Not “even worth responding to as it’s so ridiculous,” a deputy mayor wrote.
By Erica C. Barnett
In an email to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, expressing “serious concerns” about the mayor’s status-quo comprehensive plan update, State Rep. Julia Reed suggested that she might be less than supportive of future city requests to help fund its $285 million Fort Lawton redevelopment project if the city didn’t get more serious about increasing density.
“I know the City is hoping for significant state support to deliver on the Mayor’s vision for Fort Lawton next year,” Reed wrote. “I don’t know if that will be possible if the City’s comprehensive plan isn’t seen to be doing everything possible to maximize housing growth in the state’s largest city. It’s already an uphill climb to do any funding packages for Seattle, and if there’s a strong impression the city isn’t doing all it can on its own, it makes the argument that much harder.”
Documents PubliCola obtained through a records request show that Reed’s email sent mayoral staffers into a tizzy. For two days, emails flew back and forth between at least 17 city staffers (plus Harrell’s in-house political consultant, Christian Sinderman) debating how to respond to Reed.
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Some of the emails were snarky (“I am surprised that these legislators had the time to read and analyze our proposed update with just three days left in legislative session,” mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen wrote) while others urged caution. Gael Tarleton, the former state legislator who led the mayor’s lobbying team in Olympia, noted on May 5 that it was the last day of the legislature and “Emotions are running high[.] .. May I suggest that once this letter is sent, we just let things quiet down, let session end, and re-group[?]”
Staffers debated how strongly to respond to Reed’s suggestion that the Seattle delegation’s advocacy for Fort Lawton funding would depend on Harrell’s larger commitment to density. Harrell’s deputy mayor, Greg Wong, responded to a draft response written by Harrell’s chief operating officer Marco Lowe and edited by Sinderman, saying the city shouldn’t even dignify Reed’s reference to Fort Lawton with a response, writing:
“I like Christian’s edits. I personally don’t think the Ft. Lawton piece is even worth responding to as it’s so ridiculous. It’s not the leverage they think it is and their stance doesn’t even make sense given what we’re proposing. But I don’t feel very strong about whether to delete. If you want to say something about it, I wouldn’t feel the need to explain or be defensive about it. Just point out the baseless bluff it is. You could say something like: ‘As to Ft. Lawton, it is unfortunate to hear you would not support our plan to increase the amount and likelihood of affordable housing in this area. But that is a separate issue, which we are happy to discuss with you as well.'”
There’s actually some good news for density advocates in Harrell’s slow-growth comp plan proposal: It’s being widely panned.
I take this backlash as a sign of progress. Consider: Nine years ago, when then-mayor Ed Murray floated the unthinkable in his own housing initiative—universal neighborhood upzones to promote growth, density, and housing—the NIMBY backlash against him, led by the Seattle Times, was swift and furious. Murray was immediately forced to backpedal, and eventually the city only allowed more housing along the margins of the 75 percent of Seattle that’s otherwise off-limits to apartments.
While it’s certainly disappointing that Mayor Harrell is still committed to an old-fashioned planning model that relegates density to busy arterial streets, it’s noteworthy that this time around, the backlash is an outcry for more density, not less. Critics are calling Harrell out for failing to go beyond the minimum statewide requirements established in last year’s House Bill 1110, which requires cities to allow at least four units on every residential lot, and for promoting a status quo that led to the current affordability crisis.
It’s not 2015 anymore. With a keener sense of the racism encoded in Seattle zoning rules, a pressing housing affordability and homelessness crisis, and an urgency about environmental catastrophe all informing the debate, a whole new generation of pro-housing advocates has dislodged the anti-growth, Seattle-politics-as-usual attitudes that Harrell’s comp plan proposal regurgitates.
It’s not just the usual suspects—armchair planners and YIMBYs on social media—either. Mainstream Seattle state legislators have formally joined the fray. Not only did they champion and help pass HB 1110, but they’re pushing back on Harrell for doing the bare minimum to comply with its density mandate. In a letter to Harrell’s office on March 5, the day the mayor released the plan, Seattle state Rep. Julia Reed (D-36) expressed “serious concerns about the Mayor’s comprehensive plan,” calling it “disappointingly modest, particularly as it relates to the [density] floor, middle housing zoning, and breadth of exemptions.” (PubliCola obtained Reed’s letter through a records request).
