Category: Renters

homelessness, housing, Renters

With Affordable Housing at a Crossroads, Many Low-Income Tenants Find Themselves at Risk of Eviction
Renters in permanent supportive housing, like Plymouth Housing’s Almquist Place, report receiving eviction notices for relatively small amounts of unpaid rent.

If we can’t keep people in subsidized housing, what are we even doing? 

By Katie Wilson

Angelique is racing against the clock to stop her eviction from Plymouth Housing’s Almquist Place. She owes $2,014 in back rent and she has until October 18th. “I just worry about being homeless,” she said.

Angelique knows what that’s like. She was homeless for about five years before moving into the permanent supportive housing building when it opened in 2020. Like many of her neighbors, she struggles on and off with her mental health and with substance use. But early this year, she felt she was finally getting things together. In January, pandemic rental assistance helped to cover $3,285 in rental debt, and Angelique applied for a Housing Choice Voucher through the federal Section 8 program. She was quickly approved and looking forward to finding a new place; she just needed to pay back a few more months of rent.

In April, Angelique signed a payment plan and handed over $265 from her monthly Social Security Disability Insurance payment of $942 — her $245 monthly rent, which amounts to 30 percent of her income, plus $20 toward the remaining debt. But then something unexpected happened. In May, June, and July, when she tried to make her payments at the beginning of each month, Plymouth turned her away. And in late June, she received a 30-day notice to pay or vacate. 

With the help of her case managers, Angelique finally got a meeting with the building’s property management staff. Soon after, on August 2, she found a letter from Plymouth taped to her door, acknowledging their error. She had mistakenly been placed on a do-not-accept list, a step Plymouth told PubliCola it takes only “when it’s determined that eviction is imminent, after a resident has failed to pay rent for 3 months and failed to take resolution measures by engaging in a payment plan or another such program.”

Plymouth withdrew the eviction notice and reinstated the payment plan, but the stress of the ordeal had upset Angelique’s precarious balance.

“I took my puppy and left,” she said. She was hard to find for a while and didn’t pay her rent; she said some of her money got stolen. In September, another pay-or-vacate notice appeared on her door. Now Angelique is seeking rental assistance to help her avoid eviction, but what felt like a manageable amount of debt in April has multiplied.

“I just feel like it set me back,” said Angelique. “I was really excited to get the choice voucher, but I haven’t been able to move. If I owe back rent, I can’t just up and leave into another apartment. It’s been hard; it’s been up and down. [Plymouth] didn’t take into account that it was their fault, those months not accepting my rent. They just took no ownership of that.”

Renters at Risk

Angelique is one of many tenants who are facing the prospect of eviction from subsidized housing, mainly for unpaid rent. (Tenants in many types of subsidized housing pay no more than 30 percent of their income in rent, while others may pay more.) It’s a crisis that The Seattle Times sounded the alarm about back in April, and it hasn’t let up. Many of these tenants, like Angelique, are formerly homeless. If they lose their housing, it’s overwhelmingly likely that they will have nowhere else to go.  

Cycling back into homelessness from subsidized housing isn’t just heartbreaking, it’s also an expensive outcome for the City. Helping someone out of homelessness—especially chronic homelessness complicated by mental illness and addiction—usually costs a lot more than preventing them from losing their housing in the first place. Yet plenty of people are now being evicted for relatively small debts. 

“We’ve been seeing tenants evicted from subsidized housing for as little as $25 in unpaid rent,” said Edmund Witter, Senior Managing Attorney at the Housing Justice Project, which provides legal aid to tenants facing eviction.

Given all this, you’d hope that elected leaders would be springing into action to keep at-risk tenants housed. Instead, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed budget would cut city funding for rental assistance and tenant services— including tenant education, counseling, and eviction legal defense—in half, at a time when evictions are hitting record levels. 

But that’s not all. Throughout this year, there have been murmurings that some council members hope to weaken or repeal some of Seattle’s renter protection laws, making it easier to evict tenants and harder for them to find new housing.  

Specific laws that may be under threat include the winter and school year eviction protections; the first-in-time law, which aims to prevent discrimination by requiring landlords to rent to the first qualified applicant; the roommate law, which makes it easier for tenants to add family and non-family roommates to their household; and the $10 monthly cap on late fees that the previous council passed just last year. 

