Lead Opinion
delivered the opinion of the Court.
The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment provides: “[N]or shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Most of our cases interpreting the Clause fall within two distinct classes. Where the government authorizes a physical occupation of property (or actually takes title), the Takings Clause generally requires compensation. See, e. g., Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp.,
Petitioners own mobile home parks in Escondido, California. They contend that a local rent control ordinance, when viewed against the backdrop of California’s Mobilehome Residency Law, amounts to a physical occupation of their property, entitling them to compensation under the first category of cases discussed above.
I
The term “mobile home” is somewhat misleading. Mobile homes are largely immobile as a practical matter, because the cost of moving one is often a significant fraction of the value of the mobile home itself. They are generally placed permanently in parks; once in place, only about 1 in every 100 mobile homes is ever moved. Hirsch & Hirsch, Legal-Economic Analysis of Rent Controls in a Mobile Home Context: Placement Values and Vacancy Decontrol, 35 UCLA L. Rev. 399, 405 (1988). A mobile home owner typically rents a plot of land, called a “pad,” from the owner of a mobile home park. The park owner provides private roads within the park, common facilities such as washing machines or a swimming pool, and often utilities. The mobile home owner often invests in site-specific improvements such as a driveway, steps, walkways, porches, or landscaping. When the mobile home owner wishes to move, the mobile home is usually sold in place, and the purchaser continues to rent the pad on which the mobile home is located.
The Mobilehome Residency Law limits the bases upon which a park owner may terminate a mobile home owner’s tenancy. These include the nonpayment of rent, the mobile home owner’s violation of law or park rules, and the park owner’s desire to change the use of his land. §798.56. While a rental agreement is in effect, however, the park owner generally may not require the removal of a mobile home when it is sold. § 798.73. The park owner may neither charge a transfer fee for the sale, § 798.72, nor disapprove of the purchaser, provided that the purchaser has the ability to pay the rent, § 798.74. The Mobilehome Residency Law contains a number of other detailed provisions, but none limit the rent the park owner may charge.
In the wake of the Mobilehome Residency Law, various communities in California adopted mobile home rent control ordinances. See Hirsch & Hirsch, supra, at 408-411. The voters of Escondido did the same in 1988 by approving Proposition K, the rent control ordinance challenged here. The ordinance sets rents back to their 1986 levels and prohibits rent increases without the approval of the city council. Park owners may apply to the council for rent increases at any time. The council must approve any increases it determines to be “just, fair and reasonable,” after considering the following nonexclusive list of factors: (1) changes in the Consumer Price Index; (2) the rent charged for comparable mobile home pads in Escondido; (3) the length of time since
Petitioners John and Irene Yee own the Friendly Hills and Sunset Terrace Mobile Home Parks, both of which are located in the city of Escondido. A few months after the adoption of Escondido’s rent control ordinance, they filed suit in San Diego County Superior Court. According to the complaint, “[t]he rent control law has had the effect of depriving the plaintiffs of all use and occupancy of [their] real property and granting to the tenants of mobilehomes presently in The Park, as well as the successors in interest of such tenants, the right to physically permanently occupy and use the real property of Plaintiff.” Id., at 3, ¶ 6. The Yees requested damages of $6 million, a declaration that the rent control ordinance is unconstitutional, and an injunction barring the ordinance’s enforcement. Id., at 5-6.
In their opposition to the city’s demurrer, the Yees relied almost entirely on Hall v. Santa Barbara,
The Yees were not alone. Eleven other park owners filed similar suits against the city shortly afterwards, and all were
The Court of Appeal affirmed, in an opinion primarily devoted to expressing the court’s disagreement with the reasoning of Hall. The court concluded: “Loretto in no way suggests that the Escondido ordinance authorizes a permanent physical occupation of the landlord’s property and therefore constitutes a per se taking.”
