By Katie Wilson
As housing costs have soared over the past decade, many Seattle renters have found themselves cost-burdened and vulnerable to displacement and homelessness. Spurred to action, renters’ rights advocates have notched some big victories: New laws governing tenant screening, evictions, and what landlords can charge, including caps on move-in costs and late fees, 180 days’ notice of rent increases, and landlord-paid relocation assistance in some cases of “economic displacement.”
Landlord organizations like the Rental Housing Association of Washington (RHAWA) and some individual landlords have fought back with lobbying, lawsuits, and attempts to shape public opinion. Their opposition narrative routinely centers around small landlords.
“In virtually every policy debate, opponents of new regulations on the housing market claim that adding new regulations will create new burdens that will drive ‘mom-and-pop’ landlords out of the market, and that this will have the unexpected consequences of higher housing costs and reduced access for renters—especially vulnerable renters,” Dr. Kyle Crowder, Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington, said.
I got embroiled in this debate in 2021 when I responded to two pieces in The Seattle Times, by inveterate landlord lobbyist Cory Brewer and that paper’s editorial board, with a series of articles in Crosscut. They argued that rental regulations were eroding the single-family rental house supply. I argued that they probably weren’t; that renter protection laws should not exempt small landlords; and that even if small landlords were exiting the market, it’s not clear that we should care. Brewer then doubled down on his position with a fusillade of misinformation, and The Seattle Times refused to make corrections. Fun times!
The following year, the RHAWA engineered another media blitz, this time pointing to data from the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections that showed a decline in the number of rentals that had been registered or reregistered with the city during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, I was working with the Transit Riders Union and the Stay Housed Stay Healthy coalition to pass renter protection laws in multiple cities around King County, and we found ourselves having to reassure worried elected officials: Numbers had fallen in part because Seattle paused outreach and enforcement of the registration requirement; and if rentals were being sold, that was more likely due to soaring property values and the extraordinary financial strains of the pandemic than the kinds of permanent renter protections cities were considering.
The researchers concluded that “in Seattle there was no increase in the likelihood of small rental properties being sold following the passage of these ordinances, even after a period of court limbo ended and both ordinances’ constitutionality was eventually upheld.”
All these debates between dueling narratives have been frustratingly inconclusive, partly because there’s been little reliable evidence to point to. If only there was some actual research that could resolve this dispute!
Now, there is. A new study co-authored by Crowder, “Mom-and-Pop” Landlords and Regulatory Backlash: A Seattle Case Study, tackles these questions head on. It examines the “mom-and-pop” landlord narrative against the backdrop of Seattle’s First-in-Time and Fair Chance Housing ordinances, passed in 2016 and 2017.
“Given how common these arguments are in policy debates, we felt it was important to objectively interrogate the two underlying assumptions—that small landlords tend to offer more accessible, lower-cost housing for renters with limited incomes or facing other barriers to access, and that new regulations will drive these small landlords from the market,” Crowder said. “Seattle provided a strong case for us to study because we have unusually good data on the practices of different types of landlords and because we could track sales before and after the ordinances passed by the city in recent years.”
First-in-Time requires landlords to publicize their screening criteria and rent to the first qualified applicant; Fair Chance Housing prevents landlords from unfairly denying applicants housing based on criminal history. (Just this year, in a rare legal reverse, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down one element of the Fair Chance Housing law: landlords are no longer banned from asking about a tenant’s or applicant’s criminal history, but they still can’t require disclosure or take an adverse action based on that history.)
Among all the renter protections passed in Seattle, these two provoked more than their share of apoplectic rage among landlords.
The researchers used a combination of consumer data and parcel records to look at patterns of small rental property sales before and after these laws took effect, comparing Seattle to areas outside the city without such laws. They concluded that “in Seattle there was no increase in the likelihood of small rental properties being sold following the passage of these ordinances, even after a period of court limbo ended and both ordinances’ constitutionality was eventually upheld.”
Additionally, the researchers found, there was a “declining probability of sale of small rental units” both in and around Seattle after the new rules went into effect—”a general dynamic inconsistent with the broader narrative about mom-and-pops exiting the market.”
