1. Eight months after former King County Regional Homelessness Authority director Marc Dones announced their resignation, the KCRHA seems to be in no hurry to hire a replacement. This despite the fact that Helen Howell, the former deputy director who stepped into Dones’ position on an interim basis last year, is now almost nine months into what was supposed to be a six-month temporary assignment.
At a meeting of the KCRHA’s implementation board on Wednesday, board member Christopher Ross announced that the company chosen to lead the search, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, had created a job description for the position that will be posted on the KCRHA website sometime before the end of January. NPAG does executive recruitment for nonprofits; its client list includes philanthropic groups, public health nonprofits, and progressive advocacy organizations, but no government entities.
The new job description, Ross said, will be “more contemporary” than the one for which Dones was hired in 2021, given the growing complexity of the job in the years since Dones was hired. This could push the hiring process well into mid-2024, leaving the beleagured regional homelessness authority without a permanent leader for a year or more. The authority began holding public meetings in May 2020, and has had a permanent CEO in place for 15 months since that time, meaning that the KCRHA has spent significantly more time without a permanent leader than with one.
It wouldn’t be the first time the KCRHA took a long time hiring a CEO. The KCRHA was supposed to hire its first CEO in September 2020, but that process kept getting pushed back, and Dones took the job the following March after the board’s first pick, Regina Cannon, turned down the position.
But is Seattle even losing small rental units as fast as landlords claim? Unfortunately, there’s a lot we still don’t know.
2. In 2022 and again in 2023, the Rental Housing Association of Washington (RHAWA) and other landlord advocates engineered a news blitz touting a supposed loss of rental housing units in Seattle, especially those operated by small landlords. Their evidence was data showing a decline in registrations of rental units under the City’s Rental Registration and Inspection Ordinance (RRIO). The cause? They blamed Seattle’s renter protection laws.
Since then, evidence has piled up refuting that claim. As reported in PubliCola last month, a recently published study shows that Seattle’s First in Time and Fair Chance Housing laws did not drive “mom and pop” landlords out of the market, despite many landlords’ claims that they had sold or were planning to sell due to those laws. And a new city audit examining the decline in small rental property registrations found that Seattle’s rental market is shifting toward larger properties in line with national trends, so it’s unlikely that our local regulatory environment is a significant factor.
But is Seattle even losing small rental units as fast as RHAWA claims? After all, the City paused outreach and enforcement of the RRIO program during the pandemic, and it’s plausible that many landlords simply failed to re-register their units, even though they continued to operate as rentals.
One might hope that the audit would shed light on this question. Unfortunately, there’s a lot we still don’t know. According to Deputy City Auditor Miroslava Meza: “Our report didn’t definitively quantify the decrease in registered rental properties due to re-registration failures because we faced challenges identifying and quantifying the rental units that are still operational under the same owner, mainly because of various data availability problems.”
The report does recommend improvements to the RRIO program to remedy these problems, “covering issues such as enforcement challenges, IT system difficulties, and inactive registrations surpassing current enforcement procedures.”
Still, the results of the audit’s landlord survey are suggestive. The 635 survey responses included 309 owners or managers of properties with at least one known rental unit sold, and 326 of properties that, without a known property sale, did not have their RRIO registration renewed after the due date. When asked “Have you recently stopped renting out any of your properties? (2016-2022),” 281 respondents answered “Continuing to rent.” (261 answered “Stopped renting,” and 93 did not answer the question.) This suggests, contrary to landlord lobbyists’ claims, that a large portion of failed re-registrations may actually represent rentals that are still in operation.
—Erica C. Barnett, Katie Wilson
OK in a previous post I already argued against this convenient conclusion that over regulation of, demonization of, and imposition of excessive risk on small housing providers somehow doesn’t cause them to leave the market or otherwise change their behaviors or business practices to protect themselves.
Just to look at it from a different perspective I went over to zillow and did some searches. Now I didn’t try to verify every listing was accurately categorized property, and some certainly are not (at least some of “house” listings are townhouses and some of the outlier cheap ones are actually rooms for rent for example) but…
SFR homes under $3000 to rent ; 3+BRs any baths (all of seattle city limits) : 73 total. So, “affordable” at roughly $108K annual income considering advertised base rent only. Adding townhomes makes it 115 total
SFR homes under $4000 to rent ; 3+BRs any baths (all of seattle city limits) : 196 total. “affordable” at about 144K annual income considering base rent only. Adding townhomes makes 321 units available.
