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Rob Johnson Profile picture
@FreeRangeLawyer
Sep 13, 2020 • 3 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
Nowhere but up to go from here. #Browns
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More from @FreeRangeLawyer

Rob Johnson Profile picture
Jan 9
NY's new Tenant Advocate, Cea Weaver, has called for the government to "seize private property." But is that empty rhetoric? Just a "bad old tweet"?

No - it's a real threat. An unprecedented scheme to seize private property is already taking shape. This thread will explain.
The scheme has three parts. The first is to force apartment buildings into distress through regulation that forces landlords to rent at unsustainably low rents.

Here's how it works: Under New York's Rent Stabilization Law, the City gets to say how much landlords can raise the rent on "stabilized" units. About half of all apartments in NYC are "stabilized," so we're talking about a lot of apartments.

For years, the City has held rent increases below inflation--in some years (under DeBlasio) allowing no increase at all. And Cea Weaver has been a vocal proponent of that. Here she is, last year, saying the only appropriate rent increase is no increase at all:

The result is that rents increasingly fall behind expenses, forcing landlords into economic distress. And everyone is well aware of that basic economic reality. Here is a page from a presentation to the City's rent guidelines board explaining how this works:

The same presentation lays out the math. At the average stabilized rents in the Bronx, apartments are already negative cash flow -- and average stabilized rents citywide will be negative cash flow within four years:

You don't have to be an economist to understand that renting apartments at negative cash flow is an unsustainable business. The result is a death spiral: deferred maintenance, deteriorating buildings, missed utility or tax payments, and, ultimately, forced liquidation.Image
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Step two: Once buildings are forced into distress, the next step is to block any attempt to transfer them to new private ownership.

If step one has been playing out for years, step two is taking shape now. One of the Mamdani Administration's first actions, upon taking office, was to intervene in an ongoing bankruptcy proceeding to oppose the sale of a large number of distressed stabilized units. The Mayor's office made a big deal about this last week, calling this the administration's "first major action":

The amazing thing is--if you look at the city's filing in the bankruptcy proceeding--the city openly acknowledges that the buildings have been rendered non-viable by rent regulation. Indeed, that's why the city opposes the transfer! They argue that the buildings should not be sold to new private owners because a private owner couldn't profitably run them as a business. Here's the key passage from the city's legal filing:

Take a minute and think about how crazy this is. Having regulated the buildings into insolvency, the city opposes their sale in bankruptcy because it's own regulations mean they can't be profitably operated!Image
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Read 5 tweets
Rob Johnson Profile picture
Nov 13, 2025
Almost two years ago, I posted about Justice Thomas's opinion encouraging more targeted challenges to New York's rent stabilization law. Yesterday, we filed a case responding to that call.

It's took a huge amount of work to get from there to here. Months and months talking to building owners to understand their situation; visiting apartment buildings to see the situation on the ground; reading the rent stabilization regulations cover-to-cover; doing a deep dive on the Supreme Court's takings jurisprudence over the last hundred years.

The result is a lawsuit that not only can win but should win--that presents the strongest possible challenge to a deeply irrational regime that is harming building owners and tenants alike.
There are a few things that make our approach unique, but perhaps the biggest is that we narrowly focused our claims on New York's regulation of vacant apartments--apartments that are sitting vacant because the legal rent is so low it doesn't make sense to put them on the market.

For instance, Pashko and Tony Lulgjuraj own a building on the island of Manhattan that contains a two-bedroom apartment with legal rent set at about $700 per month. The apartment became vacant in 2019 after a long-term tenancy (the last tenant was in the apartment over 40 years). It's sat vacant ever since because it simply doesn't make sense for Pashko and Tony to rent out the apartment for $700/month.

Understand the economics here: After long-term tenancies, apartments require work to get them back onto the market. We're not talking about upgrading to luxury finishings. This is work that is required by law: things like dealing with lead paint, levelling out the floors in a hundred-year-old building, putting in new outlets to get electrical up to code. It costs tens of thousands of dollars to get an apartment on the market. And it makes no sense to put in that investment if you can't make it back in rent.

Pashko and Tony run a business, and their business is renting apartments. They want to rent all the apartments they own. But, thanks to rent stabilization, this unit has been regulated off the market.Image
What we aren't focused on: Occupied apartments. We make that crystal clear right up at the top of our complaint. We aren't asking the court to say that landlords can raise the rent on existing tenants.