In other words, Seattle’s small landlords did not, in fact, sell off their properties en masse. This revelation suggests, among other things, that we should be skeptical about some of what landlords say about their own actions. The 2018 Seattle Rental Housing Study (of which Crowder was also the lead author) asked landlords and tenants about the same ordinances through surveys, focus groups, and interviews. According to an online survey of more than 4,000 Seattle landlords:
About 40% of landlords have sold, or plan to sell, property in response City ordinances governing the housing market, with long-term landlords and those managing large numbers of buildings especially likely to report that they plan to sell. About one-third report that the First-in-Time ordinance is a major reason for the decision to sell. A similar proportion of landlords report that the decision to sell is at least partially motivated by changes to rules about the use of criminal records.
These are astounding claims, especially in light of the new research. The RHAWA and the Washington Multifamily Housing Association actively promoted the survey to their members via email and in their organization newsletters, and later heavily promoted the results to members, claiming landlords justly felt “vilified” by the city. Clearly, a city-sponsored survey about laws that many landlords find obnoxious invites responses with a political valence, adding to the general unreliability of human beings reporting on their own motives and intentions.
So much for mass selloffs of small rental properties. The new study also tackles the second part of the “mom-and-pop” narrative: The notion that policymakers should coddle small landlords for the sake of their renters. According to the study, landlords of small rental properties “do not neatly fit the theorized expectations of ‘mom-and-pops’ in terms of who they tend to rent to, the affordability of housing they offer, or the friendliness of their practices towards tenants.”
While these landlords might be less likely than corporate landlords to raise rents or terminate their tenants’ leases, they also “tend to rent to higher income households and are less likely to rent to vulnerable tenants than large landlords. Meanwhile, over three-quarters of small and large landlords alike reported charging rents above fair market value. Overall, these results challenge the rhetorical depiction of small landlords as the last bastion of affordable housing for the city’s most vulnerable renters.”
The paper cites other research suggesting that small landlords’ lower eviction rates don’t necessary mean that they provide more secure housing. They may simply have fewer tenants who fail to pay rent because they rent to more financially secure people; and they may more often use informal or illegal eviction methods that don’t show up in court records. Some large landlords also use eviction notices as a routine tool to collect late rent, inflating the averages.
There’s a strong racial undercurrent to the “mom-and-pop” narrative and the two laws that were the focus of this study. The laws are intended to prevent discrimination, both systematic—as in blanket refusals to rent to anyone with a criminal record—and informal, as when a landlord selects among a pool of applicants based on a gut sense of who will be a “good” tenant. Both these practices can enable landlords to reject applicants based on race without having to acknowledge, even to themselves, what they’re doing.
The very phrase “mom-and-pop” is fraught. Michele Thomas, Director of Policy and Advocacy at Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, calls it a racist dog whistle. “I really do think the image it invokes is heterosexual white older couple, and they’re trying to say, ‘Think about these people and think about who a tenant is, and who do you think needs protection?’”
At least part of that stereotype is accurate, when it comes to the Seattle landlords who responded to the 2018 survey: Demographically, according to the survey report, they’re “overwhelmingly white.” Almost 82 percent of the respondents who identified their race said they were white, followed by Asian and multi-racial landlords. Renters, meanwhile, are disproportionately Black and brown, especially lower-income renters and those who carry other baggage, like past evictions or a criminal history, that make it harder to compete in a tight rental market. Thanks to this new research, we now know that these vulnerable renters do not, as a class, owe all that much to the beneficence of small landlords.
This study is timely, as the Seattle City Council is about to lose several members who have consistently gone to bat for renters. Despite all the debate, the laws passed in the past decade—in Seattle, around King County, and statewide—have, almost without exception, applied to small landlords as well as large. If the incoming council changes course, at least it will be harder to argue they’re doing so because they care about the renters who now constitute a majority of Seattle’s population.
Huumm, not many supportive comments here. Interesting how the author uses derogatory comments to describe opposing opinions. I guess it’s an attempt to make herself relevant.
Additionally Multi-Family building is slowing and Single-Family building is growing. I’m not sure how that will help with affordable housing or homeless, as the backers of these new laws proclaim.
