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
- 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.
- 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.