Long Wait Likely for New Homelessness Director; Landlords May Be Failing to Register Rental Units, Rather than Selling

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.

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