Politicians spin up nonsense in their press releases as matter of course, but last week Washington State Senator Annette Cleveland may have perfected the form in her statement on her decision to strangle the latest anti-rent gouging bill in committee.
Her explanation managed to condescend to her colleagues and to people of color in her district, conflate two related but significantly different policies (“rent control” vs “rent stabilization”), and arguably spread misinformation, all before signing off with a troll-y little cliché that didn’t even have the benefit of being true.
Her stated position on an issue that impacts the monthly budget of 40% of Washingtonians offers yet another example of the Democratically-controlled Senate’s disregard for the very people who help them maintain control of that chamber. Meanwhile, the Democratically-controlled House remains determined to keep the ball rolling on their anti-gouging measure this year, but the task may prove Sisyphean given the current makeup of the Senate.
A Senator’s Struggle with Logic and the Presentation of Basic Facts
Sen. Cleveland’s anti-renter crusade began a little more than a week ago, when she took the extraordinary step of declining to sign her committee vote on Senate Bill 5961, a decision that held the bill in limbo until last week, when she finally announced her opposition to the measure in a press release.
The Senate’s version of the proposal would have capped annual rent hikes at 15%—excluding buildings constructed within the last 15 years—until its expiration in 2044. If that bill had became law, it would have amounted to the highest such rent cap in the nation. (California caps at 10%, Oregon caps at 7% plus inflation, which can send the cap higher than 10%.) Nevertheless, in her statement on her vote, Sen. Cleveland treated a moderate measure to stop flagrant gouging as if it were a much cooler bill to keep rent increases tied to inflation.
She began her defense with the assertion that the legislation would allow landlords to raise rent by 15% every year, which was her “biggest problem” with it. “That math is brutal,” she wrote. “What renter could afford a 15 percent increase in rent with each new year?”
People who try to persuade others with an argument as shallow as that one do not respect the people they’re talking to, but I’ll extend her the courtesy she refused to extend to the public and engage anyway.
Yes, it’s true, no one who has to work for a living can afford annual 15% rent hikes. But right now, no law in Washington caps rents increases, so landlords can raise rent by 15%, 16%, 20%, 30%, 100%, or even a million percent every year if they’d like. In fact, renters in the Seattle area watched their rents climb 92% last decade. That math is pretty brutal, too. Maybe even more brutal than telling landlords they can’t raise rents more than 15% in a year? That’s kinda where this whole movement is coming from!
Later on in her statement, she repeated this logical fallacy by claiming that “Oregon and Portland have passed rent control programs that resulted in 14.6% rent increases in 2022.” When she puts it that way, you’d be forgiven for thinking that rent prices increased by 14.6% in Oregon in 2022 as a result of the state’s decision to pass a rent stabilization bill, but that’s not true.
As I mentioned earlier, Oregon’s law capped rent hikes at 7% plus inflation, and so in 2022—a year with high inflation—the state set the maximum rent increase limit at 14.6%. That’s where she gets that number. Perhaps some landlords raised the rent to the cap, but overall rent prices didn’t rise that high. Again, according to the logic Cleveland used to make that point, I could just as easily say that Washington’s prohibition on rent control “resulted” in 150% rent increases in 2022, but I’m not going to make that claim in that way, because it would be misleading, which is bad.
More to the point, after Oregon passed its landlord-friendly rent stabilization measure, rent prices actually fell 5.7% between July 2022 and July 2023, according to rent.com. During that same time period, the Portland area saw a nearly 10% drop in rent prices, which were among “the fastest declining rents in the nation.” Did rent stabilization cause slower growth in rent prices in that area? Unclear! But clearly the sky did not fall, or at least rents did not shoot up.
Comparing Apples and Oranges with Cherry-Picked Quotes
In the statement, Sen. Cleveland went on to use a couple studies and a few reports on much stricter forms of rent control as evidence to support her opposition to rent stabilization. (For more on the distinction between those two policies, read this.) That lapse alone should serve as reason enough to dismiss her thinking on the issue as uninformed, but Senate leadership put her in a position to make calls on housing, so it’s worth batting back the nonsense even on her own flawed terms.
