Whether the provisions of the New York Rent Stabilization Law that prevent a property owner from regaining exclusive possession and control of her property after the expiration of a lease effect per se physical takings

QUESTIONS PRESENTED New York’s Rent Stabilization Law (RSL) is the nation’s most stringent rental housing regulation, governing one million New York City apartments. It appropriates owners’ right to exclude and other property rights by, upon the expiration of a tenant’s lease, preventing owners from occupying their property, changing its use, or simply leaving it vacant. Absent unlawful acts, tenants and their broadly-defined “successors” are entitled to lease renewals in perpetuity. The RSL also imposes the public burden of providing affordable housing on a subset of rental property owners, by setting maximum rent levels based in part on tenant ability to pay. New York’s high court held that this subsidization scheme is a “public assistance benefit,” “conferred by the government” through regulations “applied to private owners of real property.” The Second Circuit affirmed dismissal of petitioners’ claims, holding that owners lose their rights to exclude, use, and change the use of their property by electing to enter into a lease. In effect, these apartments become the government’s housing stock, outside the owners’ control. The questions presented are: 1. Whether the provisions of the RSL that prevent a property owner from regaining exclusive possession and control of her property after the expiration of a lease effect per se physical takings. 2. Whether, by mandating consideration of tenant ability to pay in setting maximum rents, the RSL forces a subset of owners “alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole,” and thereby effects a regulatory taking as Justices Scalia and O’Connor concluded in Pennell v. City of San Jose, 485 U.S. 1, 22 (1988).