City of Los Angeles v. Lankershim

HENSHAW, J.

This is an action to recover moneys due under a revenue license ordinance of the city of Los Angeles providing “for licensing and regulating the carrying on of certain professions, trades, callings and occupations.” Judgment passed for the plaintiff and from the judgment and from the order denying his motion for a new trial defendant appeals.

[801]

While thus described as “regulatory” an inspection of the ordinance discloses that it is an ordinance simply for revenue, the only attempt at regulation being the prohibition against conducting or carrying on any of the enumerated professions, trades, callings, or occupations without first procuring a license so to do. Section 54 of the ordinance is as follows:—

“Section 54. For every person, firm or corporation maintaining, managing or conducting a building for the purpose of letting office rooms or storerooms, the following license: “For every building containing more than 30 rooms, $1.00 per year for each office room, and $3.00 per year for each storeroom contained in said building.”

Defendant is admittedly the owner of an office building containing more than thirty rooms which are rented or leased.

Against the enforcement of this license ordinance and against its validity it is first urged that the ordinance in design and in effect levies an unequal and ununiform tax upon property which the owner may elect to rent (Const., art XIII, see. 1); that an owner’s right to rent his property and receive the rents thereof is one of the inherent rights of property ownership; that to call the renting an “occupation” is a mere subterfuge and that to exact a license-tax for the right to conduct this so-called “occupation” is but an attempt to evade the law forbidding unequal taxation. The question thus presented is certainly a serious one. If a man owning an office building with offices to rent who has paid all taxes, state, county, and municipal, upon his property is to be charged a dollar a room for every office he rents under a declaration that he is engaged in the “occupation” of “conducting a building” for the purpose of letting office rooms and that, consequently, a license may be exacted on the occupation, equally well might the board of supervisors under the guise of licensing the “occupation of renting land” exact from the farmer a dollar per acre for all farming lands which he might rent.