Thomas MacMillan file photo
Judge Victor Bolden.
A federal judge ruled against a group of landlords seeking to overturn the state’s eviction moratorium, finding that rental property owners do not have a Constitutional right to maximize profits during a pandemic.
U.S. District of Connecticut Judge Victor Bolden issued that ruling Friday afternoon in the case Auracle Homes LLC; FD Management LLC; Buckley Farms LLC; Orange Capitol LLC; 216 East Main Street Meriden LLC; BD Property Holdings LLC; Prime Management LLC; and Haberfeld Enterprises LLC v. Ned Lamont. Two of the plaintiff holding companies are co-owned by the New Haven-based rental property owners David Candelora and Ben Eastman.
In his 39-page decision, Bolden, who is a former top city government attorney, denied the landlords’ request for a temporary restraining order to be placed on Gov. Ned Lamont’s statewide eviction moratorium, which currently extends through Aug. 22. Click here to read Bolden’s full decision.
The federal judge went point by point through the landlords’ claims that the governor has violated their Constitutional rights to due process, private property, private contract, and equal protection under the law.
At each step, Bolden found that the argument made by the landlords — and their Republican legislator attorneys — fell short of convincing the court to take the extraordinary measure of overturning an executive order designed to protect the public amidst the current Covid-19 crisis.
Bolden’s line of reasoning throughout the decision returned again and again to the notion that rental housing is already a heavily regulated industry, and imposing a new set of regulations designed to mitigate the current public health crisis is not an unreasonable act for the governor to take.
“Plaintiffs continue to enjoy economic benefits of ownership, and ‘can continue to accept rental payments from tenants not facing financial hardship, while also covering the cost of ownership by collecting security deposit funds from consenting tenants who have been affected by the pandemic,’” Bolden wrote, citing a decision issued by a New York federal court judge earlier this year that upheld New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s eviction moratorium in the face of a similar lawsuit from local landlords.
“As residential landlords, Plaintiffs’ contractual right to collect rent is premised on compliance with a framework of state laws. Consequently, their reasonable investment-backed expectations cannot operate apart from ‘public programs adjusting the benefits and burdens of economic life to promote the common good.’”
Lamont’s executive orders do not prevent the landlords from collecting rent or accruing unpaid rent, Bolden noted. They instead represent “a temporary adjustment of the status quo, and only defer the ability of residential landlords like Plaintiffs to collect, or obtain a judgment for, the full amount of rent the tenants agreed pay.”
Just because the plaintiffs cannot make as much profit as they normally do from these properties, Bolden wrote, does not mean that the government has wholly seized their private property and deprived them of all value.
Bolden applied a similar logic to landlords’ ability to evict tenants as he did to their ability to collect rent under these executive orders. These orders do not eliminate the possibility of evictions. They simply require plaintiffs to wait.
Citing the same 1905 case that a different federal judge cited when denying a New Haven bar’s challenge to Mayor Justin Elicker’s limitation on social gathering sizes earlier this year, Bolden reaffirmed the executive branch’s relatively wide latitude to look out for the public’s health during crises like the current one.
He referenced an amicus brief provided by a variety of legal aid services in the state, including New Haven Legal Assistance Association, that claimed that allowing evictions to resume will inevitably result in families kicked to the street, living in shelters, or in denser congregate settings, and increasing their risk of contracting Covid-19.
“Even in the absence of record evidence that these specific measures directed at preventing evictions are causally related to any reduction in the spread of COVID-19 in the State of Connecticut,” Bolden wrote, “given the ongoing nature and continued uncertainty of when public life will resume to normal, there is nothing in this record to suggest that Governor Lamont’s efforts thus far should be second-guessed, much less stayed.”
‘While this pandemic has adversely affected Plaintiffs’ businesses — as it has much of the nation’s economy,” the judge concluded, “Plaintiffs have failed to satisfy the standards necessary for obtaining a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction as a matter of law.”