City Hall has been on a crusade to undo the previous City Council’s marginal wins for working people—from the Mayor defunding the enforcement of labor and tenant rights to attempts to undermine the minimum wage for the City’s poorest workers. So it should be no surprise that the hard-fought winter eviction moratoriums made it onto their list.
The City Council passed the winter eviction moratorium in February 2020. The protections give new legal defenses for evictions that would boot tenants in the coldest months or children and education workers during the school year. The laws make some exceptions for owner-occupied units, condemned buildings, and tenants facing eviction for criminal or nuisance behavior. Tenants’ attorneys barely used these defenses in their first years—just five or six times out of 200 cases—instead favoring other pandemic-era moratoria and protections. After those laws sunset, defense attorneys still prefer to use other arguments to keep their tenants housed longer than the duration of the moratorium.
Despite its limited uses, some landlords have made it clear that they want the council to repeal the moratoriums. In an email to Council Member Cathy Moore and to the members of her Housing and Human Services Committee, Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) Executive Director Sharon Lee asked the council to “modify” the City’s eviction moratoriums to exclude “people with income who decide not to pay rent.” Lee told The Stranger that LIHI supports strong tenant protections and called the exclusion of renters with income a “narrow exception” to the moratoriums, not a repeal.
Lee is not some random commenter the council could brush off. LIHI is a major affordable housing contractor with the City and by far the most prolific tiny shelter village developer in the region. I asked the Housing Development Consortium (HDC), an umbrella organization that represents more than 200 members including LIHI, about the popularity of Lee’s proposal among their members. HDC did not respond.
LIHI’s Logic
In an email to The Stranger earlier this year, Lee argued that when a “tenant with resources” refuses to pay rent, nonprofit affordable housing landlords suffer “enormous consequences” due to their dependency on private lenders.
“Lenders are now citing the Seattle eviction moratoriums as the reason why they will not provide financing to preserve existing affordable housing in our communities facing displacement and gentrification,” Lee wrote in an email. “If there are no reliable means to ensure timely rent payments to make good on a loan, then the production of affordable housing will take a big hit.”
Lee gave Moore an example in her initial email to the council committee. LIHI wants to acquire and preserve 65 affordable housing units at Squire Park Plaza in the Central District. The nonprofit secured funding commitments with the Office of Housing (OH), the state Housing Trust Fund, and the Washington State Housing Finance Commission (WSHFC), but private lenders keep declining to finance the project. Lee sent the council a cropped, undated screenshot from an email allegedly from an unnamed “bank official.” The bank official wrote that Vanguard, PIMCO, Prudential, Alliance Berstein, Franklin Templeton, Align Capital, Belle Haven, Investco, Nuveen, Banner Bank, Washington Trust Bank, and Heritage Bank “passed on the deal — mainly due to the ongoing issue of the rent moratorium.”
Lee worried that this alleged behavior from private investors may have “ripple effects” for the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program. As the Tax Policy Center explains, the federal government gives tax credits to state governments, which deal out the credits to developers such as LIHI. Then, developers sell the credits to private investors to get funding for their housing projects. So, Lee said that LIHTC, without which none of LIHI’s projects would pencil, relies completely on private investors playing ball.
Moore did not respond to The Stranger’s request for comment, but should she and her committee pursue rollbacks to the moratoriums, they can expect a fight.
Not So Narrow
For one, “tenants with resources” is a pretty vague exemption to ask for. Lee told The Stranger that LIHI does not have a detailed proposal at this time, but excluding renters with income certainly creates more than a “narrow exemption.”
Of the 3,716 households in King County who last year got counsel from the Housing Justice Project (HJP), an organization that defends low-income tenants in eviction court, 73% reported some income. The largest share of HJP’s 2023 clients–2,241, or about 40%—reported making more than zero dollars but less than 100% of that year’s federal poverty level of $14,580 in annual income. Another 23% of HJP clients last year reported income between $14,580 and $29,160, or 200% of the federal poverty level. The remaining clients made more money, but they still fell below the Area Median Income, according to HJP.
Edmund Witter, managing attorney at HJP, said that exemptions for ability to pay don’t make a whole lot of sense: “I don’t know how you calculate that—people have unexpected obligations, and you are setting up uniform household budget expectations for low-income persons who don’t have savings.”
Who’s Afraid of a Little Ole Legal Defense?
It is unclear if lenders are truly avoiding affordable housing projects because of the City’s moratoriums. The Stranger emailed all of these investors who allegedly declined LIHI’s deal. Only a few responded, but the two who did deny that LIHI approached them about Squire Park Plaza.
Belle Haven Investments Director of Research Dora Lee told The Stranger “it’s not the renter protections” that make lenders pass on affordable housing projects. As the economy comes out of a period of low interest rates into higher interest rates and high inflation, “We’ve seen the industry tighten up its underwriting standards and require more margin and more profitability in the projects that they do underwrite, which is constricting the amount of available capital for affordable housing projects.”
But even if we take LIHI’s word for it and grant that all the other lenders think the moratoriums specifically ruin profitability for developers, then they should maybe take some deep breaths. The moratorium is not that common of a defense.
As The Stranger reported last year, HJP used the winter eviction moratorium five or six times in its first three years of existence. Now, HJP does cite these laws as a last-resort defense when a household has no other option, but “not often enough such that a landlord the size of LIHI should be going under,” Witter said.
Affordable housing developer Ben Maritz told The Stranger that while he could see room for fixes and clarification with the moratoriums, he said that “essentially no evictions are proceeding to the point of a contested hearing where the moratorium would apply” because of a backlog of eviction cases. Maritz said, “The top priority needs to be restoring the functioning of the courts so that whatever rules we agree on can actually be applied.”
Oh, the Humanity!
Aside from lenders and other housing developers offering compelling arguments against Lee’s claims, tenant advocates point out how shitty it is for someone with the phrase “Housing is a human right!” in their email signature to advocate for a policy that could leave more people without housing.
Be:Seattle Co-Executive Director Kate Rubin called LIHI’s request “disgraceful” and in direct contradiction with their mission.
“How dare they claim that they ‘advocate for just housing policies’ and then advocate for removing renter protections in order for them to grow their portfolio,” Rubin said in a message to The Stranger. She asked if LIHI would have enough tiny shelters for all the low-income families they want to kick out.
Unsurprisingly, Council Member Tammy Morales’s office clapped back in an email to Lee.
“Many renters in Seattle with income have had issues with paying their rent,” wrote Morales Chief of Staff Andra Kranzler. “The request to amend the statutes to exclude people with earnings is contrary to best practice.”
Progressives should brace themselves to defend these tenant protections and whatever else the landlord lobby wants to claw back.
The real estate industry bought the current council, putting big bucks behind Council Members Rob Saka, Maritza Rivera, Dan Strauss, Bob Kettle, and Tanya Woo in their 2023 elections. Real estate interests really liked Moore, putting at least $100,000 into an independent expenditure to support her campaign. And now she’s the chair of the Housing and Human Services Committee.
Morales seems to be the city’s only clear tenant defender. Luckily the council increased its pro-renter caucus by one when Council Member-Elect Alexis Mercedes Rinck, fresh off her defeat of landlord Woo, joins the body. Her victory, in a high turnout, even year election, proves that the majority of Seattle supports a progressive platform. And progressives should remind the council every day how deeply out-of-step they are with the City they claim to represent.
“ 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?
“… 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.
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).
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”….
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.