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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

I anecdotally know of a few cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. There is a subculture that actively encourages this type of behavior and the laws are setup such that there are almost no consequences for it. I've also met people who bragged about doing it. While rare, it is still common enough that it has become a real problem and has become socially acceptable in some circles.

It is corrosive to the social contract when government policy tacitly encourages this behavior.

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It's not rare. I repeat. It's not rare. I am a landlord in Seattle with ~55 active tenants/leases. Let's just say that I know of many landlords in the circles I run in that have absolutely stopped renting to leftie types because they've had so many issues over the last few years with many of them over litigating everything; and deciding not to pay rent over the smallest non-issues, or just not paying rent at all. I could cite case after case; and this topic is especially salient to me in the present moment because I am in fact dealing with one of these tenants right now and its a total nightmare. I will spare you the gruesome details of trying to work with this particular tenant but just trust me—I have an incredibly high tolerance to stress and this individual is doing their best to get as far under my skin as possible.

When the political class or the cultural zeitgeist tells you over and over that landlords are leeches and that "any attempt to profit off of housing is unethical"—people are going to take that to heart and have a hatred for even well-meaning small landlords. If you don't believe this is the attitude, go visit r/Seattle. The inflammatory language of politicians and cultural leaders sets the tone which plays out as legal battles and fights in properties across the city.

This obviously creates an adverse selection problem where small landlords illegally apply their own prejudices and biases in tenant selection. Honestly—could you expect them not to—when the repercussions of picking a bad tenant are so great? And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants. It used to be that it was the section 8 or low income type that were a huge problem but now there's an educated leftish fringe that landlords are also avoiding. Honestly with good reason, IMO.

Some homeowners just decide to not list extra rooms in their house outright. I remember hearing something like that Seattle has the highest number of unrented empty rooms in the country (though someone should fact check that). With the political climate the way it is here, it's obvious as to why this is the case.

With all due respect, do you consider yourself, with ~55 active tenants/leases, to be a "small landlord"?

I read their story as "I'm not small, but I know a lot of smalls who tell me things they won't even tell their confessor."

Its spread across about ~ 6 houses. I'm definitely a small landlord. I deal with all tenant issues myself, handle all repairs, leases, and most importantly for me—maintain a healthy relationship (which has grown to many friendships). I use this term in contrast to a faceless, corporate landlord who owns larger apartment buildings. Small landlords and corporate landlords are nothing alike

Being generous with your ~6 number to be either 5 or 7 houses you have either 7.8-11 people per unit?

That's slumlord territory and not any morally better than corporate landlords unless your average unit size is a 4 bed/2 bath.

Also there is zero world where you have 6 houses, 50+ people and can call yourself a small time landlord. That's being able to live entirely off of your rental income and a full time landlord. You could maybe, _maybe_ get away with describing yourself as a medium time landlord.

Small time is living in a 3 floor house and renting the other 2 floors, or owning 1 other home to rent.

I'm sure OP meant 6 houses with several units in it each, not 7-11 people per house. Otherwise the distinction between house and unit doesn't make sense.

This is a small time landlord. Large landlords have easily over 10000 units, and he is one half of a percent of that.

I hope he is able to live off the rental income. It's a big job to manage 55 units and keep everything in shape and administratively going, deal with turnover and so on.

nah, having 6 buildings(not houses, if were being precise with terminology here) with multiple units in each, is not a small time landlord. If you can live entirely off the rental income then you are a full time landlord and can at best claim that you aren't a large corporate landlord, but you don't get to invoke the idea that you are some sort of mom and pop situation renting out a spare unit, which is what people assume when you say "small time landlord"

I didn't invoke a "mon and pop situation renting out a spare unit" idea, that's your own that you're projecting on my comment.

I did say that they are a small landlord, and I stand by it given that a large landlord is several orders of magnitude larger than them. If in your world that's only a label you want to give someone renting out a single spare unit, then so be it. I disagree.

> mon and pop situation renting out a spare unit

> small landlord

Those are effectively synonymous to me. The line in the sand that definitively makes you not a small time landlord is if you earn enough from rental income after expenses to make as much as the average job's income.

If you disagree I will need you to define what "small time landlord" means to you then so we can figure out the gap in our understanding.

"Small" is a word indicating that quantitatively relative to other things, it is less, i.e. Very Small < Small < Medium < Large < Very Large.