Sen. Cleveland kicked off her academic lit review of rent control studies with a link to Rebecca Diamond’s gold-standard paper on San Francisco’s rent control regime, and then she summarized the study’s conclusions by saying that rent control “reduced the available rental housing by 15 percent and that the policy likely drove up citywide rents, damaging housing affordability for future renters.” (Later on in the statement, Cleveland wrote that “the more case studies I examined, the more reasons I found to be wary of rent control,” but then, instead of linking to “more case studies,” she just linked a Bloomberg write-up of this same Diamond study, literally quoted the same line about the 15% reduction in supply, and then somehow did not immediately resign her post in disgrace.)
Anyway, first of all, San Francisco’s rent control program gives a board the authority to cap annual rent increases at a maximum of 7%, though they often cap much lower than that, which is a far cry from the wildly high 15% cap that was under consideration in Washington’s Senate.
Second of all, Cleveland pulled those quotations from the Diamond study’s introduction and conclusion, where economists often spin their findings.
According to a read from University of Minnesota Public Affairs Professor Edward Goetz, who directs the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, Diamond’s well-known study found that rent control did its job, in that it allowed people in rent-controlled apartments to keep between $2,300 and $6,000 per year between 1995 and 2012.
And, indeed, overall rents in SF during that time period did increase by 5.1% as a result of a reduction in housing supply. But, Goetz argued, rent control did not cause that reduction. Landlords who took advantage of loopholes allowing them to move into their own properties or demolish them to construct condos that were exempt from rent controls caused it. Diamond’s spin on that process is simply Diamond’s spin.
“There’s nothing in her study or frankly any other [empirical] study that exists that connects rent control to any reduction in new construction. There are plenty of studies that have looked for such a connection but have not found it,” Goetz said in a phone interview.
The main reason researchers struggle to isolate a given rental regulation’s impact on housing construction, Goetz said, relates the complex nature of housing markets. Decisions about housing construction involve interest rates, construction costs, land costs, and the strength of demand for housing, which itself has to do with job creation and the local or regional economy. That’s a lot of potential causes for changes in development, which troubles efforts to place the blame for supply reduction solely on rent control rather than on, say, downzoning, permitting requirements, stronger labor protections, or any other policy that could increase costs.
Tram Hoang, a senior associate on housing at PolicyLink, compared concerns about developer behavior in the face of rent stabilization to those of restaurant owners expressing concerns about raising the minimum wage. “Even if everyone had a job (or home), we still need basic protections in place to ensure resident well-being, and regulation is just a part of the real estate landscape. If developers choose to stop developing due to rent stabilization, their shoes will surely be filled by developers from across the country (or in neighboring Oregon) who can adapt to the regulatory environment,” she said.
The Palpable Condescension
In an attempt to demonstrate her deep and abiding concern for the plight of Black people and people of color, Cleveland characterized a report on rent control from the Urban Institute as saying that “‘Black and Hispanic residents are underrepresented in rent-controlled units’ and that rent control’s benefits ‘are concentrated among wealthier, whiter households.”
Unsurprisingly, she overstated those researchers’ claims. As that very same report says literally the sentence before her paraphrased quotation about Black and Hispanic representation in rent-controlled units, “Evidence is mixed on whether people of color access rent-controlled units in proportion to their population share or housing need.” A New Jersey study, the researchers noted, showed that Black people were overrepresented in rent-controlled units, and a New York study showed that people of color “make up a higher share of residents in rent-stabilized buildings than they do in unregulated housing.”
Cleveland’s other half-quotation emerged from a kind of convoluted point in the Urban Institute’s report. The writers cited a couple studies that compared “predicted uncontrolled rent and the actual rent paid for a controlled unit” and found that New York’s version of rent control’s “benefits” would end up “more concentrated among wealthier, white households, who tend to live in neighborhoods with relatively higher unassisted rents” than they would have in an imaginary New York City that didn’t have rent control.
Cleveland continued her half-assed justification of her position on rent control, which is, I want to stress again, not the bill she “considered” in committee, with a link to a Q&A with a Johns Hopkins business professor who argued that some studies showed that “people with lower incomes do not get larger rent discounts,” and that “many with high incomes get very sizable discounts” in cities with rent control.
The literature on this issue of rent control poorly targeting renters is also more mixed than the business professor lets on, as Gilderbloom and Ye found that Black and low-income residents were more likely to live in rent-controlled housing. Moreover, Barton looked at strong rent controls in Berkeley, CA and found that low-income and non-students enjoyed the largest share of rent control’s benefits. But even if the research were clearer, who cares? Rich people get social security, too. Should we kill that program just because it’s poorly targeted?
