Tag: Renters

Affordability, City Council, Equity, housing

What That Day-Long Comp Plan Hearing Was About
A public commenter holds up an image of the kind of housing he warns will be everywhere if density proponents get their way.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Friday, hundreds of Seattle residents took time out of their days to comment on proposed updates to the city’s Comprehensive Plan—a document that sets the parameters for growth and development across the city.

Although the plan is supposed to go through a major update every 10 years, Mayor Bruce Harrell released his initial proposal a year behind schedule, and the City Council is currently plodding through the plan in several “phases,” starting with changes to the city’s historically single-family zones, now known as “neighborhood residential” areas.

Some of these changes are designed to implement House Bill 1110, a bill that requires cities to allow up to four housing units on every residential lot, or six if two of the units are affordable. The council, facing a deadline to comply with 111o or accept housing regulations written by the state, passed a short-term bill complying with the law earlier this year, but still has to pass permanent legislation to update zoning rules associated with the new law.

They’re also taking up Harrell’s plan to add 30 new “neighborhood centers”—areas within a 3-minute walk (about 800 feet) of commercial and frequent bus stops where 3-to-6-story apartments would be newly allowed.

Following a pattern that has defined Seattle’s housing debate for decades, last week’s hearing pitted opponents of new housing—who argued that apartments (and the renters who live in them) would destroy the “quaint” character of their neighborhoods and contribute to “clear-cutting” trees on private lawns—against density proponents, who argued that relegating rental housing to polluted, busy arterial roads is inequitable, and that prohibiting apartments in most of the city leads directly to deforestation for suburban sprawl.

Because each person had only one minute to comment, many used some of their time to rattle off a list of amendment numbers—gibberish to anyone who isn’t intimately familiar with the plan. So instead of focusing on the high-level arguments (seriously, though, you NIMBYs need to stop saying housing proponents want to murder “orca babies”), I thought it would be helpful to dive into some of the amendments that came up most frequently.

This isn’t a comprehensive look at the competing changes council members are proposing (I did that here); instead, it’s an attempt to explain the amendments people were praising or complaining about last week, and how they’re hitting with both sides of Seattle’s eternal pro- and anti-housing debate.

Eliminate parking mandates

HB 1110 forced Seattle to get rid of mandatory minimum parking requirements for new housing within a half-mile of major transit stops, making it possible to build apartments with few or no parking spaces; Harrell’s proposal would retain other parking mandates across the city, regardless of demand.

Rinck’s amendment (amendment 7) is the strongest among several that would reduce parking mandates or eliminate them across the city; it would effectively allow developers to add parking based on market conditions and demand, and could result in lower housing construction costs.

Support social housing

Proponents of social housing, which voters overwhelmingly opted to fund using a targeted business tax earlier this year, applauded two amendments incorporating social housing into the comprehensive plan. The first, from Rinck (amendment 17), expresses support for social housing as one of the comprehensive plan’s affordability goals and incorporates it into several sections on affordable housing.

The second (amendment 61), from Kettle, would change existing city law to make it easier to build dense affordable housing in all neighborhood residential (former single-family) areas, and expand the definition of affordable housing to include social housing—a substantive change in law that would take place outside the comprehensive plan itself. A similar amendment, 60, from Sara Nelson would make similar changes to affordable-housing rules but would not apply them to social housing.

Restoring neighborhood centers 

Rinck’s proposal would bring back eight neighborhood centers—those locations within a 3-minute walk of commercial nodes and frequent transit stops where 3- to 6-story apartments would be allowed—that were included in an earlier “Alternative 5” version of the plan and studied as part of a final environmental impact statement for the proposal. As we reported at the time, Harrell’s initial “One Seattle” proposal eliminated half of the 48 proposed neighborhood centers included in alternative, (After widespread blowback, Harrell restored six of the centers his initial plan eliminated).

Rinck’s amendment would restore eight more of the nixed neighborhood centers, bringing the comprehensive plan closer to the alternative that nearly new council member elected in 2023 said they supported.

Single-family activists were overwhelmingly opposed to these changes, saying that they come as a complete surprise, have never been vetted, and would result in—of course—”clearcutting” of trees on existing residential lawns.

“Say no to the city overreach of our community’s character that would destroy the very charm that attracted us to our respective neighborhoods,” one speaker told the council. “Say no to those who have ramrodded this blind-sighted, misguided notion that will result in our neighborhoods being significantly impacted by upzoned, high-density monstrosities.”

On the flip side, both homeowners and renters turned out to speak in favor of the changes, arguing that the city’s renter majority should be allowed to live in more parts of the city. “We spend too much time in the city driving our children around,” one speaker said. “We need more time to walk to neighborhood amenities and also welcome more neighborhood residents into the Seward Park neighborhood with mixed housing types.. … So go as far as you can. We really need it, and if we don’t do that, plenty of trees are going to get chopped down [for] urban sprawl.”

Downsizing neighborhood centers

As I noted in my earlier coverage of the council’s amendments, several proposals would downsize proposed neighborhood centers, while others would increase them. If every single change to neighborhood boundaries passed, they would collectively increase the total size of neighborhood centers across the city, but there’s no guarantee of how each individual vote will go—and the new neighborhood centers would be located, lopsidedly, in the council districts of councilmembers who support expansion.

