Winter 2024 Dec 1, 2024 at 8:00 am

This Year's Eviction Moratorium Starts Today—Some New Progressive Energy Could Help Keep it That Way

Alexa Pitt

Comments

1

“ The real estate industry bought the current council”

Is Sharon Lee now part of this insidious cabal of real estate barons now? Is there any policy passed by the precious council that TS will look at with a critical eye? If this a rarely used as a defense and is possibly limiting new housing being built why are you defending it?

2

"... attempts to undermine the minimum wage for the City’s poorest workers."

No, they attempt to retain one of Sawant's Sellouts to the Bosses. To get her name on legislation Seattle would likely have enacted anyway -- Seatac already had -- then-CM Sawant sold Seattle's poorest workers out to their bosses, by doing two things voters in Seatac (2013) and Washington State (1999) never had: phasing in implementation of the higher minimum wage*, and allowing bosses to use a "tip credit" to satisfy the new minimum wage's requirements. It is Sawant's boss-friendly tip credit which the current "conservative" Council now tries to retain.

@1: Watching the Stranger viciously turn on Sharon Lee and LIHI provides yet another delicious twist in the otherwise-dismal saga of the previous Council's failed homeless policy. Subsidized-housing tenants refusing to pay rent has become such a widespread problem, it's tanking the not-for-profit, low-income housing model which the Stranger loudly claims to support. Of course, the Stranger can blame neither refusenik tenants nor their advocate-enablers, so the Stranger has no option but to hurl blame at the Stranger's own former heroes, Sharon Lee and LIHI.

*Sawant brazenly lied about this, continuing to use her false slogan, "$15 NOW! And for everybody," even though she herself had made both parts untrue. The Stranger now finds their endless cult worship of Comrade Sawant creating even bigger problems than merely rendering the Stranger unable to criticize Sawant for her support of Trump.

3

Housing is not free. It costs money to build it (we do want the workers building houses to earn a living wage, don't we?), maintain it,and provide it. But somehow, the Stranger and the Sawants of the world want landlords to magically provide it free of charge to low-income tenants.

Please explain how this will work. And if your answer is simply "landlords are rich so fuck them," then explain what you plan to do once everyone gets out of the housing market (or at least the lower end of it).

4

Forcing LIHI to provide free housing for the winter to 5 or 6 households should not sink LIHI, but it would do serious damage to a small operator should they get stuck with it. IIRC up to 3 units and you are exempt but past that you could be on the hook for providing free housing to anybody who decides not to pay for the winter. But NO landlord is exempt from the pointless school year eviction moratorium. School employees are stably employed many with generous union contracts. I wonder how many teachers were being evicted in seattle every year prior to that statute. I bet it was close to zero. Families with kids are first in line for subsidies and emergency assistence if they truly are hitting a rough patch.

And yea, if this was only used 5 or 6 times - why keep it. There are plenty of other defenses, free attorneys and a sympathetic judiciary waiting for you if you are a tenant having any kind of legitmate issues. BTW I suspect the reason it is being used infrequently is everybody knows if it gets used frequently there is gonna be a class action takings lawsuit overturning it.

I do not blame private investors one bit for not wanting to fund subsidized housing that is being hamstrung by the WEM, SYEM and witches brew of other tenant protections that when combined with free HJP attorneys delaying legitmate suits and DOSing access to court system is driving multiple nonprofit and mission-based housing providers in the city into bankruptcy per recent ST articles. Why should they lose money to keep housed a population that cannot reach or sustain even a very, very, VERY low bar required to get one of those units.

I also love how this article and so many other pro tenant articles all intervew the same 3 or 4 people . Edmund W, Kate Rubin and so on who always make the increasingly prepostorous claims that things like eviction moratoria don't discourage investment no its interest rates or greedy investors wanting too much return or something else. Talk about circular firing squad of ostriches with heads in sand.

+1 on observations of how the Low income housing providers who are now raising the same alarm bells private landlords have been for years about seattle ordinanances are suddenly corporate tools like the rest of us evil private operators. Welcome to the other side. I'll grab some cookies. they're "organic"....

5

Turns out people will take free housing if you don’t make them pay. Who’d have thought…

So what do we do? Evict the able non payers? Dupe private lenders into providing the funds (current approach, but only last until lenders realize returns are negative)?

In the strangers mind there’s always another billionaire out there who should be required to pay for an undefined and ever growing population of people who choose to live beyond their means.


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