Some good reads from Reason

Trump Settles His Own Lawsuit Against the IRS for $1.8 Billion of Your Money

How bad is California's 'squatters rights?" Furious property owners are turning to vigilantism.

Donald Trump, Thomas Massie, and the Long, Slow Death of the Tea Party

Squatting Isn’t a Housing Policy. It’s Theft

In October last year, Absolum, age 18, finally got to visit the $115,000 home. But as he approached it, he realized something was wrong — someone was already living in the house.

Absolum called the police, who told him there was nothing they could do. The family living in the house had been scammed into believing they were renting it, and Absolum would have to go to court to evict the squatters.

“He was a victim once, and he’s a victim again,” his mother, Avril Absolum, told the Baltimore Banner in an article published this week. “He did the right thing. And there were people in his house.”

The case is pending in court, and Absolum still has not moved into his home.

Back in 2024, when “squatting” was having a moment, Republican governors such as Georgia’s Brian Kemp and Florida’s Ron DeSantis signed legislation making it much easier to evict people who took up residence either in people’s homes or in vacant buildings. Yet for around half the country, squatting is still only a civil matter; if a vacationing family returns home to find someone has moved into their residence, it could be months or years before they are able to expel the interlopers.

Read the rest here.

This is bizarre

Even for a state and city as famously hostile to property rights as New York, this is just nuts.

L.A. Wants To Seize Private Apartment Building to Prevent Rent Increases

Los Angeles politicians will make housing affordable, by force if necessary.

On Friday, City Councilmember Gil Cedillo introduced a motion that asks city staff to draft plans for using eminent domain to seize Hillside Villa Apartments, a 124-unit, privately-owned development in the city's Chinatown neighborhood to avoid rent increases at the property.

The property is currently under an affordability covenant that requires its owner to rent out a number of its units at below-market rates. That covenant is set to expire soon, meaning rents on some 59 units will increase to market rates—which means rent hikes of up to $1,000 per unit.

"We think it is important enough that we need to take action to preserve those units. We don't want to generate more homeless people," Conrado Terrazas Cross, Cedillo's communications director, tells Reason, saying that many tenants would not be able to afford the coming rent increases.

"I think it's a brilliant idea but I need to know: Are we in Cuba or Venezuela?" says Tom Botz, the L.A.-area developer who owns the building, about the proposal to seize his property.

Botz tells Reason he purchased the development company that built Hillside Villa roughly 20 years ago. The building's construction had been financed by a number of government grants and loans, including a $5.4 million loan from Los Angeles' since-abolished Community Redevelopment Agency in 1986.

A condition of that loan was that the developer rent out units in the building at below-market rates for 30 years. Other government grants and loans that helped finance the building came with their own specific affordability requirements.

The affordability requirements from the redevelopment loan were supposed to expire in June 2019. Beginning in May 2018, tenants in Hillside Villa started to receive notices that their below-market rents would be increasing in a year's time. In March 2019, tenants were given the option of signing new leases at the increased rates or face eviction.

Read the rest here.

DEA to traveler: Thanks, I’ll take that cash

Maybe he should have taken traveler’s checks.

But it’s too late for that now. All the money – $16,000 in cash – that Joseph Rivers said he had saved and relatives had given him to launch his dream in Hollywood is gone, seized during his trip out West not by thieves but by Drug Enforcement Administration agents during a stop at the Amtrak train station in Albuquerque.

An incident some might argue is still theft, just with the government’s blessing.

Rivers, 22, wasn’t detained and has not been charged with any crime since his money was taken last month.

That doesn’t matter. Under a federal law enforcement tool called civil asset forfeiture, he need never be arrested or convicted of a crime for the government to take away his cash, cars or property – and keep it.

Agencies like the DEA can confiscate money or property if they have a hunch, a suspicion, a notion that maybe, possibly, perhaps the items are connected with narcotics. Or something else illegal.

Or maybe the fact that the person holding a bunch of cash is a young black man is good enough.

Read the rest here.