There’s an even more troubling wrinkle. Some affordable housing providers are—loudly or quietly, intentionally or inadvertently—providing political cover for this pro-eviction agenda. Some are explicitly calling to weaken tenant protections, while others are broadcasting the challenges they’re facing in terms that cast low-income tenants as the problem and eviction as the solution.

Affordable Housing at a Crossroads

It’s true that affordable housing providers are facing monumental challenges right now. Some are due to the actions of their tenants, while others reflect the larger fiscal environment.PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
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“In even the best times, subsidized affordable housing ran on thin margins and depended on high rent collections,” said Rep. Emily Alvarado (D-34, Seattle), who previously led Seattle’s Office of Housing. “But in the last few years, operating costs have risen, insurance premiums are spiking, and one-time federal funds for emergency relief dried up.” 

These are not minor problems. Skyrocketing insurance rates alone pose an almost existential threat to the affordable housing sector. High inflation and interest rates are driving up the cost of new construction. On top of all this comes the loss of revenue due to rent nonpayment. In the aforementioned Seattle Times piece, for example, the Seattle Housing Authority reported that 23 percent of its tenants were behind on rent.

At the same time, some tenants’ struggles with mental illness and drug addiction are spilling into behavioral problems that many affordable housing providers aren’t prepared to address. In this, the pandemic accelerated trends long underway. 

Derrick Belgarde, executive director of the Chief Seattle Club, said that when he began working in the housing field, “the average tenant base was much higher-functioning than today”—mainly families and individuals on extremely tight budgets. Now “affordable housing is serving people who are more suited for permanent supportive housing”—housing with some on-site services such as case management and health care—”and permanent supportive housing is serving individuals with much higher needs than they are equipped to handle.”

These are sticky, multidimensional problems. The affordable housing providers can’t easily do anything about their root causes or magic more money or services into existence. What they can most immediately control is tenancies: getting rid of tenants who aren’t paying rent or whose behavior is causing damage or impacting the health and safety of other tenants or staff. 

Hence the rush to evict tenants like Angelique. But even after issuing eviction notices, landlords have encountered another challenge: A massive court backlog caused by the surge in eviction filings, constitutional restrictions on the number of court commissioners who can hear cases, and a new state law giving low-income tenants a right to legal counsel. For the past year or so, eviction cases have been moving very slowly. 

In the last few months, the King County Superior Court responded to landlord pressure by making several changes to speed things up. It adopted an emergency rule prioritizing some behavior-related eviction cases, expanded the calendar for eviction hearings, and allowed judges (in addition to commissioners) to conduct parts of the process. It will still take some time for the backlog to totally clear but, for better or worse, evictions are now starting to move much faster.

But in the meantime, some affordable housing providers’ frustration boiled over into public complaints about their tenants and support for rolling back renters’ rights.

Blaming Tenants is Counterproductive

The long timeline for evicting troublesome tenants was one focus of a July 10 meeting of the Seattle City Council’s Housing and Human Services Committee, and an opinion piece by Seattle Times columnist Alex Fryer that appeared the same day. Both the article and one of the presenters at the meeting, a small landlord, took general swipes at Seattle’s renter protection laws, but didn’t explain how rolling back any specific laws would fix the problems being discussed. 

The only specific public argument about how weakening Seattle’s renter protections would help affordable housing providers, specifically, came from Sharon Lee, executive director of the Low Income Housing Institute, who told The Seattle Times in April that she wants the council to amend the winter and school-year eviction protections to exclude tenants who have some income but aren’t paying rent, so they can be evicted more promptly.

There are several problems with this idea. Lee pitched her idea when the court backlog—clearly the main factor slowing down evictions—was at its height, so it’s hard to see how watering down these laws would have had more than a marginal effect. They don’t actually prevent a landlord from getting an eviction judgment; they just delay the actual eviction until spring or the end of the school year for eligible tenants.

Moving forward, a change like this could impact tenants, like Angelique, who are living on a fixed income below the poverty line. It’s unclear how being able to evict such tenants into homelessness in the middle of winter would serve a public purpose, even if they are behind on rent. Furthermore, affordable housing providers generally certify their tenants’ income annually, so they don’t always know if a tenant has lost a job or other form of income. 

“Low-income renter families are struggling with increased costs of living, especially in an expensive region like Seattle,” said Alvarado. “We can expect that families are making tough choices right now on whether to pay rent, groceries, other essentials for their family or activities for kids.”

There’s no doubt that low-income renters are struggling. A new study from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies shows how the rising costs of food, energy, and housing are forcing families to choose between paying the bills and putting food on the table. Household debt is hitting records and credit card delinquency rates are above their 2019 levels and climbing.

