Here’s the cert petition filed earlier this week, asking the Supreme Court to review the Ninth Circuit’s decision in MHC Financing Ltd. P’ship v. City of San Rafael,714 P.3d 1118 (9th Cir. 2013).
That’s the case in which the Ninth Circuit overturned the District Court’s ruling (after two trials) that MHC had proven a Penn Central taking and was entitled to just compensation for the City’s mobilehome rent control ordinance. The panel’s rationale was that MHC purchased the mobilehome park with the oppressive regulations already in place, so it had no “investment backed expectations” of operating free of the regulations.
We posted our thoughts on the Ninth Circuit’s ruling here, so we won’t go into the details of the cert petition, except to note two things:
- We didn’t get how the Ninth Circuit just ignored Palazzolo. We still don’t.
- The second Question Presented (below) is particularly fasinating. A regulatory taking that violates the Public Use Clause and the Due Process Clause. We’re going to read that part of the cert petition with great interest.
Here are the Questions Presented:
1. Whether the Ninth Circuit effectively nullified the regulatory taking doctrine recognized in Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York, 438 U.S. 104 (1978), and created clear conflicts with rulings of the Federal Circuit by refusing to recognize a regulatory taking caused by a rent control law that singled out one property owner to bear the burden of an 80% loss in the value of its property and denied the owner return on capital in an escalating real estate market, because the property had already been subject to less onerous regulation at the time of purchase and because it did not lose 100% of its value.
2. Whether the Ninth Circuit erred under Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), and Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A. Inc., 544 U.S. 528 (2005), in refusing to give any weight to the district court’s factual findings that the government’s asserted public use justification for a taking was a mere pretext for transferring the value of the land to a private group and that the transfer did not serve any legitimate purpose—thereby exacerbating the confusion in the lower courts about the effect of a finding that a regulation was enacted pretextually in establishing a private taking and/or a substantive due process violation.
If amicus briefs are filed, we’ll post them. To follow along, stay tuned. Here’s the Court’s docket entry.