Property Rights - 1
AUSTIN — The Texas Public Policy Foundation has filed an amicus brief asking the Texas Supreme Court to review a case involving restrictions on short-term rentals and reaffirm constitutional protections for Texas property owners.
The case raises questions about whether land-use restrictions are subject to meaningful judicial review under Article I, Section 19 of the Texas Constitution, which establishes the state's due course of law guarantee – the Texas equivalent of the Due Process Clause in the U.S. Constitution.
“No citizen of this State shall be deprived of life, liberty, property, privileges or immunities, or in any manner disfranchised, except by the due course of the law of the land,” the article states.
TPPF’s brief argues that recent court decisions have adopted novel interpretations of the Texas Constitution that could make it virtually impossible for property owners to successfully challenge land-use restrictions. The brief asks the Court to make clear that restrictions on the use of property are subject to at least rational basis review, regardless of when they were adopted.
“This case raises increasingly important questions about whether land-use restrictions in Texas will continue to be subject to any meaningful review under Article 1, Section 19 of the Texas Constitution,” the brief states. “When this case was originally filed, it did not appear that review would be necessary. Despite the political controversies surrounding ‘short-term rentals,’ the lower court’s opinion here represented a fairly straightforward application of more than a century of this Court’s Article 1, Section 19 precedents.”
The brief also argues that courts conducting rational basis review may consider evidence rather than simply accepting a government’s claims as fact when the record points in the opposite direction.
While the case concerns short-term rentals, its implications extend to land-use restrictions more broadly and the ability of Texans to challenge government restrictions on the use of their property, TPPF asserts.
The brief was filed on Oct. 6 in the case of City of Dallas vs. Dallas Short-Term Rental Alliance, case No. 25-0748.
TPPF is a non-profit free-market research institute based in Austin that aims to promote liberty.