Defining who can afford to pay is a minefield, and weakening or repealing the city’s tenant protections will leave renters in market rate-housing more vulnerable, too. Higher late fees will put tenants who already can’t pay deeper in debt. Making it harder to add a family member to a household will lock people out of housing and interfere with their private lives. Allowing landlords to pass over a qualified applicant will make it easier for them to discriminate against protected groups.

Do we really want to make it easier to evict families with kids in the middle of the school year? Is that what affordable housing nonprofits want our elected leaders spending their time on?

Of course many landlords want these laws walked back. But affordable housing providers should be careful of contributing to the anti-renter sentiment that makes weakening these protections seem reasonable. Blaming tenants is dangerous and self-defeating. It amplifies narratives the right wing and the landlord lobby have been pushing for years and risks fueling a wholesale backlash against renters’ rights. It could make it harder to site new subsidized housing (who wants to live next to freeloaders who aren’t invested in the community?) and to win public support for funding it. 

Instead, advocates and policy makers should focus on actually addressing the problems affordable housing providers are facing, while preventing evictions wherever possible. Once more for those in the back: It is far more challenging and expensive to help people out of homelessness and into permanent housing than it is to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. And homelessness in the Seattle area is now at a record high, up 23 percent this year from the last official count in 2022.

Real Solutions

What are the real solutions? The simplest is funding, and a lot of it. The affordable housing providers need more operating funds to survive in our post-pandemic reality of inflation-driven cost increases and high insurance premiums. And some of this needs to come in the form of more rental assistance for tenants in arrears.

Angelique said that many of her neighbors at Almquist Place are also behind on rent; her friend was evicted just a week before we spoke. Like her, many stopped paying for a period of time during the pandemic, when evictions were on pause. 

Angelique said she paid her rent more or less regularly for the first couple years after she moved in. “Then I went through just a lot of stuff for a while,” she said. “I just wasn’t mentally stable enough to pay my rent.”

Of course, the eviction moratoriums made it easy for this to become a habit, and affordable housing providers like Plymouth face a real challenge in nudging their residents back toward prioritizing rent over other expenses. But from Angelique’s point of view, they could be doing a better job.

“It’s sad to see, it seems like every week someone’s getting an eviction notice,” she said. “Some of them it seems like aren’t mentally capable of calling for help. I personally don’t feel like the case workers are willing to help when you’re at this point. They just throw their hands up and it’s like, oh well. I just feel like they should be more supportive.”

Plymouth Housing disputed this characterization. “Having a shared set of expectations for residents—including the payment of rent—allows Plymouth to maintain an equitable and safe building community,” said Kimberly Arrington-White, Plymouth’s VP of Permanent Supportive Housing. “Residents with no income are never expected to pay rent; for residents with established incomes who choose not to pay their rent, we exhaust every effort into working directly with the person to maintain their housing.”

How about tenants whose behavior is causing damage or putting other tenants’ health and safety at risk? While evictions may sometimes be unavoidable, Belgarde, from the Chief Seattle Club, said that ultimately this points to major gaps in the supportive housing system.

“[At Chief Seattle Club] we’re supposed to meet the highest needs of street homelessness, with culturally appropriate care and case management. What does that say when you have someone who can’t make it in one of our units? That means there’s literally nothing there in the system for them,” said Belgarde. He proposes a kind of “super” permanent supportive housing with more services for high-needs residents, such as on-site substance use treatment and clinical psychiatric nurses to respond to emergencies and help prevent crises before they unfold.

Addressing the dire inadequacy of mental healthcare and addiction treatment in Washington state, on top of the scarcity of affordable housing, is a tall order. It will require not only a lot more funding, but also coordination between governments, affordable housing providers, tenant advocates, public health systems, and the criminal legal system. None of this is easy. But if we don’t figure it out, thousands of people will continue to bounce between homelessness and unstable housing.

Unfortunately, rolling back renter protections and defunding tenant services and legal aid may seem, to some lawmakers, easier and more attractive than the real solutions.

Belgarde shares this concern. “There does need to be some empowerment to make decisions when you do need to evict,” he said. “But we are worried with all this rhetoric they’re going to make it crazy, and providers may start evicting people who shouldn’t be evicted.”

The whole point of subsidized housing is to serve people who can’t reliably find and maintain housing in the private rental market. If people are ejected from this housing in large numbers, with fresh evictions on their records, where do we expect them to go? There will be more tents in the parks and more people cycling between streets, shelters, hospitals, courts and jails. Instead of widening the eviction pipeline, let’s focus on keeping people housed.

Angelique still hopes to be able to avoid eviction and use her housing choice voucher to move into a new home. I asked her what she envisions when she feels hopeful about her future. “Some normality,” she said. “Just a new beginning.”

City Council, Police, Renters

Council May Wait Until Next Year to Roll Back Renter Protections; Community Police Commission Dismissed Consultant Who Advised Them to Fix Harms They Caused

1. City Councilmember Cathy Moore reportedly plans to wait until after this year’s fall budget season—which, practically speaking, means until next year—to introduce legislation to roll back renter protections adopted by the previous city council. So far, we’ve heard Moore plans to introduce legislation that would roll back:

• A law requiring landlords to accept the first applicant who qualifies (under criteria set by the landlord, which can include standards like a minimum credit score). Landlords opposed this legislation, sponsored by former councilmember Lisa Herbold, because it prevents them from using vibes-based criteria such as “questionable character traits” and “who will best fit into the building’s community,” which can be a de facto form of discrimination.

• A law barring larger landlords from evicting their tenants between December 1 and March 1, which passed the council on a unanimous vote (with Debora Juarez and Lorena González absent) in February 2020. Landlords said this took away their right to evict nonpaying tenants who say “It’s winter. You can’t evict me.”

• A law requiring landlords to allow immediate family members (or one roommate, who can be kicked out if they don’t pass a screening test) to live with a tenant, within existing occupancy limits. Landlords have claimed this law results in overcrowding and takes away their right to screen family members, such as a spouse or parent, and reject their tenancy.

Moore is reportedly also considering legislation thatwould allow landlords to recover fees from groups like the Housing Justice Project, which provides representation for tenants facing eviction, for “frivolous” defenses against eviction

Asked about forthcoming renter-related legislation, Moore’s office responded, “Discussions around this topic are evolving and when we have something more definitive to share we will do so.”

 

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2. PubliCola reported last week on problems at the city’s Community Police Commission, a staffed, independent city commission that is supposed to engage with Seattle residents from diverse communities and develop policy recommendations based on that engagement. Our story described a sparsely attended meeting in April about the then-upcoming police union contract; the meeting devolved into shouting and a debate about what kind of behavior is appropriate for the public and the commission.

A consultant hired to facilitate future public meetings, AV Consulting, issued a report after the meeting that made recommendations about how the CPC could improve its relationship with the community, which PubliCola obtained through a records request this week.

In the memo, AV Consulting identified a number of issues that came up during the meeting—including a need for more transparency, a lack of immigrant and refugee representation on the commission, the need to let community engagement staffers lead engagement work, and the importance of acknowledging and responding to community members’ concerns.

This last recommendation reflected an uncomfortable confrontation during the meeting, when Donnita Martin, whose son was killed during the 2020 protests after paramedics refused to go into the CHOP zone on Capitol Hill, asked the CPC what they were doing to help families like hers. Instead of responding to her question, CPC co-chair Joel Merkel thanked her for her testimony while Executive Director Cali Ellis sat silently and smiled.

AV Consulting recommended letting community members speak first at meetings, providing more transparency into the commission’s actions and budget, and being more respectful of people who have lost loved ones to violence, including police violence. “Demonstrate EMPATHY for lost loved ones FIRST in any reply. Acknowledge, validate, and respond,” they wrote.

The consultant also recommended a process of identifying past harms the CPC has caused to communities and addressing them to “rebuild trust with the community.”

Ellis responded to the report by informing AV Consulting, in an email PubliCola also obtained through a records request, that their services would no longer be needed. “At this time, we have decided not to move forward with further facilitation work,” she wrote. Ellis, who has been permanent director since last November, is currently on administrative leave, and the CPC is searching for another executive director.

housing, legislature, Renters

Your Local Car Dealer Can’t Deceive You, But Your Landlord Can
Photo via Artspace.

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.

housing, legislature, Renters

Begrudgingly, Landlords Are Finally Paying Relocation Assistance

By Katie Wilson

Last March, I wrote about how Seattle’s Economic Displacement Relocation Assistance (EDRA) program was faring after its first eight months of operation. A year later, the program is benefiting tenants—and revealing the lengths to which some landlords will go to avoid paying tenant relocation costs.

