination of rent regulation and long-term occupancy violated the Constitution’s ban on the taking of private property for public use.
The justices had considered the appeal since late September. Only Justice Clarence Thomas issued a partial dissent.
… violated the Constitution’s ban on taking of private property for public use.
Do they think that regulating the usage of private property is the same as having it taken away? Was their argument really “As long as it’s on my property, I should be able to do whatever I want, whenever I want, to whomever I want. Anything else is a violation of my rights!”
Property can be “taken” by the government, this sometimes happens when zoning laws change. For example, if the zoning of the property was changed from residential to agricultural. Then the owner could argue that the value of the property was “taken” by by the government and they would likely win the case. Regardless of if the owner was a landlord or the owner of a vacant lot.
To be clear, I’m not commenting on the original issue, but intend to only provide information about the laws related to this issue.
The argument is that there exists some level of regulation by the government at which point you can claim that you functionally do not have ownership of the thing in question.
That bar is definitely very high - consider landmark laws where you can be legally forced to maintain certain aesthetics or can be prevented from knocking down a money pit that you also functionally can’t sell - hence this case failing, but it’s not an absolutely absurd argument in general principle.
Unpopular opinion of the day : I think the justice needed to hear this case.
Given how rapacious landlords have been for all of history, I’d be curious to hear your reasoning.
To get an answer as to whether or not the actions of the city are constitutional.
Not every case has enough legal merit for the Supreme Court. Given that they declined the case, the obvious signal is that it’s allowed.
This is good. Rent control is a local issue and I don’t see a need to involve the federal government.
Tenants are no better, and so there needs to be a balance. We need both landlord and tenant rights. They are in conflict, but the world needs both (remember that public housing just makes government the landlord)
Tenets breaking rules and being shitty mean that landlords lose on their investments (which inherently carry risk).
Landlords breaking rules and being shitty means that people go homeless, live in awful conditions, or cannot afford basic necessities.
Sure, both sides have the capacity to be bad, but trying to “both sides” basic shelter is fucking wild.
Bypass the paywall: https://archive.ph/a9Uu8
Controversial opinion, but shouldn’t capitalism allow the free market to decide rental rates and tenancy durations? Why are rental incomes regulated. I completely understand having regulations for health and safety reasons (maintenance needs to be enforced, apartments need to be liveable) but why control the prices in a capitalist society?
If landlords collectively agree to double the rent of every apartment in a city, tenants can’t simply move to a cheaper unit. There should be someone telling those landlords no.
But that’s the free market at work. Prices will continue to rise until they become unaffordable and landlords have empty properties. Where I live there is no rent control, and the prices keep rising as the economy and inflation rises. When rental properties are in high demand, rental prices increase across the board. When construction provides many new properties to buy, people buy, rental demand decreases, and rental prices stagnate. No need for regulation from some government body. I thought this was capitalism 101?
When a handful of colluding parties control the entire supply of something people can’t live without, that’s not a free market. It’s despotism. The parties in control can do anything they want, and anybody who tries to tell them no can be deprived of that resource and left to die.
Free market doesn’t mean that all rules go out the window. Colluding over prices eliminates the natural competition that occurs in a free market. That is why it is generally prohibited, though businesses still try it from time to time and they (rightly) get in trouble for it.
In my opinion, basic human rights such as adequate housing shouldn’t be left solely to the free market. That’s just asking for human rights violations.
That said I’m kind of disappointed in how black and white this issue is usually dealt with on lemmy (I get the feeling most users have the opinion: capitalism equals evil)
In my ideal society, we as a society would facilitate basic housing for people where needed. Everything above the basic necessity of a roof above your head and a place for yourself (adequate housing), I think can be left up to the free market. I think the prices of the free market would be more ‘proportional’ if the free market knows it can’t ask ludicrous prices because there’s basic housing as a safety net.
The free market cannot provide affordable housing for everything, including essential service workers
I thought pure capitalism meant that a removal of controls and regulations would lead to natural consequences (like essential services workers being priced out) which would eventually lead to a lack of essential workers, which would eventually lead to the creation of affordable accommodation in the city by some enterprising business looking to capitalise on that opportunity. The free market would eventually take care of the problem. It might be disruptive in the short term, but ultimately that problem would be self resolved by the market. Bringing in regulations and controls starts to smell like socialism?!
In a world with infinite resources maybe. But consider places like NYC where there is no more land to build on and agencies with money gobble up whatever land/buildings become available before an enterprising agency can come in to shake up the market and you’ll start to realize one of the major failings of capitalism.
Capitalism always favors the rich at the expense of the poor. The only way that the poor can prosper is at the good will of the rich, which is something that exists in such small quantities that it may as well not exist at all.
it might be disruotive in the short term
This handwave sentence is always what libertarians use to hide the utter destruction of a working society.
“Yes, millions of people in a city suddenly being homeless, leading to crime/violence/mass death/the breakdown of all services and commerce would be disrupted, but at some point after tens of thousand die it would work itself out because…”
Plenty of “libertarian paradises” out there man, only some of them over run by bears. Hows that track record of unfettered capitalism going?
but why control the prices in a capitalist society?
Yeah, why would we want to regulate prices on a necessity to live that requires capital to be able to own, thereby meaning that ownership will only ever be in the hands of a small amount of lords that the peasants are 100% at the whims of the owning class. Add in that it’s better for landlords to collude and drive up prices (to the point that the rental price increases can be entirely automated to better extract money from renters) it’s not difficult at all to see why it needs to be regulated.