Sen. Cleveland’s mischaracterizations and condescensions also raised concerns among the Members of Color Caucuses in both the Senate and the House. Both MOC caucuses identified rent stabilization as housing bill priorities this year, and the chairs of both groups supported the measures in their respective chambers.
Over the phone, Sen. Yasmin Trudeau, who carried the Senate’s version of the legislation, said Cleveland’s policy analysis compared apples and oranges, and she found her critique of the bill’s affect on people of color “offensive.”
“It becomes offensive when you wield misinformation against communities that are telling you what’s good for them,” Trudeau said.
Given that Washington’s housing supply will take decades to catch up with demand, Trudeau said rent increases will continue to contribute to homelessness in a state where many renters transfer more than 30% of their income from their boss to their landlord. According to the latest report from Harvard, around 50% of renters in the Seattle area, the Spokane area, and the Kennewick-Richland area fit that description. “If we don’t act now it’s going to get worse,” she said.
Rep. Mia Gregerson, who chairs the MOC caucus in the House, agreed that Cleveland’s statement focused on rent control, which “isn’t really what this bill does.”
“[Large rent hikes] is an important issue that we know contributes to homelessness and drives people out of their neighborhoods, which disproportionally impacts Black and brown communities, and that is fact,” she said.
A coalition of equity organizations in southwest Washington, the area Cleveland represents, sent their state senator a letter over the weekend expressing their “deep frustration and anger” over her decisions and commentary around the bill and “strongly” urged her to reconsider her stance.
The organizations, which included the directors of Southwest Washington Equity Coalition, the NAACP of Vancouver, Latino Leadership Northwest, and others, also called into question the relevance of the rent control studies Cleveland used to explain her position on rent stabilization. They argued she “incorrectly portrayed information” from the Urban Institute report and the Johns Hopkins Q&A while “simultaneously ignor[ing] the voices of those who are most directly affected and aware of the need and potential impacts of these bills.”
For the letter’s signatories, the issue is existential. “People of color and culture are more likely to rent, are more likely to experience homelessness, are more likely to experience excessive rent increases, and are more likely to remain unhoused once we become unhoused. We need rent stabilization immediately. Without it, we cannot successfully remain housed in this community,” they wrote.
In a letter released this morning, Sen. Trudeau and Rep. Gregerson echoed that call, saying it’s time to listen to and act on the demands from “over 100 community-based organizations, including faith and labor groups and those representing priorities for people of color statewide, [who] are pleading with us to center their voices, their struggles, and their pain.”
“They are not interested,” the MOC caucus chairs wrote, “in misleading data, comparing a jurisdiction that has implemented ‘rent control’ with the distinct policy before them. They are asking us to look past patronizing platitudes from those who serve to speak with authority on what is best for them while ignoring what is happening right now, in real time.”
The Time to Restrict Rent-Gouging Is Now
As if the levels of condescension weren’t high enough already, Cleveland concluded her statement with a riff on a cliché: “Haste doesn’t merely make waste,” she wrote, “It can inflict lasting hardship on families that need solutions to housing that don’t just sound good but provide housing that is affordable for more than one year.”
Even as the affordability crisis deepens across the state despite the recent passage of bills to increase supply, no one in their right mind could accuse the Legislature of acting hastily on the issue of simply reducing the phenomenon of rent-gouging. The latest wave of rent stabilization discussions started in the Legislature in 2020. Sen. Trudeau said Senators have had “multiple” work sessions on the issue during this session and over the interim. Seattle routinely includes a measure to lift the ban on rent control in its Legislative agenda. The idea has been around.
And make no mistake, though Cleveland stepped out in front of this issue, she’s not the only friend of the landlord lobby in the Senate. Other Democrats in the Senate who have reportedly opposed stabilization include Issaquah’s Mark Mullet and Seattle’s own Jamie Pedersen, the Senate majority floor leader. In a text message about this particular piece of legislation, Pedersen said he did “not necessarily” oppose the bill, and that his support would “depend on the details,” but that it had not reached a place where he could vote on it, so he’s not really sure, which is exactly the sort of thing state lawmakers say when they oppose something. Somewhat to his credit, Pedersen has supported lifting the statewide ban on rent control, but that’s easy because it’ll never happen, and if it did, then the move would transfer the political heat on this issue to the cities, so it’d be a win-win.
Anyway, despite the recalcitrance in the Senate, lawmakers in the House, led by Seattle Rep. Emily Alvarado, plan to continue to push that chamber’s version of the bill, which caps rents increases at 7% and also exempts new construction. For the legislation to survive, that House will need to vote it off the floor by early next week.
