The first paragraph states median rent tripled in one year. Um??? What?

@1 What you could take away from that is that many lower priced units left the market and were not replaced shifting the median price point towards the higher priced units. The author's assumption is supply stayed the same and "greedy" landlords raised rental prices through the roof because they are cold hearted bastards. In reality the city's policies have continued to drive lower priced units out of the market as covered by Capitol Hill blog last year: https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2024/06/audit-shows-seattles-house-and-small-building-rental-market-is-dwindling-down-19-in-five-years. The policies advocated here by the author continue to demonize small landlords and paint them as the bad guys so doubling down on more of the same will only increase the number of these units leaving the market. Personally I think this is by design so inevitably the only solution is government owned and subsidized housing.

"Between 2021 and 2022, the city's median asking rent soared from $1,300 to $3,118"

I know Seattle rents are beyond ridiculous, but that can't possibly be right. Perhaps you meant 2011, not 2021?

The $3118 figure appears to come from this Redfin report, which was widely cited in other media sources: https://www.redfin.com/news/seattle-rent-report/

Here's the figure in context, which the author of this Stranger article elected to omit: "the median asking rent for downtown Seattle fell all the way to $1,399 in February 2021 as Seattle’s tech-driven workforce moved away from the city center and transitioned to working from home. As offices started to re-open, demand increased and the median rent rose all the way to $3,118 in August 2022."

The author also elected to omit the fact that "Since then, rents have fallen by roughly 36% to where they are today thanks to a major uptick in apartment construction."

If you look at the graph in the Redfin report linked above, you'll see that the author has cherry-picked the lowest and highest median rents we've had since 2019, and rents are currently relatively low for this region.