Are rent freezes unconstitutional? The question comes up in my pea brain by the moves of Democratic Socialist and Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s move to freeze rents in New York City (though he’s merely expanding on prior city administrations’ rent freezes) and of Democratic Socialist and Progressive-Democrat candidate for Florida Senator Angie Nixon, whose campaign platform plank was a national rent freeze.

The Fifth Amendment says, in part, nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. A rent freeze plainly caps a landlord’s income, blocking him from increasing it at will or even consistently with market values or imperatives.

Nah—that won’t work. Government can’t take what doesn’t exist, and those increases are purely speculative.

But those rent freezes lead to reductions in value of the landlord’s property through denial of the revenue increases required, not merely useful or even needed, to maintain his rental properties in the face of rising costs of maintenance through aging degradation, misuse or abuse of the property by the tenants, and inflation which drives the prices plumbers, electricians, etc must charge.

Surely that freeze-driven devaluation of the property constitutes a taking within the meaning of the Amendment.

Probably not here, either. For one thing, the government wouldn’t be taking for public use, it would be just taking. That’s a technicality. One the merits, it likely isn’t a taking at all. All government regulations in one form or another impact the value of the businesses in the industries being regulated. In some cases, those regulations actually increase the value of the regulated industry participants. If regulatory caps are takings, then regulatory-prompted gains would seem to be taxable capital gains.

But those gains aren’t transfers by government to the regulatees anymore than the regulation-driven losses are takings.

Rent freezes are bad for business, bad for tenants in the long run, and bad for government revenue, but they aren’t unconstitutional. Just monumentally stupid.