The downsizing proposals would shrink neighborhood centers in Fauntleroy and Morgan Junction (amendments 35 and 37, Rob Saka), Madrona (amendment 38, Joy Hollingsworth), and Bryant, Ravenna, and Wedgwood (amendments 39, 40, and 41, Rivera).

Dan Strauss’ amendments expanding and redrawing neighborhood centers all over his northwest Seattle district (42 through 49) are the main proposals that would offset these potential losses. If all the amendments were to pass, it would mean that most of the expanded neighborhood centers would be in District 6, which includes parts of Magnolia, Fremont, Wallingford, and Ballard, while most of the reduced neighborhood centers would be in Northeast Seattle, represented by Rivera. (Bob Kettle has also proposed restoring a neighborhood center on Nickerson).

In other words, the neighborhood center-specific amendments are a product of the city’s district council system, in which individual council members have been empowered reshape the density maps in the parts of the city they represent based on their individual opinions about whether more housing is good or bad.

Corner stores, not just for literal corners anymore

A large number of public commenters expressed their support for Rinck’s Amendment 66, which would allow “corner stores” throughout residential areas, rather than just on literal corners, as Harrell’s plan proposes. Rinck’s amendment would also remove a proposed size limit of 2,500 square feet for these businesses, allow bars (not just restaurants), and remove a requirement that new businesses close at 10pm.

“It’s time to let Seattle cook, brew, and create,” one supporter said. Nelson and Strauss have amendments that would remove the “literal corner” requirement but keep all the other restrictions in place.

More transit-oriented development

Rinck’s Amendment 76 would allow denser low-income housing and stacked flats in more parts of the city, by making a technical change to the definition of “major transit” so that it includes areas within a quarter mile of bus stops that have 15-minute service on weekdays. The upshot would be that these types of housing could get a density bonus if they’re near frequent transit; in addition, they wouldn’t be subject to mandatory parking requirements.

One commenter who spoke against this change suggested it would result in “denuding all of Seattle’s neighborhoods” of trees and “subject[ing] nearly the entire city to five- and six-story developments.” Others noted that it went beyond the requirements in HB 1110—which is true; that bill was meant to represent a floor for all cities across the state, not a  maximum density level for the state’s largest city.

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Top-down dictates for new housing

Rivera has a couple of amendments that would create steep hurdles for new housing. The first, Amendment 81, would direct the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections to write rules dictating the kind of “exterior cladding” allowed on buildings in any local or national historic district, based on “objective design standards,” whatever that means.

Activists have sought and won historic district designations for neighborhoods like Wallingford with the goal of preventing demolition and redevelopment of lots developed in the 1920s and 1930s, but they might balk at HOA-style rules telling them what color they can paint their houses, or what specific type of siding they have to purchase during home renovations.

The second Rivera amendment, 102, is more insidious: It would authorize SDCI’s director, a political appointee, to require developers to come up with alternative site plans, at any point during the development process, “if the Director determines that an alternative site plan could feasibly increase the retention of existing healthy trees.”

In plain language, the amendment would give absolute power to the head of the city’s building department to kill individual housing projects on the grounds that there is some possibility a purely theoretical “alternative site plan” could protect any tree of any size or age—an absurd expansion of the city’s bureaucratic power.

As we’ve reported, neighborhood activists frequently present their own “alternative site plans” that they claim would allow developers to retain trees, usually by reducing the size and value of any future housing on the site.

Developers, who get loans to build housing projects based on future value, generally dismiss these alternative plans as unworkable (if you got a loan to build five 1,500-square-foot units with yards, you can’t pay that loan back by selling five 1,000-square-foot units with no outdoor space); under Rivera’s amendment, the city itself could use similar site plans to effectively stop housing projects from moving forward.

Lawns > housing

Other tree amendments (including 91, from Nelson; 92, from Strauss; 93, from Rivera, which would also establish new tree protection areas) would provide density incentives for developers that preserve existing trees on existing private lawns. One Strauss amendment, 100, would require developers to plant a new tree for every 2,500 square feet of lot area, in addition to other tree requirements, and another, 103, would prohibit removing large trees near the corners of any lot.

Unsurprisingly, many commenters claimed that allowing more density in Seattle’s historic single-family neighborhoods would result in “clear-cutting” the city, by eliminating the trees that homeowners and earlier developers planted in the yards of single-family houses. As one speaker argued, “We risk losing old-growth trees and wetland and bald eagle habitat ecosystems that make this area unique.” In fact, there are virtually no old-growth trees remaining on private property in Seattle, because early developers clear-cut the forest that once occupied the land now known as Seattle in order to build single-family houses.

Two proposals that didn’t come up much, if at all, during the public hearing are also worth flagging. The first, Kettle’s amendment 32, would add an entirely new “public safety element” to the comprehensive plan—effectively adding goals like crime reduction and improved 911 response times to the city’s foundational zoning document.

