Court Opinion

ID: 9463666
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 23:12:43.541047+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:13.364804
License: Public Domain

LEVIN H. CAMPBELL, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
As both the district court and my colleagues indicate, section 221(d)(3) is not a statute conveying a congressional design necessarily to displace coincident local regulation. Rather section 221(d)(3) empowers the Secretary to determine whether the federal statutory purpose will or will not be better served by submitting, among other alternatives, to local regulation of rents. Since during the period under consideration, the Secretary took no coherent stance, I agree with my colleagues that it is reasonable to hold that the local rent control apparatus and laws applied to the federally-insured housing in question, as it did to other housing.
Insofar as the court’s decision may be read more broadly, either as a gloss on the general legal principles applicable to preemption, or as suggesting that' section 221(d)(3) partakes of the same goals as local rent control, I would not go so far. I see, in point of fact, a substantial degree of tension between the federal and local schemes, in that local rent control could well reduce HUD’s ability to assure owners the return *15needed to stimulate the entry of private entrepreneurs into the field of low- and middle-income housing. Section 221(d)(3) is not primarily a rent control program but has as its basic purpose increasing the housing supply.
Still Congress left it up to the Secretary whether it would be better to assimilate or reject local rent regulation. For the period that the Secretary’s own policy was in such disarray, I am unable to hold that the Janus-like federal statute displaced local controls.