A short one from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit that we’ve been meaning to post for a while.
In reVamped LLC v. City of Pipestone, No. 25-1076 (Dec. 23, 2025), the court concluded that the city’s issuance of a closure order to reVamped after the business ended up on the city’s “blighted list” was not a regulatory taking.
If the court’s restatement of the facts is accurate, this was going to be a tough case for the property owner. Code violations, compliance orders that were not complied with, and even a fire on the premises. Uh oh.
The owner’s main beef was that the city had not provided the required predeprivation notice and hearing before issuing the closure order. The court assumed the owner possessed a property right protected by the due process clause, but concluded that the risk of erroneous deprivation was low, and the city’s process provided for adequate post-deprivation remedies.
On to the (brief) takings analysis. Here it is. All of it:
Fortune’s temporary closure of the Inn did not amount to a regulatory taking proscribed by the Fifth Amendment. A lawful exercise of a state’s police power to regulate in the interest of public health and safety is generally not a taking. Outdoor Graphics, Inc. v. City of Burlington, Iowa, 103 F.3d 690, 695 (8th Cir. 1996). “For example, the government owes a landowner no compensation for requiring him to abate a nuisance on his property, because he never had a right to engage in the nuisance in the first place.” Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, 594 U.S. 139, 160 (2021).
Here, Fortune, acting under the Minnesota State Building Code, closed the Inn to preserve public health and safety. The Inn Owners may have been entitled to operate their retail business in the ordinary course, but they were not entitled to be free from temporary enforcement targeting well-documented safety deficiencies.
Slip op. at 8-9.
As we’ve said before, the fact that a government is exercising the police power isn’t the be-all-end-all analysis in takings (where the court must accept the notion that the government is lawfully exercising its power). The takings inquiry isn’t focused on what the government did, or especially why, but on the effects of the otherwise-valid action has on the owner’s property rights.
Now don’t get us wrong: we’re not saying the court here reached the wrong conclusion. Only that the way it got there leaves a lot unstated. We wish courts would stop taking the shortcut and do the takings work.
reVamped LLC v. City of Pipestone, No. 25-1076 (8th Cir. Dec. 23, 2025)