The two most recent takedowns of Harrell’s non-comprehensive comp plan—a 19-page letter from the Seattle Planning Commission and an in-depth analysis from the progressive Sightline think tank—both lay out the basic problem with Harrell’s proposal: It doesn’t call for density in enough of the city, providing for just 100,000 new units over the next 20 years. That’s 20,000 less than the bare minimum the city will need, as the Planning Commission put it, to “help us climb out of the existing housing deficit.”
Additionally, in the areas where Harrell’s plan actually does call for more housing, it doesn’t allow enough housing types, excluding apartments in favor of tall, skinny townhomes. Critiquing Seattle’s longstanding “strategy of confinement” for density, Sightline goes all in on advocating for apartments, writing: “Seattle’s plan could rise to the moment by allowing highrise towers in all regional centers and near all light rail stations, eight-story buildings in all urban centers, and six-story buildings near frequent transit stops and other community amenities like parks. It could also designate more and larger neighborhood centers with apartment zoning.”
And as everyone—even the Seattle Times—has pointed out, while Harrell says his plan follows the new state mandate to allow fourplexes wherever detached single-family homes are allowed, his reluctant proposal renders such development merely theoretical with restrictive caps on floor area ratio (a key measure of density) that prevent construction from actually penciling out.
Of course, Harrell may simply dismiss the negative reviews as grousing from a gaggle of liberal elites. And certainly, on cue, Erica and I both registered our disappointment in his proposal here on PubliCola wondering if it was written by AI, with a prompt from the minutes of a mid-90s neighborhood council meeting.
However, Harrell (who deleted density and equity goals proposed by his own Office of Planning and Development (OPCD) shouldn’t take comfort in his single-family comfort zone. Seattle is now skewed heavily toward renters—a change that’s reflected by this city’s new slate of leaders. Indeed, the people who were most outraged by Harrell’s timid plan were not think tanks and bloggers, but the squad of progressive populists who now officially represent Seattle in Olympia, including Reed—pro-density voices that helped pass the statewide fourplex rule last year. Demonstrating this changing of the guard, they passed that rule in part by first ousting longtime slow-growth Seattle Rep. Gerry Pollet (D-46) from his powerful position as chair of local government committee.
“Frankly, we were expecting to see the City take meaningful advantage of the additional flexibilities provided in HB 1110 and other tools that the state has made available,” Rep. Reed wrote in her letter criticizing Harrell’s plan, adding that she was “not the only member from the Seattle delegation with these major concerns.”
This spring, OPCD met with members of the Seattle delegation, including Sen. Noel Frame, (D-36) to respond to “the questions [and] concerns we’re hearing from our constituents,” Reed told PubliCola. Reed said OPCD staffers were informative and answered their questions, and that she and her fellow Seattle reps “want to work with the city so that the final plan reflects a shared vision of abundance, affordability, and unified belonging for the entire city.”
According to a spokesperson for Frame, the senator is also “a critic” of Harrell’s proposal “and says it ‘falls far short of what we should be doing’ as the biggest city in the state, who should be leading on the housing crisis.” Frame and other legislators plan to send a letter to Harrell’s office in the next few days, the spokesperson said.
PubliCola has been covering the density debate for 15 years. It’s only been in the past few years that pro-housing voices, now represented by a contingent of Seattle lawmakers with a new state law in hand, are part of the fight. And—as opposed to the days when anti-density homeowners ruled the public process—legislators like Reed are working in concert with an organized YIMBY movement that’s amplified by a sympathetic urbanist media infrastructure which regularly fact checks and pushes back against the Seattle Times’ NIMBY narrative.
Thank you, Mayor Harrell, for formally and finally revealing where you stand in the housing debate; Erica’s earlier reporting on Harrell’s drastic re-write of OPCD’s initial pro-housing draft proposal wasn’t surprising, but it was clarifying. The current backlash against Harrell’s plan is clarifying as well.
On June 30, 2023, tenants at three Seattle apartment buildings owned by Artspace, a national nonprofit real estate corporation, received notice of a rent increase effective January 1, 2024. Almost everyone was on month-to-month leases, and if they continued that way, their rent would go up 9.5 percent. But if they signed a new year-long lease, the increase would be only 8 percent.
