Court Opinion

ID: 9756994
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 22:13:07.785703+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:58:03.250451
License: Public Domain

*634Conford, P. J. A. D.,
Temporarily Assigned, (concurring). I join the opinion of the court to the extent that it decides the specific ease before us and explains how it does so. I also agree thoroughly with the suggestion that municipal rent control ordinances should fix criteria and guidelines for determination of complaints of landlords that the regulations deprive them of a fair return. I do not join that portion of the opinion which discourses in extenso upon how a rent control board or court is to, or may, determine whether the rent regulations are depriving a landlord of a “just and reasonable” or “fair” return on his property in the absence of provisions therefor in an ordinance. Neither the instant plaintiffs nor any of those in the companion cases undertook either at trial level or on appeal to prove or even assert that they were deprived of a fair return. Thus, an extended exploration of the complex question of fair return, beyond the unexceptionable assertions that the landlord may not be deprived of it, and the ordinances should deal with it, is extraneous to the appeal and the record as presented; and to dwell on it on a purely theoretical basis does not, in my view, serve any tribunal which may someday face the question, but may rather tend to confuse it.
I have particular objection to the court’s observation “that deciding whether a rent regulation permits a just and reasonable return requires consideration of the value of the rental property, the reasonable expense of operating the property, the income, the rate of return on the value of the property actually permitted by the rent regulation, and the minimum rate of return which would be just and reasonable for that property” (emphasis mine). This is the jargon of adjudication for public utility rate purposes, as evidenced by the cases in that field cited by tire court. It seems to me that the court is implying that that method will be the general rule for rent control administration, with its detailed supporting explication as to methodology. This is plainly inconsistent with the court’s separate observations that “public utility precedents are of only limited value to the field *635of rent control” and that it does not “regard this appeal * * * as the appropriate vehicle for a comprehensive or definitive formulation of the methodology for determining whether a landlord is receiving a fair return under a given rent control ordinance.” My view is that both in theory and practice public utility rate cases have minimal utility for this purpose and should not be discussed in this case. Indeed the whole search for “value” in this context becomes circular, since, as the court’s opinion itself points out, apartment house value is normally approached on the basis of capitalization of net income, whereas the very purpose of the rent control agency, when the issue is raised, is to determine the fair rent on which the net for valuation purposes would be predicated.
Were it appropriate in these cases to get into the subject at all, I would submit that a local rent control agency of typically inexpert part-time people, operating under the rudimentary kinds of ordinance before us here — which unfortunately prevail today — see Inganamort et al. v. Bor. of Fort Lee et al., 62 N. J. 521, 538, 544-545 (1973) (dissenting opinion), needs simple, practical and inexpensively administrable rules, such as, for example, those provided for determination of fair return by L. 1953, c. 216,1 the last general rent control statute in this State. Such an agency would be ill-served by resort to the complex, cumbersome, expensive, and, I think, largely irrelevant techniques, procedures and theoretical bases of the public utility rate field.
The court’s opinion is useful in suggesting the availability of a variety of criteria and guidelines (other than public utility) for fair return purposes, but I would stop there in this particular case and not specify a preferred approach, especially that advanced by the court.
*636Justice Clifford joins in this concurring opinion.
Clifford, J., and Conford, P. J. A. D., concurring in the result.
For affirmance — Chief Justice Hughes, Justices Mountain, Sullivan, Pashman, Cliifford and Schrexber and Judge Conford — 7.
For reversal — Fone.

Section 16(h) provides for presumptively fair ratios of net operating income to gross income. See also L. 1966, c. 168, Section 4(e).