We just want to ensure that landlords can charge a fair market rent for vacant apartments, to get those apartments back on the market.

This is a huge change from past challenges to rent stabilization, all of which have focused on existing tenants (and the right to evict or raise the rent). As a practical matter, past challenges to rent stabilization have essentially asked the courts to allow landlords to raise the rent, overnight, on hundreds of thousands of apartments. That's a big ask. By contrast, a decision focused on vacant apartments wouldn't affect any current tenants--because we are focused on apartments with no tenants at all.Image
Read 6 tweets
Rob Johnson Profile picture
May 28, 2025
Yikes. Two days after Andy Payan testified at a preliminary injunction hearing--challenging a major federal surveillance rule--the IRS sent an audit notice to his business. Image
Andy's gas station is one of hundreds of businesses along the border that has been ordered to report cash transactions over just $200 to the federal government. It's an unprecedented financial surveillance program.
After a day-long hearing, where Andy was a witness, a federal judge entered a preliminary injunction. Among other grounds, the judge found the order likely violates the Fourth Amendment.
Read 5 tweets
Rob Johnson Profile picture
May 21, 2025
HUGE Fourth Amendment victory: Federal court grants preliminary injunction against financial surveillance program. Invokes the "rebellious idea that King George III should not be able to have his red-coated soldiers and agents rifle haphazardly through ... homes and businesses." Image
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Here's the background: In 1974, the Supreme Court upheld a (then-new) law that forced banks to report over-$10,000 transactions to the federal government.

Three Justices dissented, and Powell and Blackmun concurred -- warning that more expanded surveillance might well violate the Fourth Amendment.Image
Even though Powell and Blackmun provided the necessary votes for the Court's opinion, that warning got lost in the intervening fifty years. Federal bank surveillance laws have metastasized -- to the point where the federal government has vast insight into Americans' financial activities.
Read 13 tweets
Rob Johnson Profile picture
May 3, 2024
What I've been working on lately: Pasco County, FL, used a crude computer algorithm to "predict" who would commit future crimes--and then subjected their families to relentless harassment. They called it "Intelligence Led Policing."

This is Robert Jones, one of our clients. His son landed on Pasco's list when he was just sixteen years old.

Soon, the Pasco sheriff's office was visiting the family's home multiple times a week and at odd hours of the day, knocking on the doors, and peering into the windows. Deputies found excuses to issue fines for things like tall grass, and they found excuses to arrest Robert--arresting him three times in three months.

Robert had never been arrested before. But he was arrested the day after Christmas because officers claimed to see a minor smoking a cigarette through the windows of his home; was arrested a week later for failure to appear for a code citation hearing (even though he did not receive notice of the hearing); and was arrested several months later for alleged possession of marijuana.
When Robert was arrested the third time, a deputy was captured on body-camera telling him, "We'll just continue on this shit, because you're messing around with an aggressive sheriff. Sheriff Nocco is not playing games, that's the bottom line." Not long after, Robert moved his family out of the county.
Robert wasn't the only one to be arrested because his kid was targeted by Pasco County.

Tammy Heilman's son was placed on Pasco's list when he was sixteen years old, and before long Tammy (who had never been arrested before) was arrested twice--once when deputies forcibly removed her from her car after she was pulled over by deputies who came to her house to investigate her son; and a second time because she opened a screen door into a deputy's toe.
Read 4 tweets
Rob Johnson Profile picture
Mar 16, 2024
The FBI raided Jeni Pearson's safe deposit box and tried to take all the contents using civil forfeiture. Jeni fought back, along with other @IJ clients, and won...

Except, when the FBI returned the box contents, $2,000 was missing. So Jeni and @IJ sued again.

Yesterday, we got an important decision in our case seeking to recover Jeni's $2,000.Image
Jeni's fight for her missing $2,000 is another chapter in the story of U.S. Private Vaults, a safe deposit box facility in Beverly Hills that the FBI raided in March 2021. @IJ challenged the raid, and, earlier this year, the Ninth Circuit held that the raid violated the Fourth Amendment.
So, how does Jeni know that $2,000 went missing from her box?

Whenever she visited the box, she took a picture of the contents. And, when she visited the box in February 2021--just a month before the raid--she took a picture of the cash.

But when the FBI returned the contents of the box, there was no cash at all.Image
Read 6 tweets

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