I hate to be a total asshole, but 92% rent increase over a decade is less than 7% per year.
@2: Almost exactly 6.75% annually. Which means the Stranger shouldn’t be angry about this bill not passing; the Stranger should be angry the proposed cap was uselessly high.
@2 Absolutely. Maybe something more in line with cost of living increases (3%? 4%? I dunno). But it also goes to show that even though “landlords can raise rent by 15%, 16%, 20%, 30%, 100%, or even a million percent every year if they’d like” on the whole, on their own and without any laws, it’s less than 7% (I know there are some egregious cases). That being said, I would love to see a story on a landlord raising rents by one million percent, just to see how long it would take for them to be tar and feathered.
I’m really Interested to see how our Social Housing PDA pans out – that seems to be the answer to the free market folks (add some competition – and don’t kneecap it like Medicare). I also wish someone in the legislature or SCC would look at ending short term rentals (like NYC, LA, Palm Springs) – that would go a long way towards decommodify housing (something we desperately need).
RE: why be “angry” when rents increased by exactly 6.75% annually over a decade? That was then, this is now:
Rental rates skyrocketing across Washington
Spokane (Mar. 2020 – Mar. 2021)
⬆32.0%
Tacoma (Oct. 2020 – Oct. 2021)
⬆18.9%
It took more than a few “egregious cases” to bump these percentages up so high. Most landlords may not need rent stabilization legislation to do the right thing, just as most people don’t need the threat of imprisonment to keep us from robbing people at gunpoint. Regulations to prevent rent gauging are needed for the same reason most other laws against harming others are in place. Some people need exterior consequences to curtail their most reptilian inclinations. This legislation won’t force ethical landlords to change a thing.
Percentages noted above are from https://www.wliha.org/2023-public-policy-priorities/pass-bills-stabilize-rent-increases-and-prevent-rent-gouging
Perhaps we ban Democrats from taking Economics 101?
Only The Stranger would call a Democrat who champions reproductive health care a “conservative.”
@6: Thanks for the link on “How to Lie With Statistics.” Let’s look at the Seattle-area figures. Following the links back to Seattle Met magazine (https://www.seattlemet.com/home-and-real-estate/2022/09/cost-to-rent-an-apartment-seattle-bellevue-redmond-issaquah-august-2022), we have:
“Since March 2020, when the onset of the pandemic caused prices to plunge, rents are up 17 percent.”
So, if we start counting from an artificially low point — in this case, the onset of a once-in-a-century global disaster which resulted in millions of Americans no longer needing any home or shelter of any kind — then prices rise dramatically as the disaster wanes. Quelle surprise.
The largest single-year increase for the Seattle area happened in Redmond, which saw an annual increase of — wait for it! — 15 percent. So exactly none of the Seattle-area rent increases would have been illegal under the proposed law.
Also at the link @6, we have a big red flag in this oft-repeated ‘fact’: “Studies show that every $100 in median rent increases leads to a 9% increase in homelessness.”
Following the links back, it’s one ‘study,’ actually an estimate by Congress’ General Accounting Office. It does not cover all rental situations, but a certain subset:
“The figure below shows estimated homelessness rates and median household rent, which includes actual rent paid by renters for occupied units with shared living situations rather than total rent for the entire unit. Therefore some localities, such as New York City, may appear to have lower rent than expected.
“Specifically, we found that a $100 increase in median rent was associated with a 9% increase in the estimated homelessness rate…”
(https://www.gao.gov/blog/how-covid-19-could-aggravate-homelessness-crisis)
So, from an “associated with a 9% increase in the estimated homeless rate” not for the general renting population, but specifically for, “rent paid by renters for occupied units with shared living situations…” we get all the way to “Studies” showing a causal relationship between rents and homelessness for the general renting population! Now that is some primo truth-stretching, that is.
There may be an excellent case for rent stabilization. This headline post and supportive commenters seem intent upon making the opposite case.
@8 — you don’t understand, according to The Stranger the real supporters of reproductive rights are people who actively tried to get Trump elected in 2016 and are trying again in 2024, not Democrats.
“But, Goetz argued, rent control did not cause that reduction. Landlords who took advantage of loopholes allowing them to move into their own properties or demolish them to construct condos that were exempt from rent controls caused it.”
