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.

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.

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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