EDRA requires a landlord who notifies a tenant of a rent increase of 10 percent or more to pay relocation assistance, if the tenant makes less than 80 percent of the area median income and moves out. The amount of the assistance is three times the monthly rent, and it’s the city that cuts a check; the landlord is supposed to reimburse the city.

House Bill 2114, which would limit rent and fee increases to 7 percent a year statewide, passed the state house earlier this month, although it faces an uphill battle in the senate.

Landlords aren’t exactly leaping at the chance to do right by their tenants, appealing their tenants’ eligibility in 46 of 112 cases.

In 2023, 290 households applied for relocation assistance. As of the end of January, the city had found 67 eligible and provided assistance totaling $295,930, or an average of about $4,400 per household. Of this, the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections has received $245,445 from landlords so far. That’s 83 percent—not too shabby, considering that when I inquired last February, less than half the money billed to landlords had been recouped.

But landlords aren’t exactly leaping at the chance to do right by their tenants. From the start of the program in July 2022 through the end of last year, 112 households were found eligible for relocation assistance. In 46 of these cases, the landlord appealed the decision. That’s an appeal rate of 41 percent. Seven appeals were successful, meaning that the hearing examiner upheld the department’s decision 85 percent of the time.

Common reasons for appeal included disputes over who counts part of the tenant household for the purpose of calculating income; whether parking, utilities, and other monthly fees count toward a rent increase; and what happens when multiple lease terms are offered at different rates, some clocking in over 10 percent and some below.

Some landlords tried shenanigans to avoid paying. Coppins Well Apartments, managed by the nation’s largest property management company, Greystar, notified a tenant of a rent increase of over 30 percent. The tenant gave her notice to vacate, listing the rent increase as the reason. Four months later, the landlord sent along a new offer: A 9.9 percent increase. The tenant declined, having already signed a lease elsewhere, but the landlord argued, unsuccessfully, that he shouldn’t be on the hook for relocation assistance because he had (eventually) offered a rent increase of less than 10 percent. Nice try!

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Or take Embassy Apartments, managed by Northwest Commercial Real Estate Investments, LLC. When a tenant qualified for relocation assistance, the landlord appealed on the grounds that “Ordinance 126451 is rent control pure and simple” and therefore in violation of state law. Funnily enough, that didn’t work either.

What about the other 223 households that applied for relocation assistance in 2023? Fifty were found ineligible because their income was too high, the rent increase was less than 10 percent, or their application was incomplete, insufficient, or late. (Five of these rejected tenants also filed appeals, but the hearing examiner only reversed the department’s decision in one case.) SDCI closed 34 applications because the tenants did not submit information or follow up, or because the applications were duplicates. In another 23 cases, the applicant withdrew their request for assistance because they reached an agreement with the owner, reapplied later, or no longer wanted to pursue relocation funds.

The remaining 116 applications were still in process as of late January. These included recently submitted applications, incomplete applications waiting for tenants to submit additional information or documentation, and those already accepted as complete but awaiting review. Jettisoning the income requirement, as I recommended in my write-up last year, would lessen the administrative burden of this program.

We have no way of knowing how the number of tenants who have applied or actually received relocation assistance compares to the number who may be eligible under the program, because the xity does not collect data on rents. In 2022, the city council voted down legislation that would have required landlords to periodically report rent data to a research university, such as the University of Washington.

Regardless of how many tenants actually receive assistance, a major benefit of all these laws is the incentive they create for landlords to keep rent increases under the threshold.

The median rent in Seattle has fallen since EDRA went into effect in July 2022, so double-digit rent increases have probably become less common. Still, given the relatively small number of applications (290 in a renter population approaching 200,000 households) it’s reasonable to assume that many more tenants were eligible for the program last year than actually applied or knew of its existence. Landlords are supposed to inform tenants of the program when notifying them of a rent increase that could qualify them for the program, but this isn’t always happening. In the (admittedly small) survey the Transit Riders Union conducted a year ago, only three of 13 tenants receiving a rent increase of 10 percent or more reported receiving an EDRA notice from their landlord.

Seattle is no longer the only city in Washington state with a law like this. Last November, voters in Tacoma and Bellingham approved renters’ rights measures that included landlord-paid relocation assistance for large rent hikes. Both of these measures were citizens’ initiatives run by grassroots coalitions in which local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America played a large role.

The Tacoma law requires relocation assistance equal to two months’ rent for rent increases of 5 percent or more; two and a half months’ rent for increases over 7.5 percent; and three months’ rent for increases over 10 percent. 

The Bellingham law requires relocation assistance equal to three months’ rent or three times the current fair market rent for Bellingham, whichever is larger, when a landlord raises the rent by 8 percent or more.

Neither of these laws exclude tenants based on income, and neither creates a city-mediated program in the way that Seattle’s law does. Instead, the landlord is supposed to give the relocation assistance directly to the tenant, and report the transaction to the city. Seattle’s high landlord appeal rate suggests that voluntary compliance may be low. It will be interesting to see how these laws work out in practice.

Regardless of how many tenants actually receive assistance, a major benefit of all these laws is the incentive they create for landlords to keep rent increases under the threshold. Another finding of TRU’s survey last year was that a surprising number of rent increases hovered just under 10 percent, suggesting that the EDRA law is actually changing landlord behavior.

Of course, if HB 2114 makes it out of the Senate in its current form and becomes law, rent increases greater than 7 percent will largely become a thing of the past all across Washington state—happily rendering Seattle’s EDRA law obsolete.

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homelessness, housing, Renters

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.

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.

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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

City Council, Crime, Density, Drugs, homelessness, housing, Mayor Harrell, Renters, State of Washington, zoning

Nine PubliCola Predictions for 2024

PubliCola columnist Josh Feit and PubliCola’s hoary original publisher (and Seattle Nice contrarian) Sandeep Kaushik are joining Erica here to kick off the year with some soothsaying.  Specifically tailored for PubliCola’s policy obsessed readership, these aren’t prognostications about 2024’s headlining concerns (like the threat of Trump II), but rather, as you’ve come to expect from the most in-depth local news site in Seattle, this is deep political wayfinding for the year in local politics ahead —The Editors

Sandeep Kaushik:

1. The Real Change, House Our Neighbors crowd announced just before Christmas they will put a measure on the Seattle ballot in 2024 to establish a permanent funding source for I-135, the social housing measure they passed in February. I will take the bait and predict that funding measure will fail.

I say this because I have yet to see any evidence House Our Neighbors has an actual, serious, and detailed proposal (you know, one that includes actual, vetted numbers) to build such mixed-income public housing in a way that is going to be operationally viable and fiscally self-sustaining (which was part of the original promise)—much less one that’s better than the well-established existing model for building affordable housing.

It’s one thing to ask voters to support a gauzily intersectional dream of a new, supposedly self-sustaining form of socialistic self-governing housing when there’s no price tag attached (57 percent of Seattle voters supported I-135), quite another when they’re asking for an endless stream of money before any proof of concept. It also doesn’t help that in developing I-135, its backers spent infinitely more time and thought on calibrating the mix of marginalized identities that are represented on the governing board than on an actual plan showing how this sort of housing would pencil.

Maybe House Our Neighbors will prove me wrong, and come forward in January with a viable proposal rather than just a leap-of-faith money ask. It’s quite possible that famously generous, progressively-inclined Seattle voters will pass the funding even if they don’t. And if that happens, maybe they’ll actually deliver on their dreams and promises. If so, fantastic! I would love to be proven wrong, and would be thrilled to see a new, viable, fiscally defensible model of public housing take root in Seattle. But I’m not holding my breath, and I going to predict that if they don’t have a real plan, Seattle voters won’t hand them a blank check.

2. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) will die a whimpering death in 2024. It pains me to make this prediction. In theory, a regional approach to homelessness policy makes enormous sense. In practice, though, the promise of regionalizing our homelessness response has—at least so far–face planted.

When KCRHA’s CEO, the charismatic and energetic Mark Dones, came on board in April 2021, and when KCRHA’s signature Partnership for Zero initiative to end visible homeless downtown was announced in February 2022, I was one of the cheerleaders for this promising new model.

But it was all downhill from there.

It soon became apparent that KCRHA had deep problems that seriously curtailed its effectiveness. To begin with, suburban buy-in to the idea of handing off and consolidating homelessness efforts in the KCRHA was nominal at best. Moreover, KCRHA had no independent funding source, and instead relied on pass-through funding from the city and King County, and that funding model quickly became fraught when some of the policies Dones advocated (no sweeps, opposition to tiny homes) ran counter to what some of their funders wanted.

The region’s key agency for dealing with its most serious problem will remain largely rudderless for more than a year, as staff and talent continue to decamp for greener pastures.

