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.