By Katie Wilson

In September 2021, the Seattle City Council passed two laws, both sponsored by Councilmember Kshama Sawant, to help renters cope with rent hikes. One required landlords to give 180 days’ notice of rent increases. The other tackled “economic evictions,” requiring landlords to pay relocation assistance equal to three months’ rent to lower-income tenants who move after an increase of ten percent or more. In a state that bans local rent regulation, these laws were designed to mitigate the harm caused by rapidly rising rents.

Since then, other cities around King County have passed new landlord-tenant laws, including longer notice requirements for rent increases, and even some protections—like caps on late fees—that Seattle doesn’t have. But so far, no other city has required landlords to pay relocation assistance when they impose large rent hikes.

The organization I work for, the Transit Riders Union (TRU), along with allies in the Stay Housed Stay Healthy coalition, hopes to support passage of renter protections in several more King County cities this year—including Tukwila, where last year we ran a successful ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage. Renter Arc Di wants the Tukwila City Council to pass a relocation assistance law.

“With two months’ notice of price hikes, it’s incredibly difficult to pull together the money to move and pay moving and storage fees,” Di said. “With my current apartment, if I don’t have a place to go when the lease is up, my rent jumps up 75 percent month to month, from $2,050 to $3,500.” Moving expenses would quickly wipe out Di’s savings.

“These large landlords don’t care if you have somewhere to go and will happily take advantage of our precarious situation as renters,” Di said.

Seattle’s Economic Displacement Relocation Assistance (EDRA) program went into effect last July, so it’s been in effect for over eight months now. So how’s it going?

According to a high-level summary from the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections, which oversees the program, 83 tenants applied for relocation assistance between July 2022 and the end of last year, an average of about 14 a month. But the pace appears to be picking up. By February 21, there had already been 61 applicants in 2023, an average of 36 a month so far.

Of these 144 applications, SDCI has determined that 33 are eligible for relocation assistance; 28 were disqualified, generally because the increase was less than ten percent or the landlord gave notice before the ordinance was in effect. SDCI only disqualified one application because the household earned more than 80 percent of Seattle’s median income, the threshold for eligibility. The remaining applications are still in the pipeline—a time-consuming process that sometimes means tenants must move before they get relocation assistance.

When Seattle landlords give notice of a rent hike of 10 percent or more, they’re supposed to include a notice about the EDRA program, which explains that the tenant may qualify for financial assistance. To find out if landlords are actually doing this, TRU ran a survey asking tenants about recent rent increases. Of 105 respondents, 13 were Seattle tenants who received notice of a 10-percent-plus rent increase after June 30, 2022. Of these, only three reported getting an EDRA notice from their landlord.

The survey results suggest several other interesting conclusions. First, a disproportionate number of Seattle rent increases hover just under ten percent, suggesting that EDRA may be changing landlord behavior to impose lower rent increases than they otherwise would. As annoying (and costly) as these increases can be, it’s a heck of a lot better than a much larger rent hike. This shifting of incentives would be a positive side effect of the law.

Second, some landlords appear to be misinterpreting the law. The key number isn’t base rent, but “housing costs,” which includes other monthly charges such as pet rent, parking, and storage, and may include utilities, internet, and cable if these are paid to the landlord in a fixed monthly amount. One person reported receiving notice of a 9.8 percent rent hike and wrote that the landlord also steeply raised parking and other fees, effective immediately. That brought the total increase to well over 10 percent, but the respondent didn’t receive an EDRA notice.

Third, many landlords, both inside and outside Seattle, appear to be giving shorter notice of rent increases than required by law. (The immediate fee increase reported by the person who got a 9.8 percent rent hike was also illegal, since Seattle law requires 180 days’ notice for any increase in housing costs, including fees.) A surprising number of respondents reported receiving only a single month’s notice, when even Washington state law requires 60 days.

All of this suggests a need to better inform both renters and landlords about EDRA and notice requirements.

Seattle has encountered some additional challenges implementing the new relocation assistance law.

First, the process of determining income eligibility has proved time-consuming, requiring a lot of back-and-forth between city staff and tenants. “Applications are often missing required income information, which adds time to the process of filing a complete application before SDCI can determine eligibility,” SDCI spokesman Bryan Stevens said. So far, it’s taken an average of 37 days from the time a tenant files an application until SDCI determines it’s complete, which leads some tenants to leave and find new housing before SDCI deems them eligible for assistance.

Tenants face an additional timing bind, since Seattle’s law requires them to give their landlord notice that they plan to move in order to complete their EDRA application. That means they have to commit to leaving without knowing for sure whether or when they’re going to get relocation assistance.

After the city pays relocation assistance to a tenant, it tries to recover those funds from the landlord—and that’s been a challenge, too.

“By law, it’s necessary to communicate with the owner of the property, and it’s often very difficult to determine the real owner,” given that many property owners structure their businesses as quasi-anonymous LLCs or have outdated contact information, Stevens said. And many landlords are appealing the charges, which causes delays. As of February 21, the city had billed $126,738 to landlords, but recovered only $52,578.

