Article from Reason by Christian Britschgi.

New York’s new rental regulations are an unconstitutional violation of landlords’ due process and property rights, argues a new lawsuit filed this week in federal court.

Late Monday, the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) and the Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP), two landlord trade groups, filed a lawsuit against New York City, its Rent Guidelines Board (RGB), and the state and city officials responsible for administering the state’s landmark rent stabilization law.

Essentially a form of rent control, the contested law limits how much the owners of rent-stabilized apartments can raise rents and imposes conditions on when tenants in those units can be evicted. In June, state lawmakers—led by a crop of newly elected progressive legislators who’d campaigned on a platform of “universal rent control”—passed a sweeping update to these regulations that piled on more restrictions still.

RSA and CHIP are arguing that New York’s rent stabilization law is such a poorly designed and irrational means of providing affordable housing that it violates the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ due process protections. They also argue that the law prevents landlords from using their property as they see fit while reducing its value, both of which amount to an uncompensated government taking.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: Thomas Good [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons