The Ramayana (Image: Lana Blinderman) — Project to document — and sometimes protect — Capitol Hill’s midcentury modern apartment buildings gets boost
Though they can’t always agree on what, exactly, a small landlord is, a group of property owners representing what they say is a vital source of Seattle housing is calling for more protections for their industry amid claims that these types of apartment buildings are being wiped out by new development and an avalanche of new tenant laws.
Wednesday morning, the Seattle City Council’s Economic Development, Technology and City Light Committee will hear testimony from participants in a Small Landlord Stakeholder Group convened last year to make recommendations on how best to support alternatives to nationwide developers companies.
Source: Small Landlord Stakeholder Group analysis
According to the group, they are more likely to live in the communities where they own housing, more likely to be personally involved in setting rent and selecting tenants, and more likely to set terms that seek tenant stability over market trends. They are also more fragile than the big companies with much higher personal financial stakes in their investments and are more likely to face personal and legal risks than large developers.
The result is a change in Seattle’s housing mix that includes a decay in “small” buildings. According to the Small Landlord Stakeholder Report (PDF) produced by the group, Seattle lost 14% of its “small rental properties” between 2018 and 2022. According to the report, the “added gain” of units in large buildings (10,749) was “canceled out” by the loss of units in small buildings (11,285). Small properties in this analysis were defined as buildings with 20 or fewer units.
But according to the report, the stakeholder group had a difficult time reaching a consensus on how a small landlord should be defined with only agreement on some key characteristics and a challenge in more hard measures like unit count:
Stakeholder groups represented included Seattle Grassroots Landlords, Rental Housing Association, and Housing Connector, as well as Be:Seattle and Catholic Community Services to provide “tenant advocacy.” The city says the group met six times beginning last August.
The council committee could act on recommendations and issues raised by the group including changes to laws like First in Time, roommate law, and winter and school year eviction restrictions. The group also raised needs for exemptions from the city’s Fair Chance Housing and Right of First Refusal laws for small landlords, as well as an expansion of issues that would qualify a tenant for a Just Cause eviction.
The group also called for free legal help for small landlords mirroring what tenants can receive under the city’s new Right to Counsel law.
Overall, one key message from the group is that small landlords — however you define them — are drowning in a tidal wave of new housing laws in Seattle.
The group’s recommendation for establishment of a formal “small landlord stakeholder advisory committee or expansion of the Renters’ Commission to include landlords as a
“Renting in Seattle” Commission could be one small step in helping these businesses stay afloat.
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Socialism for the property owner while balking at renter protections. Maybe landlord behavior modification could have forestalled the city’s need for all that ethical guidance.
Many of these proposals have gone beyond protecting renters to just punishing landlords. The policies were designed to drive private landlords from the market and apparently they have been pretty successul.
Sure seems that way. The conspiracist in me says its harder to push for the revolution when you are trying to convince your followers their downstairs neighbor is the enemy vs. some faceless corporation from New Jersey.
Spot on.
It’s interesting how this **always** comes down to the “oh, we’re just so heavily regulated, we the poor, forlorn landlords need to have all the regulations we don’t like — which is all of them — removed.”
And, as always, it’s disingenuously presented by some focus-group-tested term like “regulatory relief,” which normie, pseudo-liberal Seattleites of a certain age — cough **boomers** cough — will find compelling.
But, of course, the thrust of all of this is “we the landlords would like to maximize our leverage in renting by removing any and all regulations so we, the landlords, can do whatever it is we want and our renters are completely without recourse should we try to take advantage of them in any way.”
It’s just sickening.
lets not forget that government is supposed to be neutral. Its illegal to favor one group of citizens over another in government.
So for example if we are going to provide free attorneys for tenants we need to be doing that for property owners too. Thats not socialism, its equal treatment under the law. After all for smaller rental operators eviction proceedings are just about as rare as they are for tenants (rhetoric aside)
Or better yet, scrap the free attorney program and put the money into expanding rent assistance programs for proactive tenants who seek out the help. After all nonpayment of rent is 90% of evictions, and free attorneys won’t stop those evictions, they may only succeed slowing them down and increasing losses for the property owner with procedural wrangling and taking advantage of forced errors in notices and service due to the ever changing landscape of landlord tenant law, but do you really think the property owner is just going to give up and let a non-payer stay forever?
Spot on!!! We do not need to subsidize landlords. My god, give all this “assistance” to actual impoverished people. We should NOT be supporting someone’s bad investment.
I was surprised to read that that the number of units in new, larger buildings were not more than replacing lost units in smaller buildings. My impression was that, generally, smaller buildings were being torn down and replaced with larger/taller buildings with more units.
This is no surprise to me… some larger buildings are being built, but probably just as often (or perhaps more often if those numbers are right) a house that might have been split up into to 5-6 or even more apartments is being replaced with condos, making a net loss. Sometimes it’s a smaller number of units, but even if it’s replaced with a similar number of condos, those are owned not rented – so it’s a net loss of rental units all around.