Katie, did you read Seattle’s report on rental registrations in March 2023 (https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDCI/Codes/RRIO/RRIOAnnualReport.pdf)? Scroll down to page 10 for the section called “Loss of Registered Units.” For context, Seattle passed a winter eviction ban in February 2020, before the COVID pandemic. In the time after that ban was passed, Seattle has recorded a loss of 6,738 property registrations, or 20.1%. As you can see in the data, the corresponding loss of units was 6,686 units. This means that larger property managers came in and registered larger properties with more units while small “mom & pop” landlords failed to register or reregister their units. The report says that they have no current way to measure non-compliance. It’s impossible to say how many mom & pop housing providers have opted to continue renting without registration (and why they have chosen to do so), but it is fair to assume that many (if not most) of these small, independent housing providers have taken their properties off the market.
My husband and I are small housing provider in Tacoma with 4 units. Since Measure 1 in Tacoma passed we are getting out! We do all our own work, repairs and management, providing Affordable Housing. There are too many risks, and with only 4 units, if any one person decides not to pay, that is 25% of my income that covers my costs and repairs etc. A large business with 200 units, would only be affected by .5% of revenue. That’s a huge difference. All Seattle and Tacoma are getting is more Big Corporate Landlords and more Black Rock. We will keep our current tenants. When they move on, we will transition all our units to Condos.
Katie, imagine my surprise when someone texted me a link to this website and your story. Thank you for spelling my name correctly, that’s an improvement over your friends at The Stranger.
I am a Mom and Pop landlord. I have had no problem with the landlord laws. I have been doing “first in time” for two decades- because it was the fair thing to do. I have always given my tenants 3 months notice of a rent increase. I enacted a two year rule. The first two years there would be no rent increase. If my tenant is great, many times they go years without a rent increase. I raised the rent when they moved. My tenants have been fantastic with a couple of exceptions. I have never evicted anyone or needed to serve a 3 day notice. I have been a landlord since the late 80’s. And yet I sold a single family rental in 2021, and another in 2022. Guess what, I am putting another up for sale this Spring. It is because I don’t trust the new laws. I believe they are there to give the bad tenants the ability to screw me over. Covid brought out the worst. So, I am liquidating. Who is buying me out! The big boys, the fat cats, and so far both houses I sold have been torn down. To build big expensive condos that only an Amazon executive could afford. You are wrong. We Mom and Pops are a dying breed. One by one we are selling out. Just like the small neighborhood grocery stores. It won’t be long before Walmart and Amazon will own your rentals. Or perhaps the city? More tax revenue from dormitory style apartments. Because small landlords do not have the funds to fight the grifter tenants. We don’t have an attorney on retainer, and sure can’t absorb the loss from people refusing to pay their rent. More is the pity people. This is the new normal.
well lets not forget that a lot of tenant activists have a goal of fully socialized housing. Its the only way they can see to be able to completely control who gets what housing based on the current definition of fairness or equity. This author has made it clear she doesn’t think its a big deal to drive out small landlords so she probably considers it a win that you are selling out. (Though she will (and has) spin it as greed instead of anything to do with not wanting to be put in a position of being unable to evict a destructive and nonpaying tenant for a year or longer)
OK so I am one of those who-cares-if-they-die-off mom and pop landlords. I have 3 units in seattle, and 14 total in the region.
More than a couple thoughts here.
First I realize the line has to be drawn somewhere if you want a “small” vs. “large” landlord distinction but a better one than just unit count is probably whether or not the landlord is a full time real estate investor or manager. Very few landlords with 4 units are going to have rental income be their primary income source. If they do, its because they’ve owned the building long enough to be debt free.
This new study Katie is referencing is a great example of what you get by studying a group of people’s behavior as if you thought of them as ants or mice in a maze. Stimulus response. Little consideration for longer term impacts and no actual communicating with the people being studied. Those sorts of issues are always brought up as major flaws when “in power” people try to release studies about marginalized groups. So I wonder why its OK here.
I also see this study barely mentions or considers the impacts of COVID and the extreme measures that government imposed on landlords – forcing an unlucky subset of them with opportunistic tenants to forgo rent and/or watch their properties be destroyed in front of them sometimes for years with no legal recourse. All the charts in the study tracking probablility of sale for 1-4 unit properties end in 2020. Thats almost 4 years ago now so I wonder how THAT impacted the probability of sale.
