Real Estate & Property Law

Time On Guggenheim - California Rent Control In The (Biased) Spotlight

By Robert Thomas

In California Trailer Parks War: Owners Vs. Renters, Time magazine takes a look at the mobile home rent control issues behind the recent Ninth Circuit en banc opinion in Guggenheim v. City of Goleta (our resource page on the case is here). Be sure to take the article's implicit conclusion (the mobile home owners are getting reamed by the Simon Legree park owners) with a grain of salt - the author's bias shines through pretty clearly:

• The rent control ordinances are keeping mobile home park owners from "enjoy[ing] explosive upticks in value" experienced by other California land owners. It's only fair, after all, that such profiteers not be allowed to make beneficial use of their land.

• The mobile home park owners employ "lawyers as foot soldiers" in their war on the tenant featured in the article, whom we are told "take peaceful walks with his wife and dog Kayla." (missing a comma? I didn't know you could marry your dog in California).

• Despite quoting militant language from the same mobile home owner ("However, we are coming back at them straight up. They have not seen the fight we are and will continue to give them."), and the fact they have "100 California jurisdictions" supporting them, it is they who are the underdogs "up against park owners like Rancho's Daniel Guggenheim" (with their "foot soldier" lawyers, one presumes).

• The mobile home owner's assertions (backed up by the en banc Ninth Circuit) are quoted as fact, while the owners merely "claim" to have suffered the loss of their land's value.

• The park owners' claims of unconstitutional rent control laws arre merely speculative gambling ("So far the park owners' fight against rent control hasn't paid-off."). We'll remember that language next time a civil rights plaintiff seeks relief under, say, the Free Speech Clause, to see if the author paints it as seeking a "pay off;" we're not holding our breath.

• The article quotes only the majority opinion that the mobile home owners have legally protected expectations in the continuance of rent control ordinances, not the dissent's (in our view correct) analysis that it is the park owners' "investment-backed expectations" in an economic return on their properties that matter.

• The article ends with a quote from an attorney for the mobile home owners who asserts that park owners are monopolists who "can do whatever they want" (except make a reasonable return on their property, it appears). Missing is any discussion of how rent control laws do not so much destroy "explosive upticks in value," but rather merely shift gains from the park owners to the mobile home owners, who are able to sell their rent controlled mobile homes for outrageous sums because buyers are willing to pay a premium to own a mobile home that is entitled to below market ground rent.

Don't get us wrong: we don't expect Time to print the Guggenheims' press releases, but it would be nice for it to recognize that there are least two sides to this issue.

Full post as published by inversecondemnation on January 27, 2011 (boomark / email).