Per Seattle Times as of September 2023 seattle’s median income was $115K. So if you are on a median income and looking to rent a house, your options fall somewhere in this list. Now I’m sure there are other houses being advertized through other rental platforms but not cross posted to zillow, but these days any halfway savvy landlord will advertise online and on multiple platforms, and any property manager will for sure) so there probably aren’t massive amounts of additional inventory not represented here.
Corporate megalandlords aren’t going to represent a lot of ownership in single unit or low density residential around here. The price per unit is too high. Most new inventory on SFR rentals around here come from so called “accidental” landlords who move and end up keeping their old home as a rental (with its already baked in lower cost basis) vs anybody buying a house specifically to rent it.
So if we all think that a few hundred units of inventory (at the SLOWEST time of the year for rentals and moving households) of this kind of housing unit is enough then great. But I bet people wanting that kind of housing would like a bit more inventory to choose from.
So how many people do we think, given their choice to sell their old starter home or keep it as a rental would choose to keep it as a rental when they learn of all the laws and regulations around that, versus what the calculus would have looked like say 10 years ago? How many of those “accidental” landlords who turned out to enjoy and be good at it and who would have then traded up their old house for a triplex or 4-plex never got that oppurtunity?
Its not just existing housing providers leaving. We are also cutting off the supply of new landlords in this regulatory environment.
You write that the UW “study” you held up in you PubliCola piece “shows that Seattle’s First in Time and Fair Chance Housing laws did not drive ‘mom and pop’ landlords out of the market, despite many landlords’ claims that they had sold or were planning to sell due to those laws.” It didn’t show that. As I argue in my PostAlley piece, [https://www.postalley.org/2024/01/03/have-recent-tenant-protection-laws-reduced-our-number-of-rental-units/] the correct measure is not the number of owners in the market, but the number of units, and the statistics show a decline on the order of 20% among the smaller properties. It’s true that the statistics aren’t definitive, and that some of the effect may be failure to report, but “some” doesn’t mean all or nearly all.
It also doesn’t deal with the fact that a LOT of smaller landlords are throwing their hands in the air and contracting with large management companies to deal with their rental properties – and those firms raise the rent a lot more often and by larger amounts than the owner/operators did.
Choose to not register your rental property at your own peril. The law in Seattle says if your rental is not registered, you cannot evict a tenant. Proof of current registration is probably the first question the Court will request in an eviction hearing. If your answer is “no”, the unlawful detainer action will be tossed. A savvy tenant seeking to avoid rent can easily verify if your property is registered. You might seek confirming advice from your attorney.
A savvy tenant pays their rent on time, in full. Otherwise your credit score gets jacked up and you’ll never rent again, or buy a home. Losers who get evicted don’t care about shit like this, but the winners in this world… well they do. If you get evicted in Seattle… you’re going to homeless for long time. You don’t think any perspective employer isn’t pulling a credit report? You think losers with evictions are going to land a good job? Bottom line. Only rent to winners.
Your credit report says everything about you in America. (full disclosure.. I’m not a fan of this, but it is 100% true)
Let me explain how upper class White privilege works. Fuck registering a nice rental unit. Fuck all the stupid Seattle renter protection laws. I just have a nice place to rent and though my upper class friends network, I find the ideal tenant. But I’ll need an excellent credit score, 3 year’s tax returns, employment info and their parents contact info in case they don’t pay the rent. My ass is completely covered here.
If there isn’t any victim, did I even break the law? And what if I did? Who’s going to stop me? The City of Seattle? Really? The same City that can stop people from pooping in City parks? Or driving/living in an RV without insurance or legal plates? Oh I’m sure Katie Wilson would love a job with the “Seattle Apartment Police” but that’s not going to happen.
From the article above…
One might hope that the audit would shed light on this question. Unfortunately, there’s a lot we still don’t know. According to Deputy City Auditor Miroslava Meza: “Our report didn’t definitively quantify the decrease in registered rental properties due to re-registration failures because we faced challenges identifying and quantifying the rental units that are still operational under the same owner, mainly because of various data availability problems.”
Remember everybody. Laws are only for poor people. Since when did “Landed Gentry” need to fallow rules not made by them?
Wait! I’m supposed to re-register? Ugh, why don’t they send out a notice?
Because they don’t have their shit together to manage this huge new program, and likely never will?