“After asking for months to view a copy of the new lease, tenants finally received it late on the day after Christmas,” said Zade Gueble, an organizer with the Puget Sound Tenants Union who has been assisting some of the tenants. “They were expected to sign it by that Friday, three days later.” Gueble says tenants at one of the three buildings may have received the lease about a week earlier.
The email landed in some residents’ spam folders. Others were on vacation and didn’t see it until after the new year, automatically bumping them to the more expensive month-to-month option.
Washington state has robust consumer protection laws to protect people from unfair, deceptive and abusive business practices, but these laws don’t protect residential tenants. If your local car dealer tries to scam you, the state might actually do something about it. But if it’s your landlord, you’re out of luck.
The residents of the Hiawatha, Mt. Baker, and Tashiro Kaplan Lofts are all artists—painters, sculptors, dancers, playwrights, and musicians. They’re also low-income, as the units are designated for households making between 50 and 60 percent of the Seattle area median income. Tom Nelson, a tenant at the Tashiro Kaplan who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, says he was on the waitlist for six years before getting an apartment. “There is little to no turnover,” he says. “Many have lived here since the building opened for residential living over 20 years ago, and rarely does someone move out.”
When the tenants examined the new lease language, many were taken aback. It seemed to suggest that their rent could be bumped up to market rate the following year; that the landlord could take, alter, and publish their photos at will; that pets, which many residents have, would now be prohibited without written permission; and that residents weren’t allowed to conduct business from home without written approval.
“For many, the late lease delivery felt like an attempt to coerce them into accepting unfair terms that they had no chance to review or negotiate,” said Gueble.
In a statement responding to questions from PubliCola, Indigo claimed the problem was isolated to the manager of the Tashiro-Kaplan building. “[W]e acknowledge that our dedicated property manager should have proactively communicated with residents well before this date [December 26th], and we regret that this did not happen as expected.” However, both Nelson and Gueble maintain that tenants of all three buildings are facing the same issues.
The state Attorney General’s Office routinely prosecutes businesses that deceive their customers, whether it’s a lingerie company sneakily signing people up for monthly “VIP Membership” payments, or debt adjusters charging students excessive fees and misrepresenting their services and expertise.
Residents of mobile home parks, who own their homes but rent the land underneath, can also turn to the state for help; Washington’s Consumer Protection Act has been interpreted by the courts to cover the Manufactured/Mobile Housing Landlord-Tenant Act. But these laws are useless to the Artspace tenants, because in 1985 the Washington Supreme Court ruled that other renters aren’t protected by the Consumer Protection Act.
Talk to anyone whose job involves trying to assist distressed tenants, and you’ll hear about plenty of unfair and deceptive practices.
“The classic one is security deposit retention,” said Edmund Witter, senior managing attorney of the King County Bar Association’s Housing Justice Project. A tenant moves out and a landlord refuses to return their deposit, citing costs for which the tenant isn’t actually liable under state law. Or a landlord may tell tenants that it’s their responsibility to pay for repairs or pest control (it’s not). Or a landlord may give incorrect termination notices, representing to tenants that they have less time to come up with back rent than they are actually allowed under the law.
Then there’s the Artspace tenants’ new lease, which reads: “At the expiration of your lease term, should you choose not to renew with another lease, your current lease will convert to a month-to-month lease at the current market rate.”
But the three buildings receive low-income housing tax credits and other public subsidies. “They have a covenant with the city that this is supposed to be low-income housing and it’s supposed to stay that way,” said Nelson.
“Threatening to raise the rent to market rate when a landlord can’t is clearly deceptive,” says Witter.
Asked about this provision, Indigo responded, “The term ‘market rate’ as used in the lease agreement does not imply a shift to conventional market rates but rather refers to the highest permissible rents under the affordable housing program, or to the established rates for month-to-month leases.” In other words, according to Indigo, “market rate” doesn’t mean market rate.
What recourse do tenants have when landlords engage in unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices?If a Seattle landlord actually breaks the law—by refusing to do repairs or wrongly withholding a deposit, for example—a tenant can file a complaint with the city and hope for intervention. The state and most other jurisdictions don’t actively enforce tenant protections, so tenants outside Seattle would have to sue to force the landlord to comply with the law. Or, if there are clear monetary damages involved, they could try small claims court.