These challenges suggest some straightforward ways to revise and improve the ERDA program. City staff should be able to communicate with someone other than the owner, like a manager. Tenants should be allowed to apply for the program before committing to moving out. And the income qualification should be jettisoned altogether—a great example of how the U.S. obsession with means testing creates costly bureaucracy and hurts the very people that programs like this are supposed to help.

It’s also not true that renter households above 80 percent of area median income are doing just fine. “My little family is quite privileged in terms of income, and even that’s not enough to be able to stay here,” one survey respondent wrote. “I’m exhausted of moving every two years (if I’m really lucky). I don’t know how much longer we will be able to live with reasonable access to public transit, which is essential to me as a disabled person.” The survey respondent’s income is too high to qualify for relocation assistance,  “so we have to wait and pay the new fees until we either get desperate enough to take on some (more) debt or the lease runs out,” they wrote.

This respondent wished they could leave before the end of their lease. That’s another idea to consider. House Bill 1124 would have (among other things) given tenants the right to terminate their lease without penalty with 45 days’ notice, if they received notice of a rent increase greater than 5 percent. Since that bill died, Seattle could take action to allow tenants facing significant rent increases to leave early.

Understanding the inner workings of this program does raise questions about the ability of smaller cities, like Tukwila, to implement something similar. Setting up a program that requires significant staff time is a lot harder in cities with populations in the tens rather than the hundreds of thousands.

There is another model out there for cities to consider. In 2018, Portland, Oregon passed a relocation assistance law that can be triggered by several events, including a rent increase of 10 percent or more over a 12-month period. The assistance is a fixed amount based on unit size—for example, $3,300 for a one-bedroom apartment—and all tenants are eligible, with no income-based restrictions. But the biggest difference in the program design is that the city doesn’t mediate the transaction; the landlord is supposed to pay the tenant directly, then report the payment to the city.

A community-labor coalition in Tacoma is taking a similar approach a just-launched citizen’s initiative campaign that’s aiming to win an ambitious “Landlord Fairness Code.” Among other pro-renter policies, it would require landlords to pay relocation assistance equal to two months’ rent for rent increases over 5 percent; two and a half months’ rent for increases over 7.5 percent; and three months’ rent for increases over 10 percent. As in Portland, the landlord is supposed to pay the tenant directly and report the payment to the city.

There is an obvious downside to this approach. If Seattle, with all the authority of the city government, is struggling to recover funds from landlords, how many will do the right thing by their tenants on their own?

You might think that four full years of Portland’s program would answer that question. But about a year after the law went into effect, Oregon enacted a statewide rent stabilization law that limited rent increases to seven percent plus the rate of inflation. Between 2019 and 2022, the maximum allowed rent increase ranged from 9.2 to 10.3 percent. As a result, according to the Portland Housing Bureau, only 33 tenants received payments as the result of rent hikes through the end of 2021, most of them in 2018. (For comparison, the total number of relocation payments reported for all reasons throughout the life of the program, as of March 7, was 1,478.)

But thanks to roaring inflation, the maximum rent increase for 2023 climbed to 14.6 percent, so starting sometime last year landlords once again began giving notice of rent increases that trigger the law. Landlords reported making 13 payments for raising rents more than 10 percent in the last five months of 2022 and one in January 2023. A few months of data isn’t much to go on, but, in a city with more than 130,000 renter households, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that these represent only a fraction of the payments Portland tenants are legally entitled to.

Nevertheless, an approach like Portland’s is probably more feasible for smaller cities, and they could take steps to improve compliance. An obvious one is to work harder to ensure that tenants and landlords are aware of the law. But it may be possible to give more power to tenants, too. For example, instead of relying on the landlord to write a check, what if tenants faced with large rent increases had the right to simply not pay rent in the final months of their tenancy, up to the amount of relocation assistance?

Adequate enforcement of renter protections is a problem that goes way beyond EDRA—even in Seattle, which unlike most King County cities has a large department overseeing its landlord-tenant laws. Often the only effective recourse a tenant has when a landlord breaks the law is to sue, and not many renters have the money and time for that. One solution was floated in last year’s legislative session: House Bill 2023 aimed to create a streamlined process for tenants to address violations and obtain relief in superior court, without having to lawyer up. Seattle, at least, could explore establishing a similar “summary proceedings” process in municipal court.

But cities should not let the challenges of enforcement deter them from passing good policies. If, extrapolating from the results of TRU’s survey, about 25 percent of Seattle landlords aren’t following the 180-day notice requirement, 75 percent are. As a Seattle renter who did get six months’ notice of a $130-a-month rent increase last year, I’m grateful for the law, and I know that many thousands of my fellow renters are benefitting too.

Katie Wilson is the general secretary of the Transit Riders Union and helps to coordinate the Stay Housed Stay Healthy Coalition, an alliance of over fifty organizations fighting for stronger renter protections in Seattle and King County.