SPOKANE, Wash. – Washington legislators are discussing a proposal which would dramatically change the landlord-tenant relationship in the state.
House Bill 2114 and Senate Bill 5961 would apply to nearly all privately-owned rental units ten years or older, and would restrict landlords from raising rent on the same tenant more than 5% over a 12-month span.
“In the last year I have seen a rent increase every 90 days,” Julie Sparkman, a Spokanite in support of the bill said. “So in the last 12 months my rent has gone up by a total of $560, and that ends up being like a 57% increase.”
“Renter households throughout Washington continue to face excessive rent increases on top of Washington’s already sky-high rents,” Michele Thomas, policy and advocacy director for the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, said. “For our state to ever prevent and end homelessness, we must stabilize rents and prevent excessive rent increases.”
The policy would also prevent any rent increases for a tenant in their first year, cap late fees at $10 monthly and cap security deposit and move-in fees at the price of one month’s rent.
“More than half of all renters in the Spokane area are cost burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing,” Spokane City Councilmember, Paul Dillon, said. “It’s clearer than ever that excessive rent increases and evictions are a major cause of homelessness. This is a crisis, and if the legislature does not act this year, our crisis will only worsen.”
The proposal isn’t free from criticism.
“If we capped rent at $500 a month, that would make it really easy for people currently living in housing to afford the rent that they’ve got,” Kelsey Carlston, an assistant professor of economics at Gonzaga University, said. “However most people know that capping rent at $500 a month means landlords are going to get out of the market and housing is just going to be a bad investment for everybody.”
Carlston says there should be some restrictions on rent raises, but applied cautiously and in conjunction with other measures to increase housing supply.
“For anybody that says tenant protections will always be bad, they’re trying to use economic theory to make it easier for landlords to make money,” she said. “There’s some sweet spot between allowing landlords to charge whatever they want and having zero protections for tenants, but also on the other side being so stringent that there isn’t housing available. I think what the people who made this bill had the goal of is finding that sweet spot and without more analysis, I don’t know if they did.”
One of Carlston’s main criticisms of the bill was not tying rent raises to inflation, as has been done in other states with similar laws, such as Oregon.
“If inflation is again above 5% like it was a few years ago, that means that landlords are going to be reducing the amount of profit that they’re making from year-to-year and that could be a big distortion in the market,” she said.
Thomas says they had an inflation measure in a bill they tried to pass last year, but heard from both landlords and tenants that they would rather know exactly how much rent could be raised by.
“Our goal here is to increase predictability for renters so they know what’s coming in the next 12 months,” Thomas said. “We carefully calibrated that (5% flat cap) to ensure that landlords would still have money to make repairs and make a profit. This bill is not intended to say landlords can’t make a profit.”