But what if the problem is language in a lease or notice that contradicts the law? A tenant can point it out, and the landlord may back down. That’s good news for that particular tenant. But the landlord has every incentive to continue putting that same deceptive language into future leases and notices, since the vast majority of tenants won’t realize that it misrepresents their rights. The deception itself has no consequences.
When an unfair, deceptive or abusive practice doesn’t involve unambiguously breaking or misrepresenting a law, tenants have even less recourse. The Artspace tenants’ new lease included extensive language giving the landlord permission to “take, use, reuse, and publish” photos and videos of the tenants “and any minor occupants,” and to use their “name, picture, written comments, and statements” for any lawful purpose, including advertising.
The notion that a person should have to license their own and their children’s identities to a landlord to rent a home is bizarre, and potentially dangerous. “What if a parent and their child are hiding and trying to protect their location from an abusive ex-spouse?” Nelson said. For a building full of artists whose images may be part of their livelihood, it’s doubly offensive. The new lease, he said, “violates the heart of what this place is.”
But there’s nothing outright illegal about this provision. Nor is it illegal to suddenly disallow pets, or prohibit a building full of artists from working at home. Indeed, Indigo says that these terms are “aligned with standard National Apartment Association (NAA) lease provisions” and that the language about photos and licensing allows the company to “use photos from items such as community functions for promotional purposes.”
The company added that they now “recognize concerns about this and will introduce an addendum to remove this clause, affirming there’s no intent to infringe upon residents’ privacy.”
But what if a landlord refuses to bend? “A tenant could bring an action to have a term declared unreasonable and thereby unenforceable, but that’s it,” Witter said. And, he added, “a tenant isn’t likely to do that because no attorney would take that case, since there’s no money in it.”
Of course, tenants can also band together and try to negotiate with their landlord collectively. But they won’t have much support from the law.
Lawmakers have the power to improve this situation.At the state level, the obvious solution is to make landlords liable for damages under the Consumer Protection Act and give the Attorney General the authority to enforce tenants’ rights under both that act and the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act. One of the two rent stabilization bills introduced in the 2023 session, HB 1388, would have done this.
This year’s version, HB 2114, would have given the Attorney General the authority to enforce landlord-tenant laws related to security deposits, just cause eviction, rent increases, and rent increase notices. That bill also failed to pass out of the legislature this year.
But local elected officials don’t have to wait for state lawmakers to act. Seattle City Councilmembers can pass their own ordinances banning unfair, abusive, and deceptive practices, as unincorporated King County and the city of Kenmore have already done.
In Kenmore, a landlord who violates the law banning deceptive practices has to pay the tenant “the greater of double the tenant’s economic and noneconomic damages or three times the monthly rent of the dwelling unit at issue, and reasonable litigation costs and attorneys’ fees.” By attaching meaningful consequences to unfair, deceptive and abusive practices, landlords might actually get sued sometimes, creating a stronger incentive for them to clean up their act.
“This is what makes consumer protection laws work in general,” Witter said. “Even when you are suing over a $15 toaster, UDAP [unfair, deceptive and abusive practice] laws encourage a person and an attorney to bring them.”
Until then, tenants are at the mercy of landlords and management companies. Indigo says their “ethos” includes “[e]ncouraging our residents to engage with their lease agreement. … We believe in clear communication and have always been here to provide answers and clarity when needed.”
“Indigo management has not responded to a single email or certified letter about the lease, and their onsite manager is unable to help,” Nelson said.
Redmond hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, who bankrolled the initiative to roll back restrictions on police pursuits, testifies at a hearing on the bill earlier this week.
By Andrew Engelson
On Friday, the state Senate Law and Justice Committee voted to pass Initiative 2113, which would repeal statewide limits on police pursuits. If the legislature passes the bill, the initiative will become law without first appearing on the November ballot, where polls indicate it would likely win.
A group bankrolled by Redmond hedge fund manager Brian Heywood has been pushing for a statewide initiative that would allow police officers to pursue drivers based on a suspicion they have “violated the law” or are a “threat to public safety”—a dramatic reversal of efforts over the past several years to restrain the ability of police to chase drivers who they believe have committed a crime.
