California County Fined Man $120,000 for Refusing to Evict Family from Property

Happy Tuesday and welcome to another issue Rent for free.

Our lead story this week covers a dark and ironic case in California, where excessive government regulation has led to a housing cost crisis; government officials are punishing a winery owner who tried to solve a cost crisis for his employee.

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Santa Clara Winery Owner Fined $120,000 for Allowing Employee to Live on His Property

Hundreds of people live in RVs and campers on the streets of Santa Clara County, California, a telling sign of the homelessness crisis in the overpriced county.

Despite the extent of vehicle-related homelessness in the county, county officials for years have focused their enforcement actions on a single trailer parked on private property.

For years, winery owner Michael Ballard has allowed longtime vineyard manager Marcelino Martinez and his family to live rent-free in a trailer parked on the winery’s grounds.

County officials say that violates a county ordinance prohibiting recreational vehicles (RVs) parked on residential lots from being used as dwelling units, so Martinez’s trailer has to go.

Ballard is trying to fix the violation by building a permanent home on the property for Martinez and his family, but it took years to get all the necessary permits from the county for that home.

Meanwhile, Ballard refused to evict Martinez’s family from the property.

“I’m not going to remove this trailer because it’s going to cause them to be homeless and it’s going to put this family out on the street and I’m not going to do that,” Ballard says. Reason.

In response, the county imposed daily fines on Ballard for each day he refused to remove the trailer, totaling about $120,000 in fines.

Ballard is now suing the county in federal court, arguing that the fines violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on excessive fines.

Background

Ballard and his wife have owned and operated Savannah-Chanelle Vineyards since the late 1990s. They have employed Martinez as their vineyard manager for nearly all of that time.

In 2013, Martinez asked Ballard if he could move a trailer he owned onto the winery’s property and live there with his family. Aware that Martinez had limited options for housing in the ultra-expensive county, Ballard agreed.

Average home prices in Santa Clara County 1.5 million dollars Today, according to Zillow. The average apartment rents For $3,200.

By District 2023 Point-in-time count9,903 people are homeless in Santa Clara County — that includes the city of San Jose and other expensive Silicon Valley communities. About 10 percent of the county’s homeless population lives in campers or RVs.

Martinez and his family lived on Ballard’s property, where Ballard and his wife also lived, for several years without any problems.

But in 2017, a county law enforcement officer noticed the trailer while conducting an inspection of Ballard’s property. A few weeks later, Ballard received a letter telling him he had to remove the trailer or evict Martinez and his family.

Transition to Compatibility

Ballard would not accept either option.

Throwing Martinez off the property “would have forced him to leave the area completely. It would have caused him to lose his job here, it would have caused his kids to leave school,” he says. “I knew it would have been traumatic for the Martinez family.”

Ballard initially tried to obtain permits that would legalize Martinez’s trailer, but the county backed down, arguing that trailers are prohibited from being used as dwelling units on residential lots.

Ballard then sought to build an additional housing unit on the property for Martinez that would serve as a legal alternative to his trailer.

The county didn’t make it easy either. Ballard applied for the permits needed for the ADU and septic system in May 2019. COVID hit while that application was being processed, leading to the closure of Ballard’s winery and the county permitting office.

Ballard was only able to get the rights for the ADU in October 2022. Martinez and his family are waiting on some final county approvals for the fire suppression system before they can move in.

While Ballard was waiting for permits for the ADU, the county continued to fine him for every day Martinez and his family lived in the trailer at the winery.

Excessive Fines

Ballard also used the county’s administrative process to appeal the fines he was issued while he was building the ADU, resulting in his daily fines being reduced from $1,000 to $100, but no other relief.

He is now filing a lawsuit against the county in federal court.

“The lawsuit is intended to bring a lot of the constitutional issues about what happened to the Ballards to the forefront, where they should be,” said Paul Avelar, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, the public interest law firm representing Ballard.

Avelar does not claim Ballard violated county ordinances by allowing Martinez and her family to live permanently in a trailer on his property, but he argues that the fines Ballard levied were completely disproportionate to any damage done.

Ballard’s complaint alleges that the fines he received violate the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition on excessive fines. The lawsuit also alleges that the county administrative process by which Ballard was fined violated his rights to a due process hearing and a trial by jury.

“The trailer wasn’t hurting anyone, and the Ballards were acting in good faith,” Avelar says. “This $120,000 fine is really just a violation. You just treat every day as a new violation and you get to this ridiculous number.”

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The Return of Public Housing?

Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY) and Sen. Tina Smith (D–Minn.) Houses Act This would revitalize the federal government’s role as a housing developer.

The bill would create a national housing development authority tasked with building and operating affordable housing across the country, with most of the housing set aside for low-income residents.

At a panel on the bill organized by the Center for American Progress (CAP), Ocasio-Cortez and Smith argued that the bill creates a “social housing” alternative to “privatized” real estate development that would integrate society along class lines.

While Ocasio-Cortez criticized zoning restrictions during her remarks, she appeared ambivalent about the idea that high housing costs are fundamentally a problem of overregulation that limits supply. “There are pro-building narratives that are taken from a lobbyist’s playbook,” she said. he said.

Similarly, Smith said: Zoning reform Backyard housing in Minneapolis had underperformed because it was still dependent on private contractors to build homes.

There’s a reason public housing has a bad rap in the U.S. High operating costs and skyrocketing rents have left many of the remaining public housing developments with major maintenance delays. The public housing authorities that operate them, mismanagement And corruption.

The Housing Act seems almost designed to repeat this outcome.

The government-owned homes authorized by the bill would be built and maintained by union labor, come with strong tenant protections, and be constructed to the highest environmental standards—all of which would increase construction and operating costs.

Meanwhile, the bill would cap rents at 25 percent of tenants’ income, lower than the 30 percent cap in public housing and other affordable housing programs.

In short, the bill calls for public housing that is more expensive and lower-renting than existing public housing. Continued public subsidies will be needed to ensure that new Homes Act units do not fall into disrepair.

Ocasio-Cortez said at the CAP event that opening Housing Act units to all income groups would build political support for government-owned housing, but it’s unclear why middle- and upper-income earners would choose to live in public housing if they have other options available to them.

Congress is unlikely to enthusiastically embrace the revival of public housing. The Housing Act appears to be more of a messaging bill than anything else. And yet the message it sends is not a good one.

Quick Hits

• California state government warning The city of Norwalk says it risks a state lawsuit and the loss of state funding if it doesn’t lift its ban on new homeless shelters and transitional housing.

• Meanwhile, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package Last week’s new housing bills include changes to the state’s “builder’s remedy,” increased penalties for local governments that block new housing, and modest changes to how impact fees are collected on new developments. (For a more comprehensive breakdown of the state’s new housing laws, see next week’s newsletter.)

• A new report On the UK’s failure to build.

• Pittsburgh Discussions The expansion of inclusionary zoning requirements — requiring developers to include loss-making, below-market-rate apartments in new housing projects — is spreading to more parts of the city.

• Edward Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute writes inside The Wall Street Journal About Kamala Harris’ plan to close the housing gap.

Post California County Fined Man $120,000 for Refusing to Evict Family from Property first appeared here Reason.com.