The second, which spans two amendments (21, from Nelson, and 22, from Saka and Mark Solomon), would “discourage the concentration of human services facilities” for “low-income populations” in downtown Seattle. As the brief staff summaries of these amendments notes, the city frequently has no say in where services for low-income people are located; one reason a lot of services are downtown is because downtown is the city’s most central and transit-accessible neighborhood.

The comprehensive plan committee will take up all the amendments (plus, god help us, any new ones) on September 17 and 18, with a final council vote on the Phase 1 changes likely later this month.

City Council, housing

Affordable Housing Providers are Losing Money and Selling Their Buildings. But is Eliminating Eviction Protections the Answer?
A studio apartment building owned by Community Roots Housing

Affordable housing providers say they need a range of solutions from the city, from funding for maintenance and operations to investments in new housing construction.

By Erica C. Barnett

Chris Persons, the longtime director of the low-income housing provider Community Roots, recently recounted a frightening incident that took place at a building the group owns on Capitol Hill: A resident—someone Community Roots had been trying to evict for unpaid rent for more than a year—shot a gun into the sprinkler head in their living room, flooding every apartment under theirs, along with a ground-floor daycare center. It was the second time this person had shot a gun inside the building; the first time, they fired shots into the washers and dryers in the laundry room.

Community Roots moved the displaced residents into hotels and got the daycare up and running again as quickly as possible, but the incident and others like it have eaten into the organization’s operations and maintenance budget.

“These kinds of problems are really prevalent in our sector right now,” Persons said.  “The behavior of a really small number of residents who have high-acuity needs, whether because of untreated mental illness or substance use disorder, has led to a lot of property damage [and] a lot of threatening and dangerous behavior.”

Community Roots has sold off several buildings in the past few years, a move Persons said has more to do with the cost of maintaining older buildings than keeping the organization in the black. But, he added, Community Roots is spending more on security than at any time in its history, and the time to turn over units when someone moves out has increased dramatically.

“Some of the units have been so damaged that it’s costing us tens of thousands of dollars to do the turn,” Persons said, noting that this is a nationwide problem not unique to Seattle. At one building between Pike and Pine that serves single people making up to 50 percent of the area median income, Persons said, people have not only been “breaking in all the time,” putting tenants in danger, but taking over vacant units between tenants, “totally destroying” those apartments and preventing new tenants from moving in.

In addition to repairs and maintenance, Community Roots is out of pocket for about $4 million in unpaid rent, with no remaining COVID emergency funds to address the shortfall. “The [emergency rent assistance] funding stopped, but the payment of rent has not ticked up to where it was prior to the pandemic,” Persons said.

“Prior to the pandemic, we rarely evicted anybody,” Persons continued. “Typically, they would talk to us and we’d put them on a payment plan or find another place for them. But over the last several years, that kind of process has broken down.”

 

The Seattle City Council is preparing to consider legislation, sponsored by Councilmember Cathy Moore, to roll back parts of the city’s landlord-tenant act passed by the previous, more progressive council, including a law allowing tenants to add new roommates without prior approval, laws barring school-year and winter evictions, and a law setting the maximum late fee for unpaid rent at $10.  The legislation will reportedly also eliminate a complaint process for three-day eviction notices that landlords claim has made it harder to evict people for dangerous behavior.

In a written response to PubliCola’s questions, Moore called her legislation—which she has not yet introduced—”a proposal that protects tenants while addressing the challenges facing our housing providers to ensure Seattle’s rental housing ecosystem remains viable and can meet the housing needs of all our residents.”

Moore’s legislation would give landlords more leverage over tenants, removing eviction protections sponsored by former councilmember Kshama Sawant and passed by the previous, more progressive council. That’s why they’re opposed by tenants’ rights advocates, who argue that removing renter protections will just result in more people living on the streets.

But many organizations that provide affordable housing or represent low-income housing providers, including the Low-Income Housing Institute, and the Housing Development Consortium, are supporting the proposal—along with other, more immediate actions they say the city could take now to help them shore up their operating budgets so they don’t have to sell off some of the city’s already inadequate affordable housing.

HDC, which includes all the major nonprofit housing developers in Seattle, worked with Moore’s office to narrow an initial list of 18 changes down to the four in Moore’s draft proposal, and the group has been a vocal advocate for repealing the eviction moratoriums and increasing late fees, among other elements of the bill Moore plans to sponsor.

“All of the [proposed] changes, quite frankly, are very intentional,” HDC director Patience Malaba said. “They are informed by affordable housing providers who understand, from a mission perspective, the need to keep buildings operating while providing the right protection for tenants at the same time.”

Alexis Mercedes Rinck, the council’s most progressive member, told PubliCola she hasn’t seen Moore’s draft legislation yet, but “I struggle to see how compromising our tenant protections helps anyone. I have concerns about the operational sustainability of affordable housing and am actively talking to providers about their challenges and portfolio health. However, these are fundamental system issues that will not be solved by punishing people who can’t afford rent.”

Sharon Lee, the director of the Low-Income Housing Institute, became the somewhat unsympathetic face of the movement to roll back Seattle’s renter protection laws when she argued, along with GMD Development partner Emily Thompson, that the city should end the winter eviction moratorium.

