Amicus Brief: GHP Management Corp. v. City of Los Angeles

A group of Los Angeles homeowners are fighting the city’s extreme eviction moratoria. Lead plaintiff GHP Management Corp is a large landlord; when it filed suit in August 2021, its tenants owed over $20 million in back rent. GHP had no effective means to evict them because of the pandemic-related moratorium, which didn’t wind down until a few months ago. GHP sued the City of Los Angeles in federal court principally claiming that the eviction moratorium constituted physical, per se takings under the Supreme Court’s recent property-rights jurisprudence (e.g., the 2021 Cedar Point case), particularly in light of the Court’s language in Alabama Association of Realtors with regard to the CDC’s eviction moratorium: “preventing [landlords] from evicting tenants who breach their leases intrudes on one of the most fundamental elements of property ownership—the right to exclude.” The city moved to dismiss, claiming that a case about mobile-home rent control, Yee v. City of Escondido, precluded such claims. The district court agreed with the city and the U.S Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed.

The Ninth Circuit’s is the minority view, as both the Eighth and Federal Circuits considered nearly identical arguments and concluded that the plaintiffs’ claims survived a motion to dismiss on the ground that Yee was inapposite and that Cedar Point governs. GHP is now seeking Supreme Court review on the question of whether eviction moratoria depriving property owners of the right to exclude nonpaying tenants constitute physical takings deserving of just compensation, or whether they are mere regulations of a property’s use.

The Manhattan Institute has joined the Buckeye Institute supporting that petition and arguing that (1) the right to exclude is a fundamental element of property rights, (2) a regulatory scheme that deprives owners of a fundamental element of their property rights operates as a taking, and (3) this case is a proper vehicle for the Court to clarify and limit the scope of Yee.

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.

Tim Rosenberger is a legal fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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