The backlash against restrictions on police chases comes in response to a bill first passed by the legislature in 2021, which allowed police to chase a vehicle only if there was probable cause that the driver had committed a violent crime, sex offense, domestic violence, or DUI. In 2023, the legislature weakened those restrictions by lowering that threshold to “reasonable suspicion,” adding several other offenses, and removing the requirement that officers get authorization from a supervisor before pursuing a suspect.
The initiative still has to pass a full vote in both the house and senate before it can become law; if it doesn’t, it will head for the statewide ballot in November. Democrats in the legislature appear to be engaging in political calculus: By moving forward with Initiative 2113 and two other Heywood proposals—including one that would give parents more control over what their kids see and learn in public schools and another banning a state income tax—they can focus on fighting the remaining three initiatives in November. Those proposals would repeal the statewide capital gains tax, eliminate the state’s “cap and invest” carbon market, and make a payroll tax to fund long-term care insurance optional rather than mandatory.
“Pretty much all the data we have going back all the way to the 1980s makes it really clear that pursuits are uniquely dangerous. Of all the tactics that police use, this tactic causes more collateral damage than any other.”—Martina Morris, University of Washington
Supporters of the police pursuit initiative, which had a joint hearing in front of the state senate and house public safety committees on Wednesday, say repealing the law would restore law enforcement’s ability to “chase bad people”—as Rep. Jim Walsh (R-Aberdeen) put it in his testimony. That simplistic view contradicts years of research demonstrating that high-speed pursuits are risky to bystanders and do not increase rates of apprehension, according to Martina Morris, a professor emerita of sociology and statistics at the University of Washington.
“Pretty much all the data we have going back all the way to the 1980s makes it really clear that pursuits are uniquely dangerous,” Morris said. “Of all the tactics that police use, this tactic causes more collateral damage than any other.”
Morris tracks pursuit-related deaths in Washington state – mostly by monitoring and analyzing news reports, because, she notes, local law enforcement agencies and the Washington Traffic Safety Commission aren’t rigorously recording data on such fatalities. Comparing equal time periods before and after the statewide limits went into effect (about two and a half years each), Morris has observed a 50 percent reduction in deaths related to pursuits.
Going back to 2015, Morris found that of 379 people killed by police in Washington state, 26 percent involved vehicular pursuits. Of the 32 deaths in Washington caused by collisions during pursuits, more than half were bystanders, passengers, or officers.
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“More than half of the fatalities due to active pursuits are not the person [the police are] trying to apprehend,” Morris said. “If you’re at the wrong place at the wrong time, you could be the next person who’s hurt in one of these chases. And it’s not because you did something wrong. It’s because the chases are dangerous.”
A study published by the U.S. Department of Justice in September noted that nationwide, police pursuits caused an average of 370 fatalities each year (with the caveat that the data is incomplete). Of those who died, 76 percent were suspects, 21 percent were people who weren’t involved, and 3 percent were police officers. The study recommended limits on pursuits, including only chasing violent offenders – a key part of the Washington state law that Initiative 2113 seeks to repeal.
In testimony before the joint committee, Josh Parker, an attorney with New York University’s Policing Project, drew attention to a detailed report published Tuesday by the San Francisco Chronicle, which found that more than 3,000 people died in police pursuits nationwide during a six-year period ending in 2022. Black people were four times more likely than white people to be killed in a police pursuit.
“That study also, importantly, found that just one out of 15 people killed were chased for violent crimes,” Parker said. “Most of the time ….the officers were conducting chases at high speeds to stop drivers suspected of nonviolent crimes, or low-level driving infractions like having a broken taillight or playing loud music.”
In testimony supporting his initiative, Heywood lamented what he described as an “increasing disregard for the law,” and noted that the measure wasn’t intended to encourage “250 mile-per-hour chases,” but rather to “restore local jurisdiction over making the rules on when a chase or a pursuit should occur.” He added that local law enforcement agencies could still impose stricter limits: “We’re completely fine with that.”
Heywood claimed that, in response to a suspected rape at Bellevue College on Tuesday, Bellevue Police declined to pursue the suspect. When Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-32) pointed out that police are already allowed to pursue people suspected of sexual offenses under the current law, Heywood walked back his comments, noting that “at the very least, it’s caused confusion in what the police feel like they are allowed to do.”
In early 2021, the Seattle Police Department imposed limits on pursuits that require police to establish probable cause that a person has committed a violent or sex-related offense, making Seattle’s rules stricter than the current state law requires. Those clear guidelines contrast sharply with the department’s vague policies on emergency driving, which SPD is reviewing after 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula was killed in a crosswalk in 2023 by a police officer driving 74 miles per hour.