No surprise at all. SFR housing is still a big proportion of housing in seattle, and all the halfway decent rentals in this stock that sell are probably going owner occupied so those sales are canceling out a lot of new construction units. Many nonconforming duplexes or homes with ADUs also may be getting sold to new owner occupants who don’t want to rent the second unit. Heck I grew up in a house with an ADU and I wasn’t even aware of its potential to function as a separate living space til I was a teenager when my parents basically let me live in it. (I only came upstairs when it was dinner time basically)
For missing middle homes, What is mostly happening is duplex, triplex, and fourplex properties that are lost are being torn down, but mostly instead of being replaced with much higher density housing they are being replaced with townhouses. There may be an incremental increase in density but its not like 2 units being replaced by 100. This has happened on my very street ; a beautifully maintained large mid century built-as duplex (which could have been up-converted to 4-plex very easily by separating basements into their own units) was torn down to put up 7 townhouses instead.
Its also the case that units being built aren’t 1:1 replacements of units being lost. Its been in the news recently that seattle has the SMALLEST new units being built of any city in the US. That means for example the new unit that mostly-offset the loss of a 3br rental house someplace is probably something like a 500sf 1br.
No family trying to find that 3br house rental is going to be interested in the new 1br (which probably is just as expensive as the 3br was)
So yeah, the attrition of small and medium housing providers is cancelling out the development of many of the newer units, and the unit types that are available are changing from in-neighborhood lower density and larger with parking and such to high-density, TOD smaller units and shame on you for wanting a car.
And its not “greed” selling at high prices – we have had market peaks before that didn’t result in small and midsize housing providers selling in droves. So whats different this time? See that stakeholder report. It hits all the nails right on the heads. CHS should also post the last page take-aways from it as there are a couple good insights there too.
1000+ units on Airbnb. Why ? Because renting for 30+ days means you gamble with eviction if you rent to the wrong person. One step forward would be to allow no cause removal from shared property such as MIL, ADU etc. This would open up a huge number of affordable units.
its counterintuitive but reinstating no cause terminations* across the board, criminal screening, and up front deposits will probably bring more opportunity to renters than any number of additional restrictions.
*its not an eviction unless the tenant refuses to leave, and owner is forced to bring a suit before a judge, who then must agree to it. The “E” word is intentionally overused by tenant advocates.
https://bhsd.sccgov.org/sites/g/files/exjcpb711/files/lfsv-eviction-process-03-08-19.pdf
California has the notion of a lodger who can be removed from shared housing without eviction after a notice period. Why not in WA ? So much rental space is being lost because of the complexities of rental law.
… and getting rid of performative eviction bans and reforming the roommate law.
Property taxes up 20%.
Property crime up a lot, but who knows how much!
Housing providers are “drowning in a tidal wave of new housing laws in Seattle”. Which means higher rents to pay for attorneys, etc.
Did you notice this group of stakeholders included Be Seattle and Catholic Community Services to provide tenant advocacy? Sometimes getting people of differing views around a table can help inform solutions acceptable to all. Perhaps the goals of small landlords might coincide with the goals of tenants and their advocates. Sounds like these small landlords, a constituency that has been roundly ignored by Council for at least ten years, is asking for a seat at the table. If that includes their own Council committee or representation on the current Renters Commission, that could be a good thing. It might even serve tenants interests by ensuring small properties and their owner/managers thrive in this city once again, all while providing the most affordable rental dwellings available.
Definitely don’t agree that there are fewer apartments today in Seattle. Consider the developments around 23rd and Union, where a vacant lot, gas station, bank building and 2 or 3 houses were exchanged for more than 700 apartments. Ditto for Rainier and Jackson Street. A Seattle Times article claimed there 14,000 new apartments came online in Seattle in 2022. C’mon man!
New build is always going to be way more expensive than existing. If you want to pay $2-3k for 1bed then lots of choice. $1k not so much
So RRIO is lying? or are smaller property owners just flouting the regulation and not registering (and losing more rights to operate their property in the process)?
Its harder to visualize the smaller properties getting sold off, converted, or demolished. that big old house that made way for a bunch of townhouses could have been a legal 4-plex for example.
there are a lot more smaller buildings than larger ones (duh) so losing some seemingly small fraction of those could easily offset building 14,000 new units.
As I write this the sidebar ads being presented to me are for a property auction – two old houses in ballard that are probably missing middle plexes to be demolished for something else.
They are flaunting. I looked at the rental registration map for my area and see several addresses (including mine) that I know are rentals and they are NOT registered.
And how many are vacant? Newbuilds rather sit empty until someone pays the $3k a month.
Small landlords’ right should be protected just like renters. They are both legal residents of the City.
Enough with dividing people into groups and asking us to hate each other.