Lee says the problem of rent nonpayment became acute when COVID-era rent assistance began drying up and hasn’t improved much since. “We need to correct the situation of people who have the ability to pay their rent but are hiding behind the eviction moratoriums,” she said. A $10 fee for late rent isn’t enough to motivate people to talk to their building managers or get on a payment plan, Lee believes. “Sometimes, by the time you give tenants notice that they haven’t paid rent and you’ve sent it for legal action, [it’s after] you’ve tried and tried to get them them to do a payment plan or talk with the manager and they ignore you.”

Like Persons, Lee said LIHI has struggled to evict tenants who cause significant property damage. “We had a tenant who would just pile everything on the bed and light it on fire, and we couldn’t get them evicted,” she said. “In some cases, when we tried to get someone evicted, the response we get is ‘This person will become homeless, or this person has a mental health issue.’ …The problem is that they don’t consider other people in the building who are who are in harm’s way in if we keep an arsonist in the building.”

 

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Affordable housing providers also say the cost of doing business has increased dramatically since the pandemic, in ways that wouldn’t be fixed by eliminating laws designed to protect low-income tenants from eviction.

Some providers started construction in 2020 or 2021, when interest rates were low, then saw their expenses balloon as construction costs rose across the country. Others have had trouble converting their high-interest construction loans (which are more expensive because construction carries greater inherent risk) into permanent loans at lower interest rates. (The city has spent $137 million so far helping developers pay down their construction loans).

Some housing providers have become increasingly dependent on the developer fees they receive when they close on a new development, using the fees from these new housing projects to fund the operations of the organization. And many affordable housing developers built too many small studios and micro-apartments, which now cost about the same in market-rate buildings as they do in buildings dedicated to affordable housing. While demand for those units will likely rebound as the housing shortage worsens (this online dashboard shows the downward trend in residential permits), for now, the result is that units that would ordinarily be bringing in revenues are sitting vacant.

Lee and other affordable housing providers have argued that the city should provide stabilization funding so providers can replenish their operating budgets and not have to sell off buildings, as Community Roots has done. Last year, the city’s Office of Housing did just that—providing $14 million in JumpStart payroll tax funding to 24 organizations for rent assistance, security expenses, repairs, and other costs through a process called a Notice of Funding Availability, or NOFA.

Lee said she believes OH should provide about double that amount through a NOFA this year, using a newly created JumpStart reserve fund as the funding source. That money, Lee said, “could help pay for the lost rent. It could pay for very high insurance costs. It could pay for very expensive damages that are caused by tenants.”

Councilmember Rinck said helping housing providers pay their operating costs would be a better solution than making it easier for them to put tenants out on the street. “We must focus on solutions that meet the needs of the people, and fix our affordable housing financing model by increasing funding for operations,” she said.

Thompson, whose firm owns several affordable housing buildings in Seattle, said three of GMD’s buildings are currently operating at a loss, and one, located next to the Othello light rail station in the Rainier Valley, is “in the red zone” and may face foreclosure if the city doesn’t intervene.

“Economic vacancy is just crippling our building,” Thompson said. “Our [rent] collection rate averages around 85 percent.” Even a NOFA without any funding attached would help the city better understand the extent of the problem and triage providers, Thompson said. “If you don’t have a scope of what the issue is how do you know how much to fund they can

A spokeswoman for the Office of Housing, Nona Raybern, said OH “is engaging with housing providers, public funders, and stakeholders to fully understand the breadth of the challenges and to help inform longer-term stabilization strategies” but has not made any decisions about funding yet.

Thompson said the Office of Housing may be too focused on the need to get more housing projects in the pipeline, while ignoring immediate problems in housing that already exists. “Maybe you have to make hard business decisions,” she said.

But Malaba, from HDC, said it’s critical for the city to keep funding new affordable housing projects, both for the infusion of cash providers receive through developer fees and because Seattle still faces an acute shortage of affordable housing.

“We are asking for the city to fund a pipeline of new resources that can be used to support the future construction of housing,” Malaba said. “If the city uses all of the existing resources for preservation when we already have [housing construction] numbers that have been down since 2022, the affordability crisis is going to be felt by the lowest-income people in the city.”

 

Landlords have frequently complained about the longstanding backlog of eviction cases at King County Superior Court, arguing that it amounts to another, de facto eviction moratorium. Legislators took action to help address the backlog during the legislative session that just ended, passing a bill sponsored by State Rep. Nicole Macri (D-43)  that allows counties to appoint special housing court commissioners to oversee eviction cases, increasing the number of people who can hear eviction cases.

Tenant advocates, Macri said, were “not enthused” by the proposal, which they said should be counterbalanced by more funding for defense attorneys for tenants, who have a legal right to counsel under state law. Macri got more funding for tenant attorneys in 2026 but says 2027 will be a separate fight.

Unsurprisingly, landlords have blamed the right-to-counsel law for the backlog, arguing that tenants with attorneys slow down the process because they’re more likely to fight their evictions. But Macri argued that the real issue is that landlords haven’t adapted to a legal environment where they no longer hold all the cards.