The King County Sheriff’s Office’s pursuit policy is closely aligned with the current state law, requiring reasonable suspicion of a violent offense or sex offense, vehicular assault, or a DUI. Asked whether those policies would remain in place if the initiative passes, KCSO spokesman Eric White said, “Any potential changes in state law will not shift the King County Sheriff’s Office’s primary focus on community safety in every decision and action the department takes.”
In his testimony, Heywood also claimed that, in response to a suspected rape on the campus of Bellevue College on Tuesday, Bellevue Police declined to pursue the suspect; however, nothing in new reports or information provided by the Bellevue Police Department indicated that this was the case. When Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-32) pointed out that police are already allowed to pursue people suspected of sexual offenses under the current law, Heywood walked back his comments, noting that “at the very least, it’s caused confusion in what the police feel like they are allowed to do.”
Heywood also drew attention to high rates of car theft as a reason to repeal pursuit limits, observing that Washington has “become the nation’s leader in car theft.”
Morris notes, however, that Washington has had nationally high rates of car theft in the three decades that predate the pursuit law. Indeed, Washington’s current rate is second in the nation at 693 vehicles per 100,000 population – but still below a peak of thefts in 2005 when it had a rate of 783. Seattle’s own law restricting pursuits hasn’t impacted the city’s ability to recover stolen cars, either; as Morris points out, SPD recovers 86 percent of all stolen vehicles (as opposed to a national recovery rate of 46 percent).
Though data is relatively scarce on the impact of pursuit policies, the city of Milwaukee prevents a fascinating case study, Morris says.
In 2010, after four people were killed in pursuits over the span of a few months, the Milwaukee Police Department became one of the first law enforcement agencies in the nation to put limits on pursuits, requiring officers to establish probable cause of a violent felony before engaging in a chase. After the limits went into place, the data show pursuits declined by half, to about 50 a year.
However, as in Washington, there was vocal opposition to the restrictions, and by 2017, Milwaukee had removed all restrictions on police pursuits.
The number of pursuits in Milwaukee each year skyrocketed from 50 in 2012 to a peak of 1,079 in 2020 – and continues to average more than 1,000 per year. Meanwhile, the rate at which suspects were taken into custody as a result of vehicular pursuits plummeted from 72 percent in 2012 to 38 percent in 2022.
In addition, the number of pursuit-related injuries in Milwaukee after the repeal increased dramatically—from about 11 a year to more than 170. “So all the danger came back, amplified,” Morris said.. Even though Milwaukee police were chasing suspects for offenses as minor as expired tabs, the city didn’t escape a surge in car thefts that began in 2021 with a TikTok challenge to steal Kia and Hyundai car—a phenomenon, it turns out, that originated in Milwaukee.
Leslie Cushman, a spokeswoman for the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, said that the state’s current restrictions, which are in line with the 2023 Justice Department report recommendations, are very reasonable.
“The core of the law is focused on crimes against persons – this includes violent crimes like murder and includes carjackings and armed robbery, it includes all sexual assaults and crimes, many assaults, escapes, and DUIs,” Cushman said. “The bottom line is that pursuits are a dangerous tactic and should be reserved for the most serious crimes against a person.”
SPD did not respond to questions about whether the department will keep its current pursuit policy in place if the ballot initiative passes.
Last March, I wrote about how Seattle’s Economic Displacement Relocation Assistance (EDRA) program was faring after its first eight months of operation. A year later, the program is benefiting tenants—and revealing the lengths to which some landlords will go to avoid paying tenant relocation costs.
EDRA requires a landlord who notifies a tenant of a rent increase of 10 percent or more to pay relocation assistance, if the tenant makes less than 80 percent of the area median income and moves out. The amount of the assistance is three times the monthly rent, and it’s the city that cuts a check; the landlord is supposed to reimburse the city.
House Bill 2114, which would limit rent and fee increases to 7 percent a year statewide, passed the state house earlier this month, although it faces an uphill battle in the senate.
Landlords aren’t exactly leaping at the chance to do right by their tenants, appealing their tenants’ eligibility in 46 of 112 cases.