Thank You Eric Holder

Now there is a blog title I never expected to write without sarcasm. But giving credit where it is due, this is a hugely important move in defense of civil liberties.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without evidence that a crime occurred.

Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.

 Read the rest here.

Sacrificing Property Rights on the Altar of Gun Rights

...As a matter of personal preference, I would certainly encourage private companies to allow their employees to bring their firearms to work, and, as a matter of taste, I would prefer it if those who have been discovered violating company policy were treated gently — especially if they were forced to break the rules in self-defense. But, unless one is to wholly rewrite the nature of American constitutional government, these decisions must be reserved to the private sector, and not to local voters or representatives. Like all of the provisions within the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment serves as a check on government and on government alone. It does not apply to Walmart or to FedEx or to Joe’s Highway Diner. When the NRA gripes that some politicians are “heeding corporate concerns” over the predilections of gun owners, what it is really saying is that those politicians are respecting property rights and refusing to get involved where they are not welcome. At what point, one wonders, did that become undesirable to liberty-loving people?

Read the rest here.

Property Rights vs Public Safety on the Jersey Shore

SURF CITY, N.J. — Anchor Produce Market sells homemade mozzarella, its own fresh salsa and what many regulars swear is the best sweet corn on Long Beach Island.

But, a sign on the counter declares, it will not sell anything to the owners of 63 Long Beach Boulevard, 7 Coast Avenue, 12 Sea View Drive South or 34 other nearby oceanfront properties. 

Those owners have refused to grant easements to allow the federal government to build a massive dune along a 35-mile stretch of the Jersey Shore. Without the protective ridge of sand, engineers predict it is only a matter of time before homes, neighborhoods, even entire communities are wiped out by rising seas — a reality brought into stark relief by the devastation from Hurricane Sandy. 

 So until they sign the easements, holdouts should buy their groceries elsewhere. 

Read the rest here.

I loathe eminent domain. As in I really detest it, because it has an incredibly long history of abuse wherever it is legal. But I have never quite been able to bring myself to call for its complete abolition, Mainly because in the back of my mind I have always accepted that there are very rare cases where it can be justified. This might be one of them.

As much as I hate to side with the statists, this really does sound like a handful of people invoking property rights over public safety. And even libertarians will generally concede that your rights end if and when they threaten someone elses. It's a bit like invoking property rights in a refusal to abide by the fire code. My guess is many of these same people who are screaming about their "view" took public money to help repair the damage inflicted by Hurricane Sandy or will happily file claims when their house is devastated by the next big storm. Speaking as one of the people who will have to foot that bill I think their position is hard to stomach. 

Even so, I would likely side with them if it were just their property or lives they are endangering. They could be told to sign the easement or renounce any and all future claims to disaster aid, end of story. But it's not just their property at risk. They are endangering other people's property, and potentially even lives on a significant scale. 

Sorry. No one has that right. 

Further, the inconvenience and loss of property value is relatively minor compared to the potential public dangers of failing to build the sand barriers. So yea, this has dragged on long enough. Ask the holdouts nicely one more time. But if they still say no, then invoke eminent domain and expropriate the property required to protect the local community from a major hurricane.

My fingers actually hurt typing that last sentence.

In blow to property rights Supreme Court rejects rent control case

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a constitutional challenge to New York City’s famed rent-control ordinance, a post-World War II housing measure that limits the rents of more than a million apartments.

The court’s action is a setback for property-rights activists, who had hoped a more conservative court would protect landlords and a free market in rentals. For decades, critics have said rent-control laws deny property owners the right to fully profit from their investment. 

The justices, four of whom grew up in New York City, turned away an appeal from James and Jeanne Harmon, who own a five-story brownstone building on West 76th Street in Manhattan. The couple says they have no choice but to rent three apartments on the upper floors for less than half of their market value. 

They also say that one of their tenants can pay a $1,500-a-month mortgage on a Long Island house because he pays only $951 a month to rent a unit in Harmon’s building.

Read the rest here.