In other words, the property owners decided that the best use of their property (i.e., highest return on investment) was condos rather than apartments. I wonder if being told that the return on their apartments would be artificially limited contributed to that decision? Anyone? Buehler?
And anyone who thinks the same would not happen here is very, very naive.
@11 dvs99: I find this very worrisome.
WTF does Annette Cleveland have against renters in Washington State?
In the mid-1970s had an acquaintance who worked on DC’s Capitol Hill as a congressional committee staffer. Said then that the common watchword among the staffers – regardless of personal ideology – was that of the electeds the Republicans were glassbowls and the Democrats idjits. Nothing’s changed.
We need more housing, not less.
Rent Caps shrink the housing supply. This has been proven over and over again. Senator Cleveland is standing up for renters by voting against harmful rent caps.
From the magazine: THE ECONOMIST
“Berlin Germany’s socialist city council, introduced a five-year Rent Cap for all apartments built before 2014 that came into force in 2020
But the problem, entirely foreseeable and foreseen, is that the caps have made the city’s housing shortage much worse: the number of classified ads for rentals has fallen by more than half.”
“One thing is certain. The rent cap has managed to make Berlin’s housing shortage even worse”
Yes, 50% of affordable apartments disappeared from the market in Berlin. 50%! (it was still easy to find apartments for those units excluded from rent caps, but the prices are those apts increased a ton due to demand)
The situation got so bad, that Berlin’s Socialist city council overturned rent caps in 2022.
So, Stranger readers, feeble-minded people, and Rich Smith: if you are OK not being able to find an apartment and have to move back into your parents basement, keep criticizing Sen. Cleveland.
@11/14 I think what Rich is saying is that rent control only works in a world with no loopholes meaning people are not allowed to opt out (e.g. elimination of private property rights). That is what the former D3 rep used to prattle on about in her legislation. Ignore the fact that it is completely unconstitutional and voila you have a working rent control model. Of course no private entity will build new housing in that model so you’ll also need the government to now take over housing construction. That is a feature, not a bug.
@8 Some conservatives do support reproductive rights (there was a time when Republicans were overall more in favor of legal abortion than Democrats were). That doesn’t make them liberals.
@1, 2,
Rich is no doubt aware of this. His point was obviously that the average annual increases were nevertheless exorbitant (do your salaries increase by anything approaching 7% annually? Mine never has) and the proposed measure wouldn’t have curtailed or impacted this. And so whatever defense she was attempting was futile regardless. I suppose the phrasing was a bit awkward, but anyone not desperate to “pwn the libs” shouldn’t have had any trouble parsing the intent and meaning there.
@17 Rich is a journalist, and although you speaking for him to clarify is appreciated, he should be able to do that himself. Saying “rents went up by 92% over a decade!” sounds a lot more drastic than “rents went up under 7% a year, and this lady didn’t support a cap at 15%!”, especially if you are math-challenged (many Americans are). I am not trying to “own the libs” because I am one. But part of the point is that landlords, apparently the vast majority of whom don’t raise their rents by 15%, may see a bill that says you can as permission to do so. Like I said (@3), maybe something more in line with 3-4%, echoing cost of living increases, would be a better goal.
BTW my salary increases by 5-7% a year, and I also get other raises every few. I am also part of a syndicate (kind of like a union) that pays me to be a member (and not vice versa), and I get steep increases in pay from it every couple of years as long as I do my job right. And my other union almost annually calls for a bigger cost of living raise, and wins about half the time. Also — I don’t live in the United States, and this kind incentive/reward package is normal in my industry. Good luck America though!
@18,
Fair enough, and I agree it’d have benefited from a simple editorial re-phrasing there. I guess I just disagree that the majority of folks wouldn’t have been able to parse that out, though I suppose I could be overestimating the mental aptitude of my fellow readers. I dunno. And good for you re: your annual salary bumps, though that’s definitely not the norm here stateside, FWIW.
@17: If a less-than-7%-annually increase was “exorbitant,” then a law intended to prohibit exorbitant increases should have prohibited 7% increases, not allowed increases up to more than twice that. As I noted @2, the Stranger criticized the wrong problem.
@12 – I find it worrisome too. Reducing the supply of housing ultimately hurts everyone. I have yet to see a study showing that rent control has the long-term effect of allowing more renters to have affordable housing. What does work, and what we need to do, is to 1) build some publicly supported housing and 2) provide rent subsidies for those who can’t afford a place to live.