The study also seems to assume an immediate reaction between passing of an ordinance and some quantity of housing providers selling. Again, we are humans, not ants. If a single unit landlord with a rental house has good tenants they will probably do nothing immediately. It could be years down the road when those tenants move out when they at that point choose to sell their rental house instead of risking the maze of new ordinances trying to select a new one. Or, some might not sell until they get their first bad tenant experience, which is far more likely under the new rules. So again, over time there will be more pressure on stock of smaller rental properties. Or, they won’t sell but convert to airBNB, let a relative move in, move back in themselves and sell their other house which might not get caught by this study’s method.
The author theorizes all kinds of possible reasons OTHER than people selling up for why the city’s rental registrations show a drop in smaller properties. This is one place where her bias is pretty clear as her theorizing basically assumes landlords are going to ignore the registration rules if they can get away with it and that MUST be the reason for the decline. Well WHY did they register in the first place then? How about contacting some of the lapsed registrants and ASKING them. She is at least moonlighting as a journalist.
On the evaluation of whether small landlords operate differently or treat tenants better I like how despite the study confirming several of our points (we offer larger units, we offer lower rents on average, we are more flexible in screening on average, we are less likely to pursue eviction, etc) the author does her best to turn this around. But OK anybody who researches her positions knows she is not just pro tenant she is very ANTI private rental housing regardless of scale. So its fine to call out the obvious and expected biases of people who own property who want to be able to protect themselves and their property. But I hope the author doesn’t believe she has no biases on her end. BTW on being less likely to file an eviction but more likely to actually execute it that makes sense. Small operators are more likely to personally know their tenant. So they will try harder to work with the tenant in person if possible. I’m dealing with this right now with a tenant who has not paid rent since last April. They had a medical issue so we (me and PM) have given them benefit of doubt, and they have gotten some rent assistance. But eventually they are going to have to start paying again. A mega landlord would more likely have gone straight to the pay or quit notices. However, once a small operator concludes there is no path forward via negotation, then there really is no other option but eviction. So they are all in at that point. Its rare but it happens. No, I’ve never had to evict yet. Threaten? yes. Negotiate an early move out that was best case for both myself and tenant? Yes. No that isn’t an illegal or self help eviction despite what is often implied. I didn’t force the tenants in these cases. I just was able to come to an agreement with them that moving was the best option and made clear what the alternative was.
Its also definitely the case that some of these ordinances like FIT and Fair chance, and the roommate ordinance have forced small landlords who are still trying to stay in the business to act more professionally. We legally cannot cut a break for an applicant who /almost/ meets our written criteria or has some alternate circumstance we might be willing to consider under FIT without going back through any and all prior applicants and notifying them of the change in terms and offering to re-screen them on those terms. Sorry nobody is going to deal with all that extra bureaucratic hoop jumping and risk. SO of course we have become less flexible in our screening. This is an obvious outcome of that law that we warned about. Apparently our tenant advocates prefer the more corporatized screening process so OK you got it. I myself hired property management when FIT and Fair chance hit and went from personal interviews and references to my PM checking credit score as screening step 1. Its not just an anecdote.
Another not-an-anecdote. I moved to upper rainier beach after I sold the seattle duplex I lived in to a developer (different story). This was early 2019 so about a year before the pandemic. Since I moved onto this block not one but THREE 1-4 unit rental properties just on my 1 block street (two SFRs and a very nice duplex) have been removed from the rental market. Two were sold to owner occupants both after their owners managed to “informally evict” terrible residents. The last one, owned by a VIETNAMESE mom-and-pop which was an absolutely beautiful building that could easily have been converted to 4 units was bulldozed for townhouses. Sure the net unit count went up, but the affordable rental count went down by 2 when a small landlord buying that property instead of a developer could have increased it by 2.
Anybody else who denies that imbalanced laws that favor the tenant excessively won’t harm landlords (small or otherwise) can look at cases like Jason Roth’s – his editorial at https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/small-landlords-are-at-the-mercy-of-broken-king-county-eviction-court/. Long story short he has been forced to live in a van while a nonpaying tenant (whose actions are clear – they never intended to pay a dime once they got moved in) occupies his beacon hill house, airbnb’d it, and is using their free legal representation to drag out the court case as long as possible. This is not the only example of such abuse.
