By Katie Wilson
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.
There is an association between homelessness and drugs – but for many, causation runs the other way around. Imagine being a sober person who just can’t seem to keep a job well enough to afford an apartment, you were sleeping in your car which just got towed and you can’t afford the impound. the shelter won’t let you bring your belongings with you, or you can’t face standing in line for hours just for a chance at a mat on the floor. So you’re faced with sleeping on the street in a tent for the first time.
Living rough causes chronic illness and pain, and one might need to stay up all night to protect their belongings from thieves, or need something to help them get up the energy to walk to a new camp site after a night of cold, damp tossing and turning. You’re surrounded by drug addicts and dealers, not school recruiters, people offering jobs, social workers, counselors and doctors. It’s natural to want to participate in activities with the only people who will talk to you, when the rest of us cross the street to avoid you or look straight ahead as if you’re not there.
If you manage to pull together $20 from panhandling, which is more appealing – saving up for two more days to get a single night in a cheap motel where you’ll still be in pain and miserable? Or a bottle of liquor, bag of weed, foil of ‘blues’ (fentanyl masquerading as OxyContin) or crystal of meth?
Hi Pete,
One big lie “homeless advocates” have told over and over is…. “You’re only a couple of pay checks away from being homeless”. That’s just not true for most people. The average person has resources…. a saving account, friends and family, that act like a safety net in hard times.
Why can’t chronically homeless people activate their “safety net”? Surely these people have family who could help them, right? Or do their addictions and mental illness keep them on the streets? Sure rents are high…. but that doesn’t mean our homeless population…. at least the hardcore concrete campers who refuse shelter….. aren’t completely bat shit crazy.
I didn’t say we shouldn’t help these people…. but high housing prices aren’t why some nut job is digging up a public park “mining for diamonds”
What year do you think this is? We repeatedly see reports that a majority of the country can’t afford to cover even a $400 or $500 emergency. And many people don’t live anywhere near friends or family anymore.
@Katie Wilson: Thanks for the article. Let’s also talk about condominiums and HOAs for a moment. What recourse do *homeowners* have when community associations engage in unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices? The answer is to file a lawsuit costing upwards of six figures and years of time and a heavy toll. We’re working on legislative reform to change the status quo despite immense lobbying from but the ecosystem of businesses that profit from community associations (especially attorneys and management companies) represented by the Community Associations Institute (CAI).
I live here. The select residents who instigated this don’t represent us. We got new management last year and it’s been night and day from the bs we dealt with before. But they’re unhappy because they have to do their paperwork our housing requires every year. My friend lives in a different affordable apartment building and their apartment is not as nice (their words) and costs more. When I got the paperwork, I was grateful to sign. It wasn’t 3 days. These people had 6 months to choose their lease option any were irresponsible and didn’t so they got their lease last minute. And okay, leases are weird.. but.. come on.. I seriously can’t understand the lengths these people take. Our apartments are beautiful, large space and tall windows. As the article mentioned, people have been here a long time.. other people would LOVE to live here and pay $900. Also keep in mind that the complainers aren’t low income. When you first apply and your income meets the requirements, you can make more money the next year and still live here. They just have to put you at the higher rent but they can’t kick you out. I know for a fact that one of these complainers makes $90k because she loves telling people. I’m sorry , I have no idea why this writer gave them the attention and time for this. It’s makes us all feel weird and honestly makes me so sad real
Issues aren’t given this space like idk the ceasefire in Gaza? Most of us are happy and it makes me sad they are choosing to be unkind humans to the staff every day. Yes- the staff is here every day and are communicating. The manager who is literally cleaning human poop from our building entrance every day is not out to get you.
“Moving to a more affordable community that generally has fewer jobs, and most likely no social ties to help in such a situation, is not an option for many. You can give up, shrug you shoulders and move on, but that’s a relatively privileged option.”
No, it’s reality. Saying, “I deserve to live here regardless of whether or not I can afford it” is the privileged option.
Thank you for bringing issues like these to light. Another notorious landlord that participates in similar anti-consumer behavior is Thrive Communities Management LLC. Their leases also include language that allows them to use tenant photos however they would like. They also continually show that they believe they are above the law and do not always need to follow the Landlord-Tenant Act, to the detriment of their tenants. With little recourse to hold them accountable, they continue to do as they wish. It was disappointing to see HB 2161 did not seem to gain much traction in the WA state legislature, as that could have provided an avenue to hold these landlords accountable.
“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.”
Oh, please. This is the council that was just asking the other day why they can’t toss homeless people into shelters whether they agree or not. More likely their solution would be give the landlord every means to raise the rent as high as they possibly can, causing some low income tenants to be forced to leave, and of those who can’t find an affordable place to fall into homelessness. Then it’s just a matter of sweeping them away to some shelter (or likely jail cell because there is nowhere near enough shelters to house them). It’s the new Seattle way: cops as the only social policy.
Seattle is an expensive place to live. I’m all for building more housing, but honestly doubt that brings prices down. There’s a lot of out-of-State money moving in every week and we have a free market housing system. I think people need to get comfortable with fact that if you’re a renter, you’re a profit source for whoever owns the property. You are building wealth for them, not yourself. It’s not a place I’d feel comfortable hanging out in for decades…. land owners have always been the “master class” in America. That’s never going to change either, because 2/3rds of the US population own their own home…
Let me ask you a question…. If you get to point where you can no longer afford Seattle rent, are you going to live in a tent and smoke fetty? My advice would to simply move to more affordable community and skip urban camping and addiction. Maybe we can stop chaining unrelated issues together? Yes, the rent in Seattle is way too high. That’s a problem. And yes, there’s way too many homeless people. But most of the “urban campers” seem to be drunk, crazy, high or “all of the above”. King County has like 2 million people? There’s got to be a small percentage of those people who are just too messed up to take care of themselves, right? There’s your homeless population. Until Seattle gets comfortable with catching people in a net and shipping them off to an insane asylum… the homeless problem is not going away. Neither will the human suffering of the vulnerable people in the City.
Moving to a more affordable community that generally has fewer jobs, and most likely no social ties to help in such a situation, is not an option for many. You can give up, shrug you shoulders and move on, but that’s a relatively privileged option. High housing costs will always cause homelessness, and with rising costs pretty much legislated from the city, something has to change. Homelessness will only get worse. And besides, it’s not only here, this is happening everywhere.
This is a problem that will be easier to change course in the short term over the long term. The high cost of living must be brought down, or after some time even you will have nowhere left to flee. If “moderates” like run our local show right now are left to have their way, soon we will have noting bu a few extremely wealthy people amid a sea of “surplus population” of which they will be as eager to liquidate from the streets as they are the homeless. You can allow such a thing to befall us if you want to, but I will not.
You said “I’m all for building more housing, but honestly doubt that brings prices down.” That is not correct as been shown in numerous academic studies and can be seen if you just look around. Minneapolis built lots of housing over the past few years and, unlike the rest of Minnesota, its rental prices have only gone up 1% in the past five years. Austin was the fastest growing city in the country last year but built lots and lots of housing and rents have *decreased* 11%. Here’s Aukland, New Zealand, that has reformed housing and saw rents drop. https://www.apricitas.io/p/new-zealands-building-boomand-what The evidence is clear. More housing decreases rents.
Regarding homelessness, it is not drugs. The data is quite clear that it is cities with that don’t build enough housing have the highest rates of homelessness. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about