Red Wing Rental Inspections
Stewart v. City of Red Wing
Mandatory Inspections of Rental Property: Is Your Rented Home Your Castle?
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IJ clients from left to right: Kim Sjostrom, Brad Sonnentag, Robert McCaughtry and Rebecca McCaughtry
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The City of Red Wing, Minn. is enforcing a rental property inspection law that requires landlords to open their tenants’ doors without permission and submit to inspections of their private property in order for the landlord to receive a rental license. Landlords who respect their tenants’ right to exclude government strangers from their homes risk losing their right to rent their property.
As a result, under Red Wing’s rental inspection ordinance, it is easier for the government to force its way into the homes of law-abiding citizens than it is to search the home of a suspected criminal. The U.S. Constitution does not allow such an absurdity. Red Wing’s inspection mandate is unconstitutional.
But the inspection of rental properties is only the first phase of the City’s plan to inspect all housing units in Red Wing. If the City is not stopped, every resident of Red Wing could face intrusive, unreasonable and expensive forced inspections of their homes as a condition of exercising their property rights. Fortunately, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the Fourth Amendment right to exclude the government from arbitrarily intruding into one’s home. It is time for the state court in Goodhue County to do the same in this case.
To protect landlords, tenants and, ultimately, homeowners against searches that violate the Fourth Amendment, the Institute for Justice Minnesota Chapter has filed a lawsuit in Goodhue County District Court in Red Wing, Minn., under the U.S. and Minnesota constitutions to stop the City of Red Wing from conducting or coercing consent to warrantless inspections and also to ensure that constitutional standards govern residential inspections.