SAN DIEGO COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Rent Control Made Simpler

This newspaper has long maintained that rent control has a negative long-term effect on the supply of affordable housing. But the wisdom of rent control aside, little question now remains about its constitutionality. In a 9-0 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the 5th Amendment property rights of landlords are not infringed when rent is regulated. Cities have “broad power,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, to “regulate the landlord-tenant relationship without paying compensation for all economic injuries that such regulation entails.”

How any given city will exercise its constitutional power now becomes a purely political question; and since tenants outnumber landlords, the balance of power may now shift. Though this decision comes in a case involving two Escondido mobile home parks, it is likely to strengthen the legal basis for the control of apartment rents as well as space rents in mobile home parks. The statist Rehnquist court has rendered an opinion with a populist effect.

In California’s rent control wars, the central importance of the troops of the California Mobile Home Parkowners Alliance, on the one side, and the Golden State Mobilehome Owners League, on the other, has not always been recognized. Mobile home park ownership can be extremely lucrative, and the park owners spent heavily to win repeal of rent control in (among other places) Los Angeles County. Mobile home owners, however, who rent land but own the dwellings that occupy the land, are the capitalists of the renting class. If their land rent cannot be controlled, their housing investment is endangered, and they have fought fiercely over the years for protection. They are the most--perhaps the only--powerful tenant group in the state. This time, they won big.

The court’s decision was not rendered for any tenant group, we note, but for the City of Escondido against park owners John and Irene Yee. Clearly, however, the decision augurs new political influence for the state’s 800,000 mobile home dwellers--and behind them the far more numerous, still-to-be-organized apartment dwellers.