Eight of the twelve park owners, including the Yees, joined in a petition for certiorari. We granted certiorari,
II
Petitioners do not claim that the ordinary rent control statutes regulating housing throughout the country violate the Takings Clause. Brief for Petitioners 7, 10. Cf. Pennell v. San Jose,
This argument, while perhaps within the scope of our regulatory taking cases, cannot be squared easily with our cases on physical takings. The government effects a physical taking only where it requires the landowner to submit to the physical occupation of his land. “This element of required acquiescence is at the heart of the concept of occupation.” FCC v. Florida Power Corp.,
But the Escondido rent control ordinance, even when considered in conjunction with the California Mobilehome Residency Law, authorizes no such thing. Petitioners voluntarily rented their land to mobile home owners. At least on the face of the regulatory scheme, neither the city nor the State compels petitioners, once they have rented their prop
Petitioners suggest that the statutory procedure for changing the use of a mobile home park is in practice “a kind of gauntlet,” in that they are not in fact free to change the use of their land. Reply Brief for Petitioners 10, n. 16. Because petitioners do not claim to have run that gauntlet, however, this case provides no occasion to consider how the procedure has been applied to petitioners’ property, and we accordingly confine ourselves to the face of the statute. See Keystone Bituminous Coal Assn. v. DeBenedictis,
On their face, the state and local laws at issue here merely regulate petitioners’ use of their land by regulating the relationship between landlord and tenant. “This Court has consistently affirmed that States have broad power to regulate housing conditions in general and the landlord-tenant rela
Petitioners emphasize that the ordinance transfers wealth from park owners to incumbent mobile home owners. Other forms of land use regulation, however, can also be said to transfer wealth from the one who is regulated to another. Ordinary rent control often transfers wealth from landlords to tenants by reducing the landlords’ income and the tenants’ monthly payments, although it does not cause a one-time transfer of value as occurs with mobile homes. Traditional zoning regulations can transfer wealth from those whose activities are prohibited to their neighbors; when a property owner is barred from mining coal on his land, for example, the value of his property may decline but the value of his neighbor’s property may rise. The mobile home owner’s ability to sell the mobile home at a premium may make this wealth transfer more visible than in the ordinary case, see Epstein, Rent Control and the Theory of Efficient Regulation, 54 Brooklyn L. Rev. 741, 758-759 (1988), but the exist
Petitioners also rely heavily on their allegation that the ordinance benefits incumbent mobile home owners without benefiting future mobile home owners, who will be forced to purchase mobile homes at premiums. Mobile homes, like motor vehicles, ordinarily decline in value with age. But the effect of the rent control ordinance, coupled with the restrictions on the park owner’s freedom to reject new tenants, is to increase significantly the value of the mobile home. This increased value normally benefits only the tenant in possession at the time the rent control is imposed. See Hirsch & Hirsch,
The same may be said of petitioners’ contention that the ordinance amounts to compelled physical occupation because it deprives petitioners of the ability to choose their incoming
Petitioners’ final line of argument rests on a footnote in Loretto, in which we rejected the contention that “the landlord could avoid the requirements of [the statute forcing her to permit cable to be permanently placed on her property] by ceasing to rent the building to tenants.” We found this possibility insufficient to defeat a physical taking claim, because “a landlord’s ability to rent his property may not be conditioned on his forfeiting the right to compensation for a physical occupation.” Loretto,
With respect to physical takings, then, this case is not far removed from FCC v. Florida Power Corp.,
Ill
In this Court, petitioners attempt to challenge the ordinance on two additional grounds: They argue that it constitutes a denial of substantive due process and a regulatory
A
The Yees did not include a due process claim in their complaint. Nor did petitioners raise a due process claim in the Court of Appeal. It was not until their petition for review in the California Supreme Court that petitioners finally raised a substantive due process claim. But the California Supreme Court denied discretionary review. Such a denial, as in this Court, expresses no view as to the merits. See People v. Triggs,
In reviewing the judgments of state courts under the jurisdictional grant of 28 U. S. C. § 1257, the Court has, with very rare exceptions, refused to consider petitioners’ claims that were not raised or addressed below. Illinois v. Gates,
B
As a preliminary matter, we must address respondent’s assertion that a regulatory taking claim is unripe because petitioners have not sought rent increases. While respondent is correct that a claim that the ordinance effects a regula
We must also reject respondent’s contention that the regulatory taking argument is not properly before us because it was not made below. It is unclear whether petitioners made this argument below: Portions of their complaint and briefing can be read either to argue a regulatory taking or to support their physical taking argument. For the same reason it is equally ambiguous whether the Court of Appeal addressed the issue. Yet petitioners’ regulatory taking argument stands in a posture different from their substantive due process claim.