The governing structure of KCRHA, with multiple boards and committees, turned out to be an unwieldy mess, and the powers that be made things much worse by ingraining some of the most chuckleheaded aspects of cultural progressivism—for example, the fixation on centering “lived experience” as opposed to, say, prioritizing actual experience running large organizations implementing complex policies—into that governance, leading to several high profile, avoidable scandals. Internal, back office operations were chaotic, and staff turnover high, leading to further credibility-sapping problems.

It all came to a head when Dones announced their resignation in May, and then when KCRHA admitted failure and threw in the towel on Partnership for Zero in September. A huge amount now rests on the search for a new CEO for the organization, and word on the street is there isn’t likely to be a hire for that critical position until the second half of 2024, if it even turns out that anyone with the requisite experience and skill sets wants the job. That means the region’s key agency for dealing with its most serious problem will remain largely rudderless for more than a year, as staff and talent continue to decamp for greener pastures.

Under that sort of slow death spiral circumstances, writing off KCRHA as a misfire—perhaps triggered by the CEO search producing underwhelming candidates—might be best option. Of course, pulling the plug would be a spectacular embarrassment, so maybe the powers that be will allow to KCRHA to limp along in some sort of awful twilight state for at least another year. But I’m going to go out on a limb and bet the end is in sight.

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3. The 2024 governor’s race will be the closest since Jay Inslee won his first term in 2012 by narrowly besting Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna, 51-48. First, Washington State voters are in a pretty sour mood, and Inslee, now exiting after his third term, has middling-to-underwhelming approval ratings. There was even a recent poll showing (relatively) moderate Republican Dave Reichert nipping presumed Democratic frontrunner Bob Ferguson in a head-to-head matchup.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s likely Reichert will actually win, given that he’s strongly anti-choice, but if he gets through the August primary —not at all a sure thing, since he faces a semi-serious challenger on the MAGA right in Semi Bird, and moderate Democrat Mark Mullet is also making a play to consolidate a cross-party middle coalition to leapfrog Reichert in the primary—he could (at least conceivably) make a race of it, particularly if Ferguson veers too far left. Anyway, if it is Reichert in the general, this is a race Democrats can’t take for granted the way they have the last couple of gubernatorial races, even if (as is also likely) Trump is the Republican presidential nominee this November.

Josh Feit:

1. Last year at this time, I predicted that after booting single-family-zone preservationist Rep. Gerry Pollet (D-46, North Seattle) from his powerful position as chair of the local government committee earlier that month, the new wave of young Democrats in the state legislature would finally be able to pass some Yes-in-My-Backyard legislation.

Here’s me on December 22, 2022 writing about Rep. Jessica Bateman’s (D-22, Olympia) plan to authorize fourplexes in residential areas anywhere detached single-family homes were allowed: “With much better odds of passing their bills intact out of [new chair] Rep. Strom Peterson’s (D-21, Everett) committee than under Pollet’s provincialism, pro-housing legislators could bring some necessary state governance to Seattle’s failed local policies.”

Bam, they passed it. I was actually a little surprised. Bateman’s legislation made it legal in places like density-phobic Seattle to build four units per lot in residential zones, six units per lot within a quarter-mile walking distance of a major transit stop; and six units per lot in residential zones if at least two units are affordable housing.

Unfortunately, that’s way too progressive for Seattle. So, here’s my prediction for 2024 as the city updates the document that governs local zoning policy, its Comprehensive Plan: The newly elected slow-growth city council (I’m thinking of Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, and Rob Saka joining incumbent anti-growther Sara Nelson, along with Mayor Harrell himself) will use the Comp Plan update as an opportunity for undermining urbanism. First, they will come up with rules to minimize lot coverage, require setbacks, and establish height limits, along with levying hefty affordable housing fees that will keep housing developers from building any apartments in Seattle’s touchy neighborhood residential zones.

There’s also a provision that anxious city lobbyists statewide forced into Bateman’s bill that allowed local governments to limit the upzones to 75 percent of single-family areas.  I can see Seattle’s anti-housing faction using that “neighborhood character” card to stall density in hand-picked neighborhoods as well.

2. Speaking of pro-housing bills going awry: Watch for an attempt by state legislators to re-do last year’s stalled Transit-Oriented Development bill—legislation that would upzone land around light rail stations and bus lines—to disappoint pro-housing urbanists this year.

