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Photo from apartments.com showing current apartments available; Renton officials have been criticized for Renton having the same number of evictions within the city as in the larger unincorporated, mostly single-family, neighborhoods east of Renton. However, this is probably because there are more apartments, and therefore more renters, in the city.
The subject of renter protections has been on many people’s minds lately as the region works to solve the ever-worsening homeless crisis. Anything that can be done to help renters keep their homes is worth discussing. Preventing jolting rent increases, unfair landlord practices, and unjustified evictions certainly deserves discussion. Part of keeping tenants in their homes is keeping landlords from quitting the business, which has happened 3000 times in Seattle in the last few years, adding about 6000-9000 new renters to the displaced tenant pool. An increasing number of landlords have found there is not enough profit in offering rentals any more, particularly Mom-and-Pop landlords who are used to operating on very little cash-flow margin, or none at all, as they’ve worked to keep rents low for tenants while taxes, utilities, insurance, and now interest rates climb rapidly. As landlords drop out, their rental houses sell to owner occupants, reducing the number of new homes built for this market, and lowering construction in the region overall. The reduced construction raises prices for everyone. Because of this necessary market balancing, it’s important to use accurate data and get thorough public input before making any significant changes to the rules covering landlord and tenant relationships.
The State of Washington has several bills working their way through committees that attempt to address these issues, and the legislature has been taking public testimony and gathering data on these bills for months. The state process will not likely be completed in this legislative session, but there is a good chance it will be completed later this year.
At the February 27 council meeting a representative from the Housing Justice Project asked the Renton City Council to consider adopting new tenant protection laws ahead of any state action; rules that some other jurisdictions have adopted, including unincorporated King County.
The council was split on how to proceed, with four members (Rivera, Prince, McIrvin, and O’Holloran) choosing to give the issue to the city administration for study and a recommendation, and three members (Alberson, Perez, and Van) suggesting that since the state is already doing the work and is ultimately in charge of statewide landlord-tenant law (which could supercede any work done by the city), it would make sense to simply let the state finish the job. The group wanting to leave the job to the state pointed out that Renton planning staff time is a scarce resource that could be better spent on many other urgent Renton issues that the state is not trying to solve for us.
If I was still on council I probably would have voted with the second group, as our city staff and even our City Council have a number of other very important activities they should be dedicating time to. For instance, they need to devote resources to other ways to help solve Renton’s homelessness challenges, rein in the burgeoning drug overdose problem, and remedy the increasingly dangerous streets. And we should be dedicating Renton staff time and Council focus to trying to getting Sound Transit to give our residents a fair share of future transit opportunities. Housing is not as good if people can’t get to work or access services from it. It’s possible the administration could come back with a recommendation to leave it to the state for these same reasons.
The Renton Reporter ran a recent article on this council discussion, and included a quote from early in the testimony of the representative from the Housing Justice Project.
“Tran-Larson (from Housing Justice Project) said Renton makes up 4.7% of the total population of King County, while the unincorporated areas around Renton make up more than double at 10.8%, yet their number of evictions are nearly the same. She said this means that renters inside the city limits of Renton are nearly twice as likely to be evicted.
Tran-Larson suggested that this difference is due to the regulatory environment for tenants in Renton, as she cited that unincorporated King County saw a “significant decrease” in eviction filings from 2021 to 2022, a year after they passed their tenant protections in the county.”
I personally got sidetracked at this speech opening as I watched the testimony, as it is an apples-to-orange comparison. While I accept that the unincorporated areas primarily to Renton’s east may have twice as many residents as in incorporated Renton, these areas, per state growth management, are much less dense and far more likely to be single-family homes than the residential areas of Renton. On a population basis, one would expect to see far fewer evictions from single family neighborhoods, where maybe 19 out of 20 own their homes, than in apartment neighborhoods where everybody rents. So unless Tran-Larson had accidentally abbreviated her comment, or else we all heard it wrong, she appeared to base her testimony on a questionable statistic. Finding the truly relevant data, like “when comparing a significant number of like-rentals in the county compared to the city, do eviction rates differ?” will take time and resources.
The Renton Reporter reached out to a landlord-tenant attorney, Devin Glaser, who emphasised the difficult financial climate many tenants are in, and I tend to agree with everything he said in the story.
One comment of his I found interesting was after mentioning different minimum notice periods different cities have adopted for rent increases, he said “Ironically, this means that someone could have very different protections than their neighbor living across the street depending on which city they live in and whether or not it has officially been incorporated as a city or is unincorporated county land.”
To me, this is exactly why we should encourage the state to come up with harmonious, consistent protections for tenants statewide, and not spend precious Renton resources further adding to the disparate, confusing rules that both tenants and landlords are continually sorting out.
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