“For many years, landlords had grown accustomed to eviction cases being pretty fast,” Macri said. “Because there was no due process for tenants, the no-show rate for tenants was extremely high—over 85 percent of tenants did not show up, pre-pandemic, to unlawful detainer cases,” so landlords won by default. Now, the two sides are more balanced, and the courts need more resources to catch up.

“If a court is working in an appropriate way, and the right to counsel is functioning appropriately, then having it work in a normal fashion is better for everyone,” Macri said. “We can’t say that a dysfunctional slowdown of the courts is the protection for tenants.

Like many tenant advocates, Macri doesn’t support rolling back laws designed to protect tenants in Seattle.  “Creating more opportunities for people to become homeless does not solve the problem, it just shifts the problem someplace else,” Macri said.

The underlying issue, Macri continued, is that more people with very high behavioral health care needs, including people with active fentanyl addiction, are moving into buildings that weren’t designed for them. “We’ve seen a greater and greater number of people in these nonprofit low-income housing buildings who … have fairly serious behavioral health conditions and there’s not adequate support.”

The “long-term solution,” Persons said, is “more treatment centers for people with mental health issues that aren’t being treated and drug addiction that isn’t being treated— there’s very few places for the folks who are suffering the most to get the kind of treatment they need, because they don’t have the capacity or the skill set to live even in permanent supportive housing. We need to make some deep changes to our housing system or these issues are going to persist.”

housing

“Landlord Lives Matter” Protest Against Tenant May Have Been Illegal
Video still from Dira TV (fair use)

By Katie Wilson

Buckle up, it’s time for another sensational “nightmare tenant” story whipped up by right-wing media personalities. Ari Hoffman and Jonathan Choe first broadcast Bellevue landlord Jaskaran Singh Sarao’s sob story last November.

“While my tenant enjoys a relaxed lifestyle, buys new cars, and celebrates [with] barbecues, I continue to struggle to pay my bills and double mortgages,” Sarao told Hoffman.

This month, they apparently decided it was time for an escalation. Sarao (or an associate) turned to Nextdoor to promote a protest outside the home where his tenant, Sang Kim, lives with his wife and four children, saying that he’d been “suffering tremendously” and inviting “City council, Senators, and other community leaders … to join our neighbor to protest against non paying renters who refuse to vacate property despite an eviction order.”

And join they did. Bellevue Councilmember Jared Nieuwenhuis and Redmond Councilmember Steve Fields spoke at the rally, alongside Republican Party officials and notorious Seattle landlord Carl Haglund. At one point the crowd of between 50 and 100 broke into a chant: “No Pay, No Stay!” One participant held a “Landlord Lives Matter” sign; another sign reading “Serial Squatter Lives Here” was placed in the yard. After the speaker program, things began to get rowdy. A group, including Choe, banged on the tenant’s door until Bellevue Police yelled “Hey, we’re not doing that!” and ushered them back to the sidewalk.

Many will find the spectacle of a landlord calling a rally outside his tenant’s home absurd and gross, regardless of the details of the situation. Protesting at a residence generally raises tricky issues of ethics and legality. When the target is a public figure whose position and power allow them to ignore public protests, this may be the only way to (quite literally) bring home the harm their actions cause. A tenant in the middle of eviction proceedings and at risk of becoming homeless  is clearly a different case. Actions aiming to drive people out of a community have a much uglier history.

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Of course, the absurdity is part of the point. We’re supposed to find it shocking that a landlord would need to resort to such a tactic to shake loose a “deadbeat tenant,” just as we were supposed to find it shocking that landlord Jason Roth was reduced to sleeping in his van and eating discount meat. But, as with that story, there’s more to this one than first meets the eye.

Who is “mom and pop” landlord Jaskaran Singh Sarao, who told Hoffman last fall both that he “lost [his] job in the summer” and that he “works two jobs to support [his] family and the tenant’s family”?

In addition to his own $1.3 million home not far away, Sarao owns at least one other property under his own name, a $1.1 million house two doors down from the tenant’s address.

The rental is actually owned by a matryoshka-like chain of LLCs, the last of which lists a person named Gaganjit Singh Jeji as its sole governor on the Washington Secretary of State’s website. If Sarao is indeed the owner, it’s likely that he’s named as such in the property’s operating agreement, which is not a public document. (I learned about this arrangement in the aftermath of the Roth story, and it’s part of what makes property ownership in Washington state so opaque—one of many reasons why it’s a bad idea to try to exempt “small landlords” from renter protection laws.)

These or other subsidiary LLCs own one other rental property (a duplex) and have been party to at least three multi-million dollar property purchase-and-sales in the past few years, two of them demo-and-rebuilds and one a straight flip. Sarao is listed as a governor of one of these LLCs, now dissolved, that sold one of these properties for $3.7 million in 2022. Jeji and Sarao also co-govern three more active LLCs that last reported owning property in 2020, 2018, and 2017.

The extent of Sarao’s financial interests in or profits from all this real estate activity is not a matter of public record. But this history at least suggests that we should take the struggling small landlord schtick with a grain of salt.