In 2023, 290 households applied for relocation assistance. As of the end of January, the city had found 67 eligible and provided assistance totaling $295,930, or an average of about $4,400 per household. Of this, the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections has received $245,445 from landlords so far. That’s 83 percent—not too shabby, considering that when I inquired last February, less than half the money billed to landlords had been recouped.
But landlords aren’t exactly leaping at the chance to do right by their tenants. From the start of the program in July 2022 through the end of last year, 112 households were found eligible for relocation assistance. In 46 of these cases, the landlord appealed the decision. That’s an appeal rate of 41 percent. Seven appeals were successful, meaning that the hearing examiner upheld the department’s decision 85 percent of the time.
Common reasons for appeal included disputes over who counts part of the tenant household for the purpose of calculating income; whether parking, utilities, and other monthly fees count toward a rent increase; and what happens when multiple lease terms are offered at different rates, some clocking in over 10 percent and some below.
Some landlords tried shenanigans to avoid paying. Coppins Well Apartments, managed by the nation’s largest property management company, Greystar, notified a tenant of a rent increase of over 30 percent. The tenant gave her notice to vacate, listing the rent increase as the reason. Four months later, the landlord sent along a new offer: A 9.9 percent increase. The tenant declined, having already signed a lease elsewhere, but the landlord argued, unsuccessfully, that he shouldn’t be on the hook for relocation assistance because he had (eventually) offered a rent increase of less than 10 percent. Nice try!
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Or take Embassy Apartments, managed by Northwest Commercial Real Estate Investments, LLC. When a tenant qualified for relocation assistance, the landlord appealed on the grounds that “Ordinance 126451 is rent control pure and simple” and therefore in violation of state law. Funnily enough, that didn’t work either.
What about the other 223 households that applied for relocation assistance in 2023? Fifty were found ineligible because their income was too high, the rent increase was less than 10 percent, or their application was incomplete, insufficient, or late. (Five of these rejected tenants also filed appeals, but the hearing examiner only reversed the department’s decision in one case.) SDCI closed 34 applications because the tenants did not submit information or follow up, or because the applications were duplicates. In another 23 cases, the applicant withdrew their request for assistance because they reached an agreement with the owner, reapplied later, or no longer wanted to pursue relocation funds.
The remaining 116 applications were still in process as of late January. These included recently submitted applications, incomplete applications waiting for tenants to submit additional information or documentation, and those already accepted as complete but awaiting review. Jettisoning the income requirement, as I recommended in my write-up last year, would lessen the administrative burden of this program.
We have no way of knowing how the number of tenants who have applied or actually received relocation assistance compares to the number who may be eligible under the program, because the xity does not collect data on rents. In 2022, the city council voted down legislation that would have required landlords to periodically report rent data to a research university, such as the University of Washington.
Regardless of how many tenants actually receive assistance, a major benefit of all these laws is the incentive they create for landlords to keep rent increases under the threshold.
The median rent in Seattle has fallen since EDRA went into effect in July 2022, so double-digit rent increases have probably become less common. Still, given the relatively small number of applications (290 in a renter population approaching 200,000 households) it’s reasonable to assume that many more tenants were eligible for the program last year than actually applied or knew of its existence. Landlords are supposed to inform tenants of the program when notifying them of a rent increase that could qualify them for the program, but this isn’t always happening. In the (admittedly small) survey the Transit Riders Union conducted a year ago, only three of 13 tenants receiving a rent increase of 10 percent or more reported receiving an EDRA notice from their landlord.
Seattle is no longer the only city in Washington state with a law like this. Last November, voters in Tacoma and Bellingham approved renters’ rights measures that included landlord-paid relocation assistance for large rent hikes. Both of these measures were citizens’ initiatives run by grassroots coalitions in which local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America played a large role.
The Tacoma law requires relocation assistance equal to two months’ rent for rent increases of 5 percent or more; two and a half months’ rent for increases over 7.5 percent; and three months’ rent for increases over 10 percent.
The Bellingham law requires relocation assistance equal to three months’ rent or three times the current fair market rent for Bellingham, whichever is larger, when a landlord raises the rent by 8 percent or more.
Neither of these laws exclude tenants based on income, and neither creates a city-mediated program in the way that Seattle’s law does. Instead, the landlord is supposed to give the relocation assistance directly to the tenant, and report the transaction to the city. Seattle’s high landlord appeal rate suggests that voluntary compliance may be low. It will be interesting to see how these laws work out in practice.
