Holy Doorman, Batman, It's Better in Nebraska!

Today's New York Times has on article--Only the Strongest Survive-- on the difficult residential rental market in Gotham City. Here are some key excerpts:

ALTHOUGH qualifying to rent an apartment in New York City is not yet as tough as winning admission to Harvard or Yale, it increasingly feels that way to a large contingent of aspiring tenants — even if they actually attended Harvard or Yale and easily passed muster with their previous landlord.

Among the 50,000 background checks run this year on Manhattan tenants by On-Site.com, a national background-checking and leasing service used by some landlords and managing agents, fully 41 percent of applicants garnered a rating of either “reject” or “maybe” (21 and 20 percent respectively).

That means a fifth of would-be renters are being shown a different door than they had hoped, while another fifth struggle to upgrade their conditional status.

With paychecks lagging behind the 10 to 15 percent rent increases for market-rate apartments over the last year, many more would-be tenants fail to scale the standard annual income threshold of 40 to 45 times the monthly rent.

That means that if you want to rent a studio for $2,000 a month, you need to earn $80,000 to $90,000 a year (much higher figures, by the way, than the 36 times the monthly rent required in the rest of the country).

Renters who flunk the income test must prove themselves in other ways. Landlords are demanding extra cash up front, solid credit records and local guarantors who earn around twice the income threshold and are willing to bare their finances to both strangers and kin. Even then, a history of litigation against a prior landlord usually triggers automatic disqualification.

By the way, you future landlords should see wisdom in background checks such as these.

As between A, with a very good income, excellent credit report, and a good tenant history, and B, with less income, some blemishes on his credit report, and a history of litigating against his landlord, whom would you choose as a tenant in your building?

Professor Bainbridge on the Economics of Tipping: Are Kindness and Generosity Rational?

Here. And here is an excerpt:

When you are a regular customer at a given restaurant, developing a reputation as a good tipper presumably results in better service, while developing a reputation as a lousy tipper presumably results in an increased frequency of "spitters." In contrast, using our recent trip to Hawaii as an illustration, I noted that when one will only interact with a waiter once (or are interacting for the last time), it's economically irrational to tip. After all, you'll never be back, so there's no chance for better service but there's also no risk of a spitter. As I put it, in a one time or final period setting, a hard-hearted economically rational actor wouldn't tip.

So, about Hawaii: did he or didn't he?

My RLUIPA Blogging at PropertyProf

If you want to read my RLUIPA and religious land use blogging at PropertyProf, here is a link that should enable you to find all my posts. Just scroll down to my first post, dated October 4, 2006, and then scroll back up to find them all.

Conservatives are Compassionate, But are Liberals Stingy?

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Prof. Jim Lingren has an interesting post that begins:

Those Who Favor Income Redistribution Are Less Happy and Less Generous.--
Last fall and winter, I circulated a paper on the relationship of people’s views on income redistribution and capitalism to traditional racism and to intolerance for unpopular groups. I presented it to Gary Becker’s and Dick Posner’s Rational Choice Workshop at the University of Chicago and to the Law, Economics, and Organization Workshop at Yale.

With the publication of Arthur C. Brooks’ new book Who Really Cares (tip for the news story to Instapundit), which presents data showing that conservatives tend to be more generous than non-conservatives, I decided to put a full PDF copy of my paper on SSRN. It appears that our analyses directly overlap only slightly, though they are certainly generally complementary.

In the field of social psychology, it is commonly believed that people support capitalism and oppose greater income redistribution because they are racist or want to dominate other people or groups. Indeed, a study of college students in the United States and secondary students in Sweden found that attitudes supporting capitalism were positively associated with racism and an orientation toward social dominance (Sidanius & Pratto, 1993). In my draft article I expand and test this thesis using 16 nationally representative General Social Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center between 1980 and 2004.

In later posts, I will discuss my main results, but in this post I want to confirm one of Brooks’ findings (in chapter 3 of his book)--those who oppose greater government income redistribution tend to give much more to charity. What follows is a shortened version of one small section of my paper (the paper includes relevant charts).

RLUIPA and "Substantial Burdens"

From the Religion Clause blog:

In Washington v. Klem, (3d Cir., Aug. 2, 2007), the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals settled on a definition of "substantial burden" under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. It held: "For the purposes of RLUIPA, a substantial burden exists where: 1) a follower is forced to choose between following the precepts of his religion and forfeiting benefits otherwise generally available to other inmates versus abandoning one of the precepts of his religion in order to receive a benefit; OR 2) the government puts substantial pressure on an adherent to substantially modify his behavior and to violate his beliefs."

Inmate Henry Washington's religion requires him to read four Afro-centric books each day. The court found that prison authorities substantially burdened Washington's religious exercise by limiting him to having 10 books at any time in his cell. Further, the state failed to show how its policy furthers its interest in safety and health of prisoners and staff.

