On November 14, the Liberty Justice Center filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear GHP Management Corporation v. City of Los Angeles, a case challenging the city of Los Angeles’s COVID-era eviction moratorium as a violation of property owners’ Fifth Amendment rights.
In early 2020, the City of Los Angeles enacted a series of ordinances that effectively functioned as an eviction moratorium, prohibiting property owners from evicting tenants during a yearslong local emergency period implemented in response to COVID-19. The city claimed that the moratorium was necessary to promote public health and prevent mass homelessness during the pandemic.
However, the moratorium deprived property owners of their constitutional rights to use their property as they see fit and to prevent its unauthorized use by others. Due to the moratorium, those renting out their property could not collect unpaid rent, remove their property from the rental market and move back into their own homes, or evict tenants who violated rental agreements—even when those tenants failed to pay rent or allowed unauthorized occupants or pets.
In 2021, Los Angeles-based rental company GHP Management Corporation—which lost over $20 million in unpaid rent due to the moratorium—sued the City of Los Angeles to challenge the ordinances. The company argued that the moratorium violates the Fifth Amendment’s “takings” clause because the government commandeered private property without fair compensation.
A lower court dismissed GHP Management’s lawsuit, ruling that the moratorium was not a taking because the city had not taken permanent physical control of the properties. The company is now petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to take up its case.
The Liberty Justice Center’s amicus brief argues that Los Angeles’s eviction moratorium is a taking because, by entirely removing landlords’ right to exclude from their properties, the city has appropriated those properties, effectively providing free housing at property owners’ expense.
“Los Angeles’s eviction moratorium threw Californians’ constitutional rights out the window by effectively transferring control over a property from that property’s owner to the government, without providing just compensation,” said Jeffrey Schwab, Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center. “The Supreme Court should grant the petition and hold that perpetually occupying someone’s property is a taking that requires just compensation under the Fifth Amendment.”
The Liberty Justice Center’s amicus brief in GHP Management v. City of Los Angeles is available here.