Finally, on the whole ‘mom and pop’ phrase being somehow racist or exclusionary or whatever. Give. Me. a. Break. everybody regardless of their skin color has a mom and pop. Okay maybe they have different affectionate names for them. Its just a term we use to indicate smaller operators. and when it comes to ownership of smaller 1-4 unit properties yes the majority of owners are individuals and families. They may be majority white but so is Seattle. so claiming racism in the term used by seattle landlords when seattle as a whole demonstrates the same demographics is just another smear attempt. well OK we get lots of those every day so we’re used to it.
Don’t dehumanize housing providers to the point where you can produce studies that mathematically show at best inonclusive results about how people are thinking, then fail to actually TALK to them. How about a followup on that original UW survey of landlords? How many who SAID they were going to sell actually DID? and so on.
I could not agree with Brian more. My wife and I own three homes and have been landlords in Seattle over 15 years. Over that time we have made it our mission to help people have a home at won’t normally qualify with the large property management companies. We never pulled credit and used a much more personal approach to choosing tenants. Since the rules have changed it has forced us to raise income requirements and pull credit history. I understand that tenants need protection but from my experience these rules have only made it harder for people to find housing.
We sold two rental properties and replaced it out of the city and county with a nice Airbnb. I had to cash out my 401k during Covid. While big business renters got money and some renters took advantage. We had one renter who legitimately couldn’t pay and another who just didn’t feel like it and spent money on drugs. We went above all to help the one tenant even cleaning his home twice of detritus when he fell into a stupor, and replaced his furniture that he allowed to get ruined. Only way out was to sell the duplex.
We have one rental left and are planning on selling that too.
As property taxes have soared over the past decade, many Seattle property owners have found themselves cost-burdened. In 2013, 41% of a Seattle property owner’s tax bill was from voter approved levies. It is 2023, that percentage is now just over 60% and will increase in 2024.
Homeowners in Seattle are in a distinct minority, but bear a disproportionate and inequitable share of the tax burden, and advocates are calling for property tax reform. Renters comprise approximately 55% of the population. Renters vote on property tax levies, benefit from all the same services paid by property tax levies, but do not share a direct payment liability.
If a “lease tax” were implemented as a line item percentage of the monthly rent paid directly by the landlord to the city, it would be a way of increasing the tax base to directly include the renters and provide property tax relief to homeowners who do not use their property as a source of income.
There are certainly arguments to be made taxes, maintenance etc. are already part of the rent. But that is different than a set percentage of the monthly rent sent directly to the city to satisfy the tax bill. There are ways to implement this so it does not impact people in subsidized housing, or receiving state/federal benefits. The idea is not to put anybody out in the street.
Renting an ADU in your house is little different from renting a room in a group house. Should roommates in a group house have “first-in-time” privileges?
In Seattle and King County, a renter can stop paying their rent and it takes many months (sometimes more than a year) to go through a legal process that will allow the landlord to evict the tenant. Meanwhile that landlord has to continue paying their mortgage and other expenses. That’s not fair to put that burden on “mom-and-pop” landlords.
The cited study apparently focuses on sales of homes by property owners. However there are other ways that owners remove units from the rental market. One of them is by converting to short-term renting (Airbnb). There are thousands of Airbnb units in Seattle. If, say, a third of them were returned to the long term rental market the beneficial consequences could be significant. Compared to the slow addition of units produced by the range of policy initiatives and public subsidy, the instant “production” of a thousand rental units returned to the long term rental market would look like a miracle. Why is no one talking about this?
Agree, there are multiple ways to exit a market. AirBnB is one path, upscaling your rental for higher paying tenants is another. Renting outside the market – to friends and family – would be another option. These are all losses for affordable units. “What units have sold” is asking the wrong question.
I don’t really get the mom-and-pop term heartburn either. I personally call them “small landlords.” But perhaps they would be better known as “small housing suppliers,” seeing that housing rentals are something we want to support, because housing crisis.
With all due respect, this is a load of crap. I’ve been a Seattle renter for nearly 40 years and a lot of these regulations do indeed screw small-time landlords in a big way, and are also doing me no favors at all in the process. Nitpicking the term “mom and pop” does NOTHING to change that fact.
Who died and made every word that Ms. Wilson writes some freaking scroll handed down like the Sermon on the Mount, anyway?