Happy Thanksgiving

Have a great Thanksgiving holiday--and remember take some time to enjoy the holiday, the food, the football games, and your family.

Property and "No Property": What Do You All Think?

I think one key passage begins on p. 1428 and continues on 1429. Prof. Baron is explaining that since property rights involve legal relations among persons with respect to things, when the law recognizes that X has the right to exclude Y from X's property, then Y has a corresponding duty to X to stay off of X's property. (X's right entails Y's duty).

"Thus, if X and Y were neighbors, each would have rights to keep the other off, and each would have a duty to stay off." (p.1429) Thus, property rights enhance both the liberty and personhood of X and Y, because each has autonomy over his own property (each is the "king of his own castle.")

But what about the person, Z, who own no property?

Prof. Baron says "[p]ersons owning very few things inhabit a realm of severe social and legal vulnerability, susceptible to the power of many...without having (m)any reciprocal power(s) over others." (p. 1427). In other words, "no property" is "a negative, a collection of lacks." (p. 1429)

What are your thoughts? How should the law respond?

"Woman Wins Religious Discrimination Case"

Here is an article that is somewhat related to some of the issues we discussed today.

Property as an Element of Personhood

While reading the "No Property" article for this week, I got to thinking about Kelo. If property rights are an essential component of liberty and personhood--and I think they are--then perhaps the public correctly views Kelo as the Court declining to protect vulnerable homeowners against the use of governmental power to deprive them of their liberty and personhood by taking their homes for economic redevelopment. Even if the "public good" is advanced from a pragmatic perspective when property is taken from A and put to a better use by B, perhaps the price is too high when the taking strikes at the core of the liberty and personhood of a few unfortunate folks like Susette Kelo.

When government redistributes property rights from A to B, it is redistributing liberty and personhood from A to B. Or at least that is one way to think about this issue

"Ten Tips for Excellence in Appellate Advocacy"

You might find this article by appellate lawyer and blogger Howard Bashman of interest.

Post-Kelo Initiatives

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has this summary and analysis:

Ten states pass anti-Kelo referendum initiatives:
During this fall's elections, voters in twelve states considered anti-Kelo referendum initiatives that sought to ban or curtail the condemnation of private property in order to promote "economic development." Ten of the twelve passed, all by lopsided margins ranging from 55% to 86% of the vote. For a complete list, see here.

The only two anti-Kelo initiatives that failed were proposals in California and Idaho that were tied to complex and highly controversial "regulatory takings" proposals which would have required the government to compensate landowners whenever the value of their property is reduced by various types of government regulations; a stand-alone regulatory takings initiative was also defeated in the state of Washington. Tying anti-Kelo referenda to the much less popular regulatory takings referenda has turned out to be a serious political mistake.

More importantly, of the ten anti-Kelo initiatives that passed, at least six (Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, North Dakota, and Oregon) and possibly seven (counting Michigan) are well enough worded to provide strong protection to property owners that would succeed in banning all or most economic development takings in those states. This is a much better batting average than that of post-Kelo reforms enacted by state legislatures, most of which tend to provide little or no protection for property owners (see, e.g., my analysis here, here, and here, and Tim Sandefur's excellent article on the subject).

Why are the anti-Kelo referendum initiatives so much more effective than most of their legislative cousins? I suspect because the former are usually drafted by property rights activists rather than by state legislators. As I discuss in more detail in the posts linked above, politicians often have incentives to give voters the impression that they are "reforming" eminent domain without actually doing so. Activist groups have few if any such incentives and the reforms they draft are therefore likely to have fewer loopholes and be more effective in eliminating economic development takings.

Class Schedule Change: Kelo Lecture

Sylllabus Update: We will finish up concurrent ownership this week, and then we will move on as follows:

14. "Poletown Lives!!" video (in class viewing); casebook p. 714-720; Kelo decision (see link below)

15. RLUIPA Handouts 7, 7A & 7B

The class on November 30 will be a review/Q&A session and we re-scheduled the last class (Dec. 1) to attend the Kelo lecture on October 30.

Room Change: The lecture will take place in ROOM 112 not Room 113.

I am re-scheduling our last class of Fall Semester (scheduled for 12/1/06) to this coming Monday, October 30, at Noon in Room 112.

The reason for the change is to require you to attend Professor Jim Huffman's presentation on one of the most important property decisions in many years, Kelo v. City of New London. I would also like you to read the Kelo opinion before attending Prof. Huffman's lecture. Here is a link to the opinion.

So to summarize:

1. No class: Friday December 1
2. Required lecture on Kelo: Monday October 30 at Noon in Room 112
3. Your assignment for Monday's lecture is to read the Kelo opinion.