With the original senate TOD champion, Sen. Marko Liias (D-21, Everett), deciding not to sponsor the bill this year—I’m guessing he was frustrated by the overemphasis on inclusionary zoning (mandatory affordable housing quotas) that House Democrats tried to work into the bill last year—anti-developer lefties like Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) are now in control of the legislation. Count on minimal upzones near transit (say five stories as opposed to eight) and steep affordability requirements that will chill development.

TL;DR: The very thing the lefties say they want, lots of housing, won’t get built.

3. I’m going to be vague about this one, but here’s what I will say: Even though Mayor Bruce Harrell got the conservative council he wanted, look for new D-3 council member Joy Hollingsworth—who appears to share Harrell’s brand of homily populist politics (even more so than the others)—to begin clashing with him behind the scenes. By year’s end, her frustrations with Harrell will be evident at City Hall.

Erica C. Barnett: 

1. The pundit class (looking at you, Sandeep) may have convinced voters that a local law governing minor drug offenses, like using drugs in public, was the most critical issue in the 2023 election, when moderate candidates denounced lefties who opposed it. But 2024 will prove that the impact of the drug law will be minimal.

As we’ve reported, the city’s new law does not actually criminalize low-level drug offenses; the state legislature did that already, when it passed the so-called “Blake fix” earlier this year. Instead, it empowers City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people for using or possessing drugs in public; without the new law, only the King County Prosecutor’s Office could do so, and they have historically shown little interest in spending scarce county resources on these relatively minor offenses.

While Davison has reportedly been eager to prosecute drug users, the jail isn’t booking people on misdemeanor drug charges alone, making it hard for Seattle’s Republican city attorney to pursue this law-and-order approach to addiction. Meanwhile, as we predicted, putting drug offenders on the “diversion” track—which was supposed to appease progressives— has just meant that other people who would have received help through the city’s main diversion program, LEAD, are being displaced by people who get arrested first.

Seattle always rolls out supposedly transformative (but, in this case, totally unfunded) new initiatives with a big burst of energy, only to let them fizzle—remember “Operation New Day”?

It’s notable, too, that the city has done exactly one big, flashy event to show off its new authority to arrest people for using drugs in public, then send them immediately to LEAD, with no public follow-ups since October. The mainstream press dutifully reported on the event, noting that it resulted in ten people going to jail on outstanding felony warrants (my question: Given that SPD could have located, interrogated, and arrested this group for their serious offenses at any point, why didn’t they?) and 13 entering diversion.

The biggest reason you haven’t seen a spate of similar headlines about drug arrests leading to diversion since that initial push is that the city didn’t provide any additional funding for diversion; as we’ve reported, LEAD—which is no longer accepting community referrals, just referrals from arrests—will run out of money to accept new clients by May. A secondary reason is that Seattle always rolls out supposedly transformative (but, in this case, totally unfunded) new initiatives with a big burst of energy, only to let them fizzle—remember “Operation New Day”? We don’t either.

2. One area where the new council may throw its weight around is by reversing outgoing council members’ renter protection laws, including the $10 maximum late fee, 180-day notice for rent increases, bans on winter and school-year evictions, and the “first-in-time” law that requires landlords to rent to the first qualified applicant. As I reported this week, small landlords complained about the first-in-time law more than any other renter protection. The law, sponsored by outgoing Councilmember Lisa Herbold, was intended to help reduce the potential for landlords to discriminate against prospective tenants based on factors like race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Although most of the city’s renter protections passed before his term, Harrell opposed the $10 maximum late fee, allowing it to pass into law without his signature earlier this year.

3. We may be entering a newly cozy era of mayor-council relations (with Harrell’s picks triumphing in nearly every 2023 council race), but camaraderie alone won’t solve the structural problems facing the city: Fentanyl addiction, a city budget deficit of nearly $220 million, the city’s inability to hire police despite generous financial incentives and a homelessness crisis for which Seattle is on the hook, at least financially.

The candidates who won this year talked a lot about resetting the culture at City Hall, finding fat in the budget and cutting it, letting police know they’re valued and trusted, and using a carrot (diversion) and stick (arrest and jail) approach to the addiction crisis. But the problems these platitudes purport to address are structural, and don’t respond readily to legislation: Every dollar of “waste” in the budget has a constituency (want to cut back on permitting times? Good luck doing that and instituting a hiring freeze) and many of the issues councilmembers brought up during their campaigns are structural and even nationwide, like police hiring. It’s one thing to denounce people for supporting proposals to reduce police funding three years ago, and quite another to solve a nationwide lack of interest among young people in becoming cops.