Lol. Rent control is a failed economic policy and no amount of class warfare and Marxist mumbo jumbo will change that.

Before pumping the gas on this it would be critical to study how the rent control we have - the many recent pro-tenant laws passed in the last five years - have impacted the rental market. That will I form what full on regulation will do to our housing supply.

I just sold one duplex because of this nonesense. The other goes on the market January 1st. I’ve always charged below market to keep good tenants and always painted when needed and kept the places up. They will be torn down for I’m guessing townhomes. This is a direct result of what the city council has been pushing. I’m not alone in selling.

I love the performative bullying:

“The question for Democrats is not whether Seattle should or should not have rent control. The question for Democrats is what system of rent-setting they support.”

The Stranger has lost so many political battles over the years, simply because ideas better than the Stranger’s ideas were available to choose. By simply eliminating those other, better ideas from the dialog at the start, the Stranger could have won where it ultimately lost. For examples:

“The question for Democrats is not whether Seattle should or should not have homeless encampments. The question for Democrats is exactly how much crime, violence, and garbage they support.”

“The question for Democrats is not whether Seattle should or should not extend the Pike Place Historical District to stop redevelopment of the Showbox. The question for Democrats is exactly how many other buildings should be made off-limits to redevelopment as well.”

“The question for Democrats is not whether Seattle should or should not build a mile-tall statue of Comrade Sawant Gloriously Leading Us To Total Victory. The question for Democrats is exactly how many mile-tall statues of Comrade Sawant Gloriously Leading Us To Total Victory they support.”

Sawant's proposal is nothing more than performative political theatre. She's incapable of building a coalition around this issue (or any other issue), and her involvement probably does more harm than good. I feel sorry for those in D3 who have supported her all these years, they sure don't have much to show for it.

@2- we know the answer. Thousands of rentals (likely the ones held by small landlords = the more affordable ones) have disappeared from the market. Super helpful to renters.

Also, first-in-time has resulted in landlords raising the minimum qualification to rent a place, as it’s about all they can do to avoid bad tenants. Again, super helpful to renters.

My guess is that the Idiot Sawant and her minions know this but don’t care as long as it keeps her name in the papers.

I would encourage the author of this article to try looking at this situation objectively. Most of the conversation on this topic is driven by rhetoric, not facts. The issue is this: will Sawant's proposal improve the housing situation or make it worse? For those experiencing massive annual rent increases, the proposal will help. For those who were not experiencing annual rent increases in excess of 4%, the proposal will hurt, because no landlord can afford to not do so after this proposal becomes law. For people at the bottom of the market (and most likely to face homelessness) the the proposal will do nothing at all to help them. For those people who are unhappy about the service their landlord provides, the bill will hurt because there will be no incentive to help-or money to fix problems. Finally, the proposal will have an overall negative effect by decreasing housing supply (because small landlords will sell and their properties will be replaced before this proposal becomes law) and incentive to provide that supply. These are simply facts. Just because you love the idea of rent control, or you are one of the people who might benefit from rent control, or you just hate greedy landlords (and let's be honest about what that means-they want to sell their product for as much as they can get, just exactly as you greedy car sellers would do if you sold your car) doesn't change facts.

How likely is the Legislature to repeal the state law banning muni rent control ordinances? By its own terms, Sawant's proposed ordinance doesn't kick in until they do.

Rent increases should never be more than someone's increase in income. Period. It's absolutely insane that landlords believe they have a right to put out people who are good tenants, work hard, always pay their rent in full and on time, and yet cannot afford a double digit rent increase every year.

This country has the financial means to eradicate homelessness and house every single person, not just in this country, but literally in the entire world and it simply chooses not to - and all the while it treats the poor and the unhoused like the pariahs of society. Billionaires and corporations hoarding more wealth than the rest of the entire population of the earth is the problem.

Tax billionaires out of exist. Tax corporations accordingly and enforce the payment of living wages (instead of allowing them to suck the teat of the federal government to pad their profits by forcing their employees to live on food stamps and other social services). Create true equity worldwide. It's truly that simple.

Human beings have made it difficult. Human beings refuse to do what needs to be done. Human beings are the problem. The greed and destruction (and the cognitive dissonance it must take to believe you will be able to survive while everyone and everything else is polluted, destroyed, and dead) are out of control. This isn't end stage capitalism, it's end stage humanity and humans are choosing to hasten the demise of humanity by any an all means necessary. It makes no sense.

If you are worried about rent increases you can’t afford to live in Seattle. There isn’t an apartment participation trophy. I’ve always wanted to live in Manhattan, but good sense told me I couldn’t afford it.

Don't be fooled, the author of the article and Sawant are idiots without knowledge of basic economics. This would be the "destroy rental property" law, wherein properties would simply deteriorate and fall apart as landlords stop spending any money on them whatsoever.

The author makes the case for RealPage being a horrible tool for landlords to circumvent anti-collusion laws… then drops the ball on providing a reasonable, practical alternative to restore fairness to the rental marketplace.

Sawant’s proposal is punitive class-warfare against rental property owners.

If rents aren’t allowed to reflect the owners investments, ongoing costs (property taxes, upkeep/maintenance/improvements), and - horror of horrors - profit, then there is no incentive to rent out property.

Yes, price gouging is wrong. But so are the extreme restrictions that Sawant would place on property-owners.