The video “circulated all around my kids’ school,” Kim said. “Two of his kids go to the same school as my two kids. My kids were bullied online and offline with that video.”

Sarao is also, as Christopher Randels noted on Twitter, a member of the Bellevue Human Services Commission, having been recommended by then-Deputy Mayor (and now protest attendee) Nieuwenhuis in 2022. Among other duties, the commission reviews applications from human service providers—including nonprofits working to address homelessness and housing insecurity—and makes funding recommendations to the council. Whether leading a protest outside a distressed renter’s home is appropriate conduct for someone in this position would make an interesting topic of discussion at the commission’s next meeting on April 2.

And who is “nightmare tenant” Sang Kim? 

Kim has lived at the property with his wife and four children since mid-2022. He says he worked in procurement and contracting until his employer downsized near the end of that year, after a national pandemic task force that it had been part of was dissolved. “I’m still waiting for a delayed settlement from an incomplete contract I was hired to do,” he said, leaving him struggling to pay rent.

Kim received pandemic rental assistance through the Housing Justice Project, covering his family’s rent from October 2022 through May 2023. He hasn’t been able to pay since, and according to Sarao’s Nextdoor post now owes $45,000 in unpaid rent. Kim said that figure sounds about right.

Last fall, Sarao arrived at his door, accompanied by a camera-wielding Jonathan Choe. Choe posted the resulting video on Twitter with the headline “RENTER FROM HELL,” naming Sang Kim and stating the landlord’s claim that he is a “Con Man who is milking the ‘broken system’ that unfairly favors renters over mom and pop landlords.”

The video “circulated all around my kids’ school,” Kim said. “Two of his kids go to the same school as my two kids. My kids were bullied online and offline with that video.”

Ironically, he says the publicity made it much harder for him to leave the rental property.

“I’m trying to keep the kids in the same school,” Kim said. “The video made it difficult for me to find a new place to move, let alone get a job locally. I went to a job interview and the guy said ‘Aren’t you the guy in the video?’ and I had to just kind of walk out. It did nothing but benefit Jonathan Choe’s story, it didn’t benefit the landlord. It prolonged the process.”

When PubliCola requested comment from Choe, he responded by posting repeatedly on Twitter/X about the owner of PubliCola, Erica C. Barnett. He did not respond to our questions.

Sarao and his media amplifiers are outraged at the slow pace of the eviction proceedings. Sarao filed the current case in January and a hearing is scheduled for April 5. King County Superior Court is indeed moving more slowly than usual, but that’s because the court is dealing with an avalanche of evictions.

“Not just in King County but across the country, evictions are hitting record numbers, so there is a backlog,” says Edmund Witter, senior managing attorney of the King County Bar Association’s Housing Justice Project, which is representing Kim. In November 2023, monthly eviction filings in King County climbed to nearly double the 2019, pre-pandemic numbers, and they’ve stayed significantly above that baseline since.

Kim says the landlord and his lawyers have only themselves to blame if things are moving slowly. “It’s not a broken system, it’s their broken approach to it,” he said. “They didn’t want to take the proper steps or give a fair chance to negotiate a repayment plan. They were cutting corners to get it done as soon as possible, and that’s why we got to this point.”

Sarao did not respond to my request for an interview.

“If they wanted to have a rally for landlords’ rights, they could have just as easily had it at a neighborhood park. Having it in front of the tenant’s house serves no purpose except harassment.”

Back to the protest outside Kim’s home. Whether you think it was appalling or justified, it may have been illegal.

Bellevue resident Bennett Haselton heard about the planned protest from Choe’s Twitter announcement. He showed up and recorded 90 minutes of the event on his GoPro. In the video, Haselton asks multiple participants the same question: “Why it wasn’t a violation of the anti-doxxing law for the landlord to organize this rally.”

The new law, RCW 4.24.792, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2023. Among other things, it prohibits the publication of an individual’s home address with “reckless disregard for the risk” that this “will be used to harm the individual whose information is published” or if it causes “mental anguish” or “substantial life disruption.”

Kim is now dealing with the aftermath of the protest. “It’s not easy,” he said. “Now I have people calling anonymously, using nasty language and hanging up. Most people who attended the protest weren’t even from the neighborhood.”

“If they wanted to have a rally for landlords’ rights, they could have just as easily had it at a neighborhood park,” Haselton said. “Having it in front of the tenant’s house serves no purpose except harassment.”

Or, if they wanted a location appropriate to their theme, they could have rallied outside the King County Courthouse in Seattle, where eviction cases are heard in superior court.

The protest also came close to violating an anti-harassment protection order that Kim obtained when he got wind of the plans. Kim says the judge promised to tell the Bellevue Police Department to expedite it, but the paperwork wasn’t delivered until the crowd was already disbanding. Sarao did know the order was coming, according to Kim, because he’d texted him a copy of it the day before.

