Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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At issue is a petition from two landlord lobbying groups asking the high court to overturn New York City’s rent stabilization law, which has been on the books since 1969 and limits annual rent increases for more than one million units in the city — nearly half of all rentals.
✏️ The issue at hand 🔗 View Highlight
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Rents would go up significantly around the city,” he continued. “There will be a tremendous amount of displacement. You will have a lot of people leaving New York City, you will have a lot of homelessness, you’ll have a lot of overcrowding.”
✏️ What the effect of that issue will lead to 🔗 View Highlight
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At least one group petitioning the court to take the case has substantial ties to both Harlan Crow, the GOP megadonor and Justice Clarence Thomas benefactor, and Paul Singer, the hedge fund billionaire who provided an undisclosed private jet flight to Justice Samuel Alito.
✏️ The corruption at hand without any checks or balances to stop it. Producers are influencing the judiciary in their favor and to the detriment of the people. 🔗 View Highlight
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decades of empirical data showing that limiting rent increases does not get in the way of new construction, as economists long argued.
✏️ Refuting the Producers’ claim that rent control stifles construction and so on. There’s another article I highlighted that goes into more detail about this. xref 🔗 View Highlight
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The two organizations spent a combined $4.7 million lobbying as they pushed to block the passage of a sweeping tenant protection law in 2019. The law, which expanded rent stabilization from just New York City to any locality in the state that chooses to opt in, made it more difficult for landlords to remove units from rent stabilization and added new protections to rent-stabilized units.
✏️ Producers spending money to influence Government in their favor, and against People. 🔗 View Highlight
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the groups sued the city and state, arguing that the new law and New York City’s existing 1969 rent stabilization law are unconstitutional. The lawsuit from RSA and CHIP was dismissed by lower courts, most recently the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals. But the groups claimed that their intention was always to reach the Supreme Court. “We always expected these issues to be decided by the Supreme Court and are confident we will ultimately prevail
✏️ Producers tried the normal process of using judiciary to get what they want, and judiciary ruled against them. That should be the end of it, but obviously the Producers were aiming to utilize their “buying out” the higher Supreme Court as their ultimate goal of success. 🔗 View Highlight
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argue that the rent stabilization law constitutes an illegal seizure of property from landlords in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause: “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” They also claim it violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. According to the RSA and CHIP petition, the law infringes upon landlords’ “rights to exclude, occupy, use, change the use of, and dispose of their property.” New York City’s rent stabilization law prohibits landlords from doing certain things with units they have chosen to lease in rent-stabilized buildings: leave the apartments vacant; change them from residential to commercial use; or kick out tenants who are complying with the terms of their lease, even after their lease has ended.
✏️ The Producers’ argument 🔗 View Highlight
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An amicus brief drafted by community groups representing tenants and homeless people noted that the law allows landlords to decline to renew a lease with agency approval, allows landlords to “recover an apartment for the personal use of the landlord or her immediate family upon a showing of immediate and compelling necessity,” and does not force landlords to offer vacant apartments for rent. Landlords are “choosing to use their property as residential real estate,” said Ellen Davidson, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, who helped draft the community groups’ amicus brief opposing the petition. “The government is not physically taking the property away from the landlord.”
✏️ The rebuttal against the Producers’ argument 🔗 View Highlight
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a flurry of corporate lobbying groups and conservative think tanks submitted amicus briefs urging the Supreme Court to take the case. One of these think tanks has close financial ties to the Supreme Court’s billionaire benefactors.