Arguing Against the City of Hartford’s Unlawful Attempt to Make a Blameless Landlord Pay the City’s Bills
PPC Realty, LLC v. City of Hartford
Connecticut Supreme Court, No. SC 20826
On March 7, 2019, a large Hartford apartment building was badly damaged by a fire set by an arsonist. As required under the state’s Uniform Relocation Assistance Act, once the City declared the building uninhabitable, the City provided the displaced tenants with housing and other compensation for the loss of their leaseholds. The day after the fire, the City sent the bill to the blameless owner by recording a lien on the property for all public expenditures. The Connecticut Supreme Court took this appeal in order to decide whether the Act permits such a shifting of public expenses to a blameless private party. NELF filed a brief explaining why it does not.
The Act provides compensation when the government takes certain private property interests, including homes by code enforcement. Two sections of the Act, §§8-268 and 270, permit government, in cases like the present one, to obtain from landlords a full reimbursement, which may be secured by a lien on their property. Section §8-270a provides that if a landlord fails to reimburse, a city may bring a civil suit, and “it shall be an affirmative defense for the landlord that the displacement [of tenants] was not the result of the landlord’s violation of section 47a-7” (enumerating a landlord’s duties, including to comply with the building code).
PPC sued to discharge the City’s lien, arguing that it could not be “liable” under §§8-268 or 270 because it was not the cause of any code violation. The City argued that, by their plain language, the two lien statutes do not mention such an defense, unlike §8-270a. The trial judge, harmonizing the statutes to reach a sensible result, permitted PPC to invoke its lack of fault and discharged the lien. The City appealed.
In its brief NELF countered with a plain language argument of its own. We argued that the legislature has given the definitive gloss for determining when a landlord is liable for reimbursement; §8-270a says that a landlord has a complete defense to liability “pursuant to” §§8-268 and 270 if the displacement is not the result of the landlord’s violation of a statutory duty. The City seemed to forget that §§8-268 and 270 are primarily liability statutes and only incidentally lien statutes; hence, they deal with the same liability that §270a enforces in a civil suit. We also noted that both statutes are partly entitled “Landlord’s responsibility in certain cases,” i.e., not all cases, as the City contended. NELF also rebutted the City’s grossly misleading use of legislative history. We showed that the legislature absolutely intended to pursue solely those landlords whose violations caused condemnation and displacement.
NELF then dealt summarily with a host of other bad arguments made by the City, before calling the Court’s attention to a constitutional problem lurking within the City’s position. To shift to a private party the costs of the Act’s valid public purpose of compensating people displaced by government conduct would violate the Fifth Amendment. The amendment is “designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole,” as the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly observed since Armstrong v. United States, 364 U.S. 40, 49 (1960). The City would prevail in this case only at the cost of a blatant violation of that bar.
In its August 2024 decision the Court reversed the trial court and found nothing incongruous about the legislature’s wanting to protect municipalities “in the first instance” by granting them a lien against even obviously blameless landlords. Hence, a valuable real estate asset of the landlord will remain subject to the extortionate effects of the lien until the city chooses to enforce it and PPC finally gets an opportunity to raise its blamelessness as an affirmative defense.