The specter of “vigilante justice” by landlords, eagerly raised by Choe, has a long history. “It gave rise to one of the first landlord-tenant laws in the 1300s, when King Richard II prohibited landlords from taking the law into their own hands,” Witter said. Centuries later, Washington’s laws on forcible entry and detainer are interpreted to prohibit landlords from using menace, intimidation, or force to oust a tenant or occupant of a property, regardless of that person’s right to be there. 

Of Sarao’s protest, Witter said, “this feels like a slide” away from the rule of law. Sarao and Choe now appear to be planning a second protest at the house.

As much as last weekend’s events were painful for him and his family, Kim says that he feels sorry for the landlord, too.

“To Jonathan [Choe] it might be excitement, but as far as me and the landlord, nobody won. Jonathan was running around trying to escalate the situation, provoking the police, pounding on the door and trying to get other people to do the same. It was practically a show. It wasn’t for the benefit of anybody. Jonathan got his story, that’s it.”

 

criminal justice, Drugs, housing, legislature, Police

Legislative Cutoff Fizz: Police Pursuit Bill Moves Forward While Tenant Protections Die

Wednesday was the legislature’s deadline for bills to pass out of their house of origin—meaning if a bill didn’t receive a floor vote yet in either the House or Senate, it’s dead for the year. 

In a session that was supposed to be all about affordable housing, a slate of tenant protection bills—including one capping rent increases at 7 percent per year, and one requiring six months notice of rent hikes of more than 5 percent—both failed to get a floor vote. However, a bill that would reform a state disability benefit by no longer requiring recipients to pay back the funds passed the House and moved on to the Senate. 

One of the most contentious votes of the session happened last Friday, when a coalition of centrist Democrats and Republicans in the Senate defied progressives and passed a new drug possession bill that increases criminal penalties for drugs such as fentanyl, meth, and cocaine and pushes those convicted into coercive treatment. The senate also passed a bill that makes fentanyl test strips legal.

Most of the legislature’s proposed criminal justice reforms—including a bill that would have granted victims of unlawful police actions the right to sue for damages and one raising the age of juvenile sentencing from 8 years to 13—never made it to a floor vote. One bill that did survive reforms the state’s criminal sentencing system so that juvenile convictions no longer lead to longer sentences for crimes people commit as adults.

The bills that survived now move to the opposite house, and in the next month and a half, the legislature will tackle Gov. Inslee’s proposed $70 billion biennial budget before adjourning on April 23. 

The new bill lowers the threshold for police to pursue a person in their car from “probable cause”—which requires more evidence—to “reasonable suspicion” that a crime has been committed.

Also on Wednesday, the senate passed a bill giving police officers additional authority to pursue drivers, using an unusual maneuver to move the legislation forward. A bill on the issue had been moving through the state house, but did not appear likely to make it to the floor by the 5pm deadline for bills to pass out of their original chamber. Senate Bill 5352, sponsored by Sen. John Lovick (D-44, Lake Stevens), had not even been heard in any committee since its introduction, but majority floor leader Jamie Pedersen (D-43, Seattle) made a motion to suspend the rules and put the bill in front of the full body, which then adopted a new version of the bill by Sen. Manka Dhingra (D-45, Redmond).

The new bill lowers the threshold for police to pursue a person in their car from “probable cause”—which requires more evidence—to “reasonable suspicion” that a crime has been committed. The bill would allow police to chase people they suspect have committed violent offenses as well as DUI—currently one of the only instances where reasonable suspicion is the standard. It also allows officers to merely notify a supervising officer that they are initiating a pursuit, rather than receive authorization. Changing the law would roll back reforms the legislature approved in 2021.

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Democrats voted down a number of amendments to the new version of the bill, including proposals that would have allowed pursuits for reckless driving and motor vehicle thefts. With many Republicans voting against the bill because they felt it didn’t go far enough, and many Democrats unwilling to change the current pursuit law, the bill passed on a narrow 26 to 23 margin.

“This bill may not be as adequate as I would like, Senator Ann Rivers (R-18, Vancouver), said before voting yes, “[but] I think it’s as good as we’re going to get for now.” Sen. Mark Mullet (D-5, Issaquah) also voted yes. “I voted for this bill [increasing the standard for pursuits] back in 2021,” Mullet said, “but I think the unintended consequence” was that “it became widely known” that police were not going to pursue for most offenses. 

The bill will now go back to the house, where it could go through normal committee review or—because the senate broke with its usual procedure—go directly to the house floor.

After taking much of the afternoon to debate this bill, the Senate was unable to advance some of the other bills on its calendar, including SB 5002, a bill that would have lowered Washington’s blood-alcohol content threshold for a DUI from 0.08% to 0.05%. That bill was next in the list when the Senate adjourned after the 5pm deadline Wednesday.

—Andrew Engelson, Ryan Packer

City Council, housing, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Vetoes Bill That Would Have Provided Data, Transparency on Seattle Rents
According to one city council member, this is all the data renters need to know whether they’re getting a good deal in a specific neighborhood.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell has vetoed legislation that would have required landlords to report basic information about the units they own, including how much they charge for apartments of various sizes, to a research university. The bill, which the city council passed 5-4 last week, had support from council members across the ideological spectrum, including Alex Pedersen (who proposed the bill as a step toward preserving “mom and pop”-owned rentals) and Kshama Sawant (who argued that rent transparency would support more renter-friendly policies.)