CM Sawant will leave office with most of her agenda unrealized. Here we see the reason. If she really wanted rent control, then she needed to work with Democrats in the state legislature. Full stop. There is no other way.

She would have needed to build coalitions with the Democrats, garner support for Democrats — real political support, not some silly impromptu street theatre troupe in red shirts — and this for many years. Not only did she utterly fail to do any of this, but for years she energetically antagonized those same Democrats. Then she sent them a form email, demanding they do as she says.

All of this last-minute activity now, including these two fawning posts at the Stranger, are a smoke screen. They are a cover for her, as she limps away from her ineffectual decade in office. And the Stranger falls for all of it.

@16 - the way that works is that the vacant apartments on the market do get cheaper, and then tenants may decide to vote with their feet and move to a cheaper place. The landlord then is unable to get the same rent for the now-vacant apartment. So yes, increased supply does put downward pressure on rents.

Comrade Rosenblum is tipping his hand: "Most immediately we need—at a minimum—full rent control." At a minimum. In other words, Sawant's draconian rent control policy is just the beginning.

So tell me, tovarish, what do you think we really need? Confiscation of housing? death to property owners?

This is not the Stranger’s first attempt to “explain” Seattle’s rising rents as nefariously predatory economic activity by outsiders. Here’s future failed mayoral candidate Cary Moon, teaming up with the Stranger’s failed economic writer, Charles Mudede, explaining how foreign (cough cough China) real estate speculation was the culprit.

‘Hot money has been flowing out of China and into Vancouver since the 1990s, as several conditions made that the easiest place for wealthy Chinese people to purchase real assets to stabilize their portfolios. Proximity, wonderful quality of life, a global culture, the friendliness of Canadian banks, and a relatively reliable housing market caught their attention. See Kerry Gold’s analysis of this dynamic, especially in an excellent long-form story in The Walrus titled “The Highest Bidder: How foreign investment is squeezing out Vancouver’s middle class.”‘

(https://www.thestranger.com/architecture/2017/04/20/24442014/hot-money-and-seattles-growing-housing-crisis-part-one)

Yes, that was over six years ago. The Stranger has gotten no smarter during that time.

In reality, Seattle became a vastly more expensive city very quickly because a lot of people moved to Seattle over just a few years, and they had good jobs with good incomes.

According to the 1960 census, Seattle had a population of 557,087. Due to the subsequent Boeing Slump and long recovery, Seattle’s population in 2010 was 610,654. That’s just over 50,000 persons, less than ten per cent growth — over FIFTY YEARS. Over the next ten years, 2010-2020, Seattle added more than 128,000 persons. That’s about equal to the entire population of Bellevue, and most of that growth was in the latter half of that decade. Housing demand suddenly outstripped supply by a huge amount. That’s why rents rose rapidly and never declined again. There’s simply no need for any other explanation.

Don't be fooled, the cause of ever higher rents (which as a renter have experienced almost every year I have lived here) is that Seattle has not built enough housing. The only years my rent did not increase were 2018 just after an unusually large number of apartments opened and 2021 when so many renters left Seattle (temporarily unfortunately). The cure for high rents is more housing. Rent control has been shown over and over to decrease building more rental housing, which is exactly the opposite of what is needed to bring rents down.

If rent control is the answer to the housing problems in Seattle, why doesn't Sawant seek an independent impact study of her proposal? Instead, she profiles extreme examples of bad landlord behavior to make her case. Example in point: she advertised her recent public forum by using Elisha as an example. Poor Elisha fell into homelessness because her landlord increased her rent from $900/month to $1500/month. But wait-why did she end up homeless? Surely she could have found another place with roommates for $900/month. Also, why did her landlord raise her rent? Maybe the building was sold at a much higher price than the previous landlord bought it for and had to raise rents to afford the mortgage payments. There is clearly a lot more to this story than Sawant wants you to know, but most importantly, how many people experience what Elisha experienced? The simple truth here is that none of us know what the impact of Sawant's rent control bill will be because the matter hasn't been examined. And there is a reason Sawant hasn't done that-it's because she knows it won't say what she wants it to say.

I really hope the stranger is getting paid well for these guest rants (this is basically a political ad for Sawant’s next grift).

@30 Never tell a rent-strapped tenant to get a roommate. For one thing, you can be sure they've already thought of it, but also there are a lot of people who just don't mesh well with strangers in a domestic setting, especially a typically cramped city apartment. I, for instance, would never ask anyone to tolerate my constant presence who wasn't either (a) a close relative or (b) madly in love with me to the point where nothing about me fazes them. Living with randos might work for college students and others in their 20s whose self-identities, habits and personalities are still in formation, but in the adult world it often just isn't viable.

@32: The choice in question was to make serious lifestyles changes, including having one or more flat-mates, or enduring an even more seriously negative lifestyle change: becoming homeless. Intentionally or not, the person in question wound up choosing the latter.

The point was that a rental increases, in and of themselves, are unlikely to drive homelessness, because most persons will adapt in many other ways to keep a roof over their heads. What happened to prevent that adaptation here? We don’t know, and given CM Sawant’s long history, ranging from lack of transparency to outright deceit, we have sufficient reason to suspect she’s withholding the details, perhaps because she knows they won’t fit her “greedy landlords cause homelessness” narrative.