## Facts

- Mobile home park owners rented pads of land to mobile home owners; when homes were sold, purchasers typically continued renting the same pads.
- California’s Mobilehome Residency Law limited grounds for terminating tenancies and restricted park owners’ ability to force removal of homes upon sale or to block qualified purchasers.
- Escondido’s rent control ordinance rolled pad rents back to 1986 levels and required City Council approval for rent increases.
- Park owners alleged the combined legal regime suppressed pad rents and allowed incumbent tenants to capture economic value through higher resale prices for their mobile homes tied to below-market pad rent.
- Park owners contended the scheme effectively granted tenants and successors a right to continue occupying the pads and impaired owners’ ability to choose incoming tenants.

## Issues

1. Whether the rent control ordinance, alone or combined with state tenancy restrictions, authorized a permanent physical occupation of the park owners’ land constituting a per se taking under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
2. Whether broader regulatory-takings or substantive due process challenges were properly before the Court in light of the question presented and preservation in the lower courts.

## Decision

- The Court affirmed the state appellate judgment rejecting the per se physical-taking claim.
- The ordinance did not compel a physical occupation because the owners had voluntarily opened their land to tenants and the laws regulated the landlord-tenant relationship rather than forcing an invasion.
- The Court did not decide whether the ordinance effected a regulatory taking or violated substantive due process because those theories were not properly presented for decision on certiorari and/or were not preserved below.

## Legal Principles

- A per se physical taking requires government action that compels an owner to submit to a physical occupation of property by others.
- Regulations governing rent levels and the terms of continued tenancy in an existing landlord-tenant relationship ordinarily constitute use regulation, not compelled physical occupation.
- Alleged wealth transfers from landlords to tenants through below-market rents and resale premiums may be relevant to regulatory-takings or due process theories, but do not by themselves convert rent control into a physical invasion.
- When claims are not preserved below or do not match the question on which certiorari was granted, the Court may decline to reach them.

## Conclusion

The Court held that Escondido’s mobilehome pad rent control ordinance did not impose a compelled physical occupation and therefore was not a per se taking; any challenge to the economic effects of the scheme would have to proceed, if at all, under regulatory-takings or due process doctrines not decided in this case.


Yee v. City of Escondido, 503 U.S. 519 (1992)