In vetoing the legislation, Harrell argued that the bill would violate landlords’ rights by revealing “proprietary” information about their rental units. Citing a constituent letter from the head of the University of Washington’s Washington Center for Real Estate Research, Harrell said any data the research university collected would be “unreliable” because landlords would choose to (illegally) opt out or provide inaccurate data on purpose, since providing accurate data might put their business interests at risk.

For years, the city (and public) did have access to accurate, frequently updated rent data through reports produced by a private company called Dupre+Scott. Since 2017, the city has had to rely on high-level Census information to keep tabs on rents and residential displacement rates. Harrell’s veto letter asks “private industry” to step up and voluntarily produce the kind of data Dupre+Scott provided—something that private industry has declined to do in the five years since Dupre+Scott shut down.

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The legislation Harrell vetoed would not have enabled the public to see what rents specific landlords were charging. Instead, it would have improved transparency and access to general information that could have helped renters make informed housing decisions, leveling the information playing field between renters and house buyers, who have instant access to listing and sale prices through data collected by the Northwest multiple Listing Service.

Harrell also said in his veto letter that the legislation would have cost the city too much money—between $2 million and $5 million—at a time when the city is asking every department to come up with potential cuts. “I cannot support moving forward with an expensive new program that is unlikely to achieve its stated aims and has no clear source of funding to pay for it,” Harrell wrote.

“Rejecting this law seems to be a victory for landlords unwilling to share data and a loss for those seeking data to make informed decisions on preserving and expanding affordable housing in our city.” —City Councilmember Alex Pedersen

Contradicting that claim, Harrell also said it would be irresponsible to spend millions collecting data on rents when that money “could otherwise directly serve people suffering in the ongoing homelessness crisis.”

In a statement this afternoon, the bill’s primary sponsor Pedersen said he is “deeply disappointed our solution to collect housing data helpful for preventing displacement of economically vulnerable people was not signed into law. Similar laws to collect rental housing data are already in place throughout the nation, so the veto means Seattle is still behind the times.” Continue reading “Harrell Vetoes Bill That Would Have Provided Data, Transparency on Seattle Rents” →

Equity, homelessness, housing, legislature, Morning Fizz, Renters, Uncategorized

Olympia Fizz: House Committee Passes Wealth Tax, House and Senate Take Action on Tenant Rights and Funding

1. After nearly two months of inaction, the House Finance committee passed the progressive wealth tax (HB 1406) out of committee Wednesday morning. The bill made it out of committee with no amendments, despite Republican efforts.

The wealth tax is arguably the most progressive piece of tax reform legislation this session; the House is taking the lead, while the Senate took the lead on the capital gains tax.

The wealth tax legislation would require anyone with more than $1 billion in intangible financial assets, such as stocks, bonds, or cash, to pay a one percent tax on their worldwide cumulative wealth. The Department of Revenue estimates the tax will affect 100 Washington state taxpayers and generate $5 billion per biennium.

Finance committee chair Rep. Noel Frame (D-36, Seattle) urged her colleagues to vote yes on the bill so the state could begin rebalancing Washington’s tax system, which, according to the progressive Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, forces the lowest income Washingtonians to spend 18 percent of their income on taxes while the very wealthiest spend just 3 percent of their income on taxes.

“The Washington state wealth tax would take a giant step forward in trying to right that wrong by asking the wealthiest Washingtonians, including some of the wealthiest people in the world, to pay their fair share,” Rep. Frame said.

Members of the finance committee passed the bill 9-7 with Democratic senators April Berg (D-44, Mill Creek) and Larry Springer (D-45, Kirkland) along with all Republican committee members, voting no. PubliCola has reached out to both Berg and Springer for comment.

Patinkin Research Strategies found that 58 percent of Washingtonians support the tax and just 32 percent are opposed. (The pollster gets a B/C rating from 538.)

According to Frame, the legislature will direct revenue from the wealth tax into a dedicated Tax Justice and Equity fund, rather than into the state’s general fund as the bill originally specified. Legislators will use the Tax Justice and Equity fund to support an anti-displacement property tax exemption (HB 1494) that the finance committee also passed Wednesday.

The finance committee passed the wealth tax in their last regularly scheduled meeting of the session. April 2 will be the last day for finance bills to be read into the record on the house floor, leaving little time for the bill to be deliberated on in the Rules committee, which will take up the bill next. If Rules passes it out, the bill will go to the House floor where progressives hope to send it to the Senate.

2. The Legislature’s latest biennial budget proposals made two traditional foes, tenants and landlords, happy—with some footnotes.

In budgets released this week, legislators from the House and Senate allocated roughly $1 billion to new rental assistance and eviction protection programs. (The House allocates $1 billion, the Senate $850 million). The state will use the money to pay off rent debt accrued by tenants during the statewide eviction moratorium and fund legal counsel in eviction cases.

Continue reading “Olympia Fizz: House Committee Passes Wealth Tax, House and Senate Take Action on Tenant Rights and Funding” →