Regardless of how many tenants actually receive assistance, a major benefit of all these laws is the incentive they create for landlords to keep rent increases under the threshold. Another finding of TRU’s survey last year was that a surprising number of rent increases hovered just under 10 percent, suggesting that the EDRA law is actually changing landlord behavior.
Of course, if HB 2114 makes it out of the Senate in its current form and becomes law, rent increases greater than 7 percent will largely become a thing of the past all across Washington state—happily rendering Seattle’s EDRA law obsolete.
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1. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority will significantly alter how it conducts the interviews with unsheltered people that form the basis of the countywide “Point In Time” count, which now occurs every two years and consists of one-on-one daytime surveys at fixed locations over multiple weeks, rather than a traditional one-night count of tents, people sleeping out in the open, and vehicles used as shelter.
Although the count will still be based on respondent-driven sampling—a form of statistical sampling in which participants recruit additional respondents from their personal networks—the questions the KCRHA interviewers will ask have been transformed. Instead of open-ended questions like “What have been your experiences with the police and justice system?” and “What has it [being homeless] been like for you?,” the survey consists of basic demographic and short-form questions along the lines of the old Count Us In survey conducted by the KCRHA’s predecessor, All Home.
The interviewers—about 130 volunteers—will receive more extensive training this year than the Lived Experience Coalition members who conducted the survey last year received, KCRHA community impact officer Owen Kajfasz said last week, and their jobs will be simpler. “By removing the qualitative [open-ended interview] component from this, we remove a lot of the complexity that would require additional training” beyond the three hours volunteers received this time around, Kajfasz said.
Last year, training for the interviews was conducted in person or online by then-KCRHA CEO Marc Dones; interviewers who couldn’t make it to a training session were asked to simply review the training documents. Interview transcripts obtained by PubliCola showed that the conversations were often rambling, discursive, and (according to experts we consulted) out of step with best practices for qualitative research; for example, interviewers frequently cut people off, talked at length about themselves, offered unsolicited advice, and improperly suggested they could connect people to services.
As we reported last year, the KCRHA used 180 of these interview transcripts as the basis for its Five-Year Plan, turning answers to questions like “what things or people have been helpful to you?” into a precise, detailed budget that favored parking lots for people living in vehicles over tiny house villages, for example.
This year’s count will also include more “hubs” throughout the county than last year’s count—17 in all—which Kajfasz said should give the KCRHA a more representative sample of the region’s homeless population. Last year, the KCRHA didn’t do any surveys in Federal Way or Kent, for example, which may have exacerbated other issues with data collection in South King County, the first region where the agency did surveys and the one with the largest number of data issues.
2. During a briefing about the ongoing state legislative session by city lobbyists Monday afternoon, Council President Sara Nelson expressed support for four addiction and overdose-related bills that aren’t on the city’s official legislative agenda: House Bills 1956 and 2222, and Senate Bills 6109 and 6134.
HB 1956, sponsored by Rep. Mari Leavitt (D-28, University Place), would require the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to update school drug education materials to include “information about the potential lethality and other risks associated with the use of fentanyl and other opioids.”
HB 2222, sponsored by Rep. David Hackney (D-11, Tukwila), would allow prosecutors to charge parents with endangering their children, a Class B felony, if they allow them to be “exposed to” or have “contact with” non-prescription fentanyl or other synthetic opiates, potentially removing children from their homes if a parent is struggling with addiction.
SB 6109, sponsored by Sen. Claire Wilson (D) would make it easier for the state to take children away from their parents and place them in foster care if police, medical personnel, or child welfare workers find non-prescription opiates in their home. The bill would legally place opiate use by parents on the same level as “sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, [and] a pattern of severe neglect.”
SB 6134, sponsored by Republicans Chris Gildon (R-25, Puyallup) and Lynda Wilson (R-17, Spokane), would give $7 million to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs to create “multijurisdictional drug task forces that would track overdose trends and make opiate-related policy recommendations to the state.
Three of the four bills have begun moving through the committee process (which is no guarantee they’ll go any further in the short legislative session); HB 2222 has not been scheduled for a hearing.
While it’s certainly disappointing that Mayor Harrell is still 
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