The Supreme Court has decided against taking up a case about whether an eviction moratorium imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic violated the property rights of landlords.
The landlords in the case argued that the moratorium Los Angeles imposed in March 2020, which prevented them from evicting delinquent tenants, constituted a so-called taking under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
A clause in the amendment requires governments to provide fair compensation when taking private property for public purposes. The moratorium ended in January 2024.
The high court’s decision on June 30 took the form of an unsigned order in GHP Management Corporation v. City of Los Angeles. The court did not explain its decision.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the court’s decision to reject the case. They said the Supreme Court should determine whether the moratorium preventing landlords from evicting nonpaying tenants constitutes a taking under the Fifth Amendment.
The lead petitioner, GHP Management, stated in the petition that Los Angeles enacted “one of the most onerous eviction moratoria in the country, stripping property owners like Petitioners of their right to exclude nonpaying tenants.” The other 13 petitioners are also apartment building owners.
This policy shifted the cost of the city’s “coronavirus response onto housing providers,” even though other constitutionally acceptable means were available to assist those in need. The city effectively gave the defaulting tenants what constituted an “exclusive easement in the private property of others without paying for it.”
An easement permits someone to use another person’s property without owning it.
By August 2021, when the petitioners filed their lawsuit against the city seeking compensation for back rent owed by tenants who could not be evicted, the rent owed had risen to more than $20 million, according to the petition.
A federal district court ruled against the petitioners, finding that because the petitioners had invited the tenants to occupy their properties by signing leases, the moratorium could not be considered a taking.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the decision in May 2024.
The panel ruled that the moratorium “does not effect a physical taking because the Landlords voluntarily opened their property to occupation by tenants.”
For a governmental act to constitute a taking, a landowner must be required “to submit to the physical occupation of his land” by a third party, the panel stated, citing the Supreme Court’s 1992 ruling in Yee v. Escondido.
In the petition, the petitioners urged the Supreme Court to take up their appeal to resolve disagreements among federal courts of appeals on whether an eviction moratorium could be considered a taking.
The petitioners argued that the Ninth Circuit erred in its ruling, which amounted to a conclusion that “the property owner must take her lumps because nobody forced her to lease, after all.”
Los Angeles filed a brief on Feb. 18 urging the Supreme Court not to accept the case.
The Ninth Circuit correctly held that the petitioners failed to prove that the moratorium, which “did not excuse any rent debt that an affected tenant accrued,” constituted a taking, according to the brief.
Thomas wrote an opinion dissenting from the Supreme Court’s new decision, which Gorsuch joined.
The justice said that the split among federal courts of appeals “stems from confusion about how to reconcile two of our precedents,” Yee v. Escondido and Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, a 2021 decision that held a law requiring agricultural employers to let labor organizers onto their land constituted a taking.
Because the Supreme Court’s decisions spurred this confusion, “we have an obligation to fix it,” Thomas wrote.
“That obligation is particularly strong here, as there is good reason to think that the Ninth Circuit erred,” he said.
Using the reasoning behind Cedar Point Nursery, an eviction moratorium “would plainly seem to interfere with a landlord’s right to exclude” people from his property.
The Supreme Court should “clarify our case law now, rather than in the heat of the next national emergency,” Thomas wrote.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared July 4, 2025, in The Epoch Times. It was updated July 8, 2025.