Petitioners .unquestionably raised a taking claim in the state courts. The question whether the rent control ordinance took their property without compensation, in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, is thus properly before us. Once a federal claim is properly presented, a party can make any argument in support of that claim; parties are not limited to the precise arguments they made below. Bankers Life & Casualty Co. v. Crenshaw,
A litigant seeking review in this Court of a claim properly raised in the lower courts thus generally possesses the ability to frame the question to be decided in any way he chooses, without being limited to the manner in which the question was framed below. While we have on occasion rephrased the question presented by a petitioner, see, e. g., Ankenbrandt v. Richards,
The framing of the question presented has significant consequences, however, because under this Court’s Rule 14.1(a), “[o]nly the questions set forth in the petition, or fairly included therein, will be considered by the Court.” While “[t]he statement of any question presented will be deemed to comprise every subsidiary question fairly included therein,” ibid., we ordinarily do not consider questions outside those presented in the petition for certiorari. See, e. g., Berkemer v. McCarty,
Rule 14.1(a) serves two important and related purposes. First, it provides the respondent with notice of the grounds upon which the petitioner is seeking certiorari, and enables
Second, Rule 14.1(a) assists the Court in selecting the cases in which certiorari will be granted. Last Term alone we received over 5,000 petitions for certiorari, but we have the capacity to decide only a small fraction of these cases on the merits. To use our resources most efficiently, we must grant certiorari only in those cases that will enable us to resolve particularly important questions. Were we routinely to entertain questions not presented in the petition for certiorari, much of this efficiency would vanish, as parties who feared an inability to prevail on the question presented would be encouraged to fill their limited briefing space and argument time with discussion of issues other than the one on which certiorari was granted. Rule 14.1(a) forces the parties to focus on the questions the Court has viewed as particularly important, thus enabling us to make efficient use of our resources.
We granted certiorari on a single question pertaining to the Takings Clause: “Two federal courts of appeal have held that the transfer of a premium value to a departing mobile-home tenant, representing the value of the right to occupy at a reduced rate under local mobilehome rent control ordinances, constitute^] an impermissible taking. Was it error for the state appellate court to disregard the rulings and
Whether or not the ordinance effects a regulatory taking is a question related to the one petitioners presented, and perhaps complementary to the one petitioners presented, but it is not “fairly included therein.” Consideration of whether a regulatory taking occurred would not assist in resolving whether a physical taking occurred as well; neither of the two questions is subsidiary to the other. Both might be subsidiary to a question embracing both — Was there a taking? — but they exist side by side, neither encompassing the other. Cf. American Nat. Bank & Trust Co. of Chicago v. Haroco, Inc.,
Rule 14.1(a) accordingly creates a heavy presumption against our consideration of petitioners’ claim that the ordinance causes a regulatory taking. Petitioners have not overcome that presumption. While the regulatory taking question is no doubt important, from an institutional perspective it is not as important as the physical taking question. The lower courts have not reached conflicting results, so far as we know, on whether similar mobile home rent
I — I C
We made this observation in Loretto:
“Our holding today is very narrow. We affirm the traditional rule that a permanent physical occupation of property is a taking. In such a case, the property owner- entertains a historically rooted expectation of compensation, and the character of the invasion is qualitatively more intrusive than perhaps any other category of property regulation. We do not, however, question the equally substantial authority upholding a State’s*539 broad power to impose appropriate restrictions upon an owner’s use of his property.”458 U. S., at 441 .
We respected this distinction again in Florida Power, where we held that no taking occurs under Loretto when a tenant invited to lease at one rent remains at a lower regulated rent. Florida Power,
Affirmed.
Notes
Strictly speaking, the Escondido rent control ordinance only limits rents. Petitioners’ inability to select their incoming tenants is a product of the State’s Mobilehome Residency Law, the constitutionality of which has never been at issue in this case. (The State, moreover, has never been a party.) But we understand petitioners to be making a more subtle argument — that before the adoption of the ordinance they were able to influence a mobile home owner’s selection of a purchaser by threatening to increase the rent for prospective purchasers they disfavored. To the extent the rent control ordinance deprives petitioners of this type of influence, petitioners’ argument is one we must consider.
Concurrence Opinion
concurring in the judgment.
I agree with the Court that the Escondido ordinance is not a taking under this Court’s analysis in Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp.,
Concurrence Opinion
concurring in the judgment.
I concur in the judgment and would join the Court’s opinion except for its references to the relevance and significance of petitioners’ allegations to a claim of regulatory taking.