Background
Glen Haven Apartments is a roughly 300-unit multifamily complex in Wheaton, Maryland, built in 2005 under the Military Housing Privatization Initiative (MHPI) on land the United States condemned in 1941. Fort Detrick/Walter Reed Army Medical Center Housing LLC (the Landlord) owns the housing units under a ground lease from the Army and prioritizes leasing to servicemembers assigned to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, but also rents to civilians. Robert Wynn, a civilian tenant, fell behind on rent from October 2023 through January 2024, accumulating $10,542 in arrears.
Montgomery County requires all residential rental properties to carry a rental housing license before operating. The Landlord, which had never obtained such a license, filed a summary ejectment action in the District Court of Maryland. It claimed exemption from the County’s licensing requirements on the ground that Glen Haven sits within a federal enclave subject to the exclusive legislative jurisdiction of Congress under the Enclave Clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the U.S. Constitution. The Landlord pointed to a 2012 letter from the County’s Department of Housing and Community Affairs acknowledging an exemption. The District Court agreed and entered judgment for the Landlord, including an ejectment order and the full unpaid-rent award.
Mr. Wynn appealed to the Circuit Court for Montgomery County, which reversed. The circuit court found Glen Haven to be within a federal enclave but held that the Enclave Clause did not preempt County licensing requirements as applied to units rented to civilians. Both parties then sought certiorari, and the Supreme Court of Maryland granted review. While briefing was underway, the court sua sponte surfaced a 1964 General Services Administration Inventory Report categorizing the Property’s jurisdictional status as “proprietorial interest only” — meaning the federal government held title but had never obtained any measure of Maryland’s sovereign authority over the land.
The Court’s Holding
The Supreme Court of Maryland affirmed the circuit court’s judgment for Mr. Wynn, but on a narrower and more fundamental ground: the Landlord never established that the United States accepted exclusive jurisdiction over the Property in the first place. Under a three-step framework the court articulated, federal enclave jurisdiction requires (1) state consent to the federal acquisition, (2) the state’s cession of jurisdiction, and (3) affirmative acceptance of that jurisdiction by the United States. A 1940 amendment to 40 U.S.C. § 255 made the third step mandatory for all lands acquired after that year, providing that exclusive jurisdiction is “conclusively presumed” not to have been accepted unless the United States files formal notice of acceptance with the state. Because the Property was acquired by condemnation in 1941 — after the 1940 amendment took effect — mere federal ownership of title did not suffice to vest exclusive legislative jurisdiction.
The Inventory Report, of which the court took judicial notice, categorized the Property as held in a “proprietorial interest only” capacity, confirming that no jurisdiction beyond ordinary federal property ownership had been obtained. Because the Landlord bore the burden at trial under Maryland Real Property § 8-406 to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that it was exempt from Montgomery County’s licensing requirements, and because it failed to make that showing, the District Court should have entered judgment for Mr. Wynn. The court expressly declined to reach the circuit court’s analysis of whether the Enclave Clause would, if applicable, preempt licensing requirements for units rented to civilians.
Key Takeaways
- Federal title alone does not create an Enclave Clause enclave: the United States must also affirmatively accept ceded jurisdiction, a requirement made express by Congress in 1940 and codified at 40 U.S.C. § 255.
- Under Maryland Real Property § 8-406, a landlord in a mandatory-licensure jurisdiction must prove at trial — by a preponderance of the evidence — that its property is licensed, exempt, or unlicensed for a statutory enumerated reason; failure to carry that burden requires judgment for the tenant.
- An MHPI ground lease and a decade-old informal exemption letter from a county housing agency do not establish exclusive federal jurisdiction and cannot substitute for proof of formal acceptance of jurisdiction by the United States.
- The GSA’s Inventory Report on Jurisdictional Status of Federal Areas, though not produced by the parties, was properly subject to judicial notice and proved dispositive evidence that the Property carried only proprietorial status.
Why It Matters
This decision clarifies that private developers operating under MHPI ground leases — who lease federally owned land but own and manage the housing units themselves — cannot automatically invoke federal enclave immunity to escape state and local regulatory regimes. The ruling places the evidentiary burden squarely on such landlords to prove, through official federal records, that the United States formally accepted jurisdictional cession over the underlying land. That burden will often be difficult to meet: the 1940 federal statute created a conclusive presumption against acceptance absent affirmative filing, and, as the GSA Inventory Report here illustrated, many military-adjacent parcels are held in mere proprietorial status.
For attorneys representing tenants in MHPI communities — which include hundreds of privatized housing projects across the country — the case offers a powerful defensive tool: challenging the landlord’s ability to satisfy § 8-406’s licensing-proof requirement before the merits of any eviction are reached. For landlords operating similar mixed-use military housing complexes near federal installations, the decision is a signal to audit the actual jurisdictional status of their properties and, where exclusive federal jurisdiction cannot be documented, to obtain the required local rental licenses.