According to [1] (Doorloop, 2026), Greystar manages 823,581 units as the largest landlord. The 10th largest landlord is WinnCompanies with 120,855 units. These are "very large" to me. If we make a generous curve then a large landlord has 10% of those units, so somewhere in the 10,000 unit range, a medium landlord 10% of that or 1,000 units, a small landlord 10% of that or 100 units, and a very small landlord has the last interval of 1-10 units. Hence, 55 units is somewhere between very small and small.

[1] https://www.doorloop.com/blog/largest-property-management-co...

I gave my definition for what a small time landlord is in the comment you replied to.

You can disagree with that definition but don’t pretend like I didn’t give one and then explain to me what my beliefs should be.

I'm the OP—just chiming in, I can just hardly live off the rental income I make, but its a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE. Yes what I am is not analogous to someone renting out a few extra rooms. I just think my experience is analogous to that of a small time landlord in that I know each tenant very well and we have good relationships—and I manually handle each part of their tenant experience. To add more detail, I share a bedroom in a 25 bedroom house that I own, which accounts for a bit more than half of my tenants.

> I can just hardly live off the rental income I make, but its a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE

there is a large gap between "can live off of"(my words) and "a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE"(your words). If you're making more than the median household income which based on the fed numbers is ~84k/yr[1] you've crossed the line past small time landlord. You may be making less than that, but I am going to be surprised if you are with ~55 tenants.

[1]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N

That's a telling detail. How many 'big time landlords' are in the position of living in one of their 25 bedroom units? I'm going to skip the 'share a bedroom' 'cos that might well mean something otherwise desirable. In the best case scenario I too would be sharing a bedroom, but it wouldn't be my best case scenario to be in a 25 unit building unless it was quite large and well built.

Sorry, I meant I live in a bedroom in the 25 br house. Its not a particularly nice or well-built house; it's a frat house near the UW campus in Seattle. As a matter of fact, I live in the basement in the smallest room in the house. I am not a fancy person and don't need anything more than the basic necessities to remain content, and I like the neighborhood here.

Now, where could the world’s tiniest violin be? Garfield!

55 isn’t small by definition and under the law. You may feel small because it’s just you, and you don’t realize how much you’ve accomplished or the asymmetric bargaining position that affords you but your perspective isn’t corresponding with reality.

That being said, I do think a system that tenant rights to be as abusive of legal process as we have in some states ends up hurting tenants themselves. I think our courts should move much faster so nonpayment is resolved faster. But I also think all landlords should be required to pay 20% of rent to a home building fund so that new housing actually gets built.

Wouldn't 20% tax on rent just lead to 25% general increase on rents? I don't think there are that much margin around in leveraged landlords.

Really better would be just to bump something like income tax and use money from there for same purpose.

If leads to building that floods the system with supply then rent won’t increase. Landlords and lenders would have to adjust purchase prices and cap rates so valuations would come down. So this would need be gradually phased in until normal. The government would need to support home builders, buyers and landlords. But eventually the housing stock supply increase would match and be tied to new household formation.

At the end of the day most economic activity is really an exercise in ratios. Some states don’t charge sales taxes. Some change double digits. Yet retailers are able to function in both environments.

What is clear is that rental and purchase housing is increasing beyond inflation since 2008 and COVID and that’s not good for tenants or landlords.

If a landlord can charge 1200 instead of 1000 why wouldn’t they? They’ll charge the maximum they can get away with, costs are irrelevant

Two landlords, one with a mortgage, one without, will charge the same amount for the same property.

Yes. And the other one is forced to charge 1200. So the other one can charge for example 1190. And the renters will choose the 1190. And then the next renter has to pay 1200.

Or the one without mortgage goes like I only get 800. Maybe instead I just throw this money in government bonds for better gains and save money...

Other option for same outcome could be just to charge any renter 20% on top of their rent. Which they directly pay to this fund. That would push rents down as they are able to pay less. Achieving exactly same effect.

You’re assuming there’s too much supply, both landlords will be able to rent the unit, one will make more money.

> And the other one is forced to charge 1200.

No.

Nobody is forced to charge anything. The market forces limit what can be charged, as an upper bound.

And I'm saying this with experience as an actual landlord.

> If a landlord can charge 1200 instead of 1000 why wouldn’t they?

Because someone else could undercut them. If everyone is being levied the same toll, and everyone knows that, it’s not that risky to just pass along the tax.

> If a landlord can charge 1200 instead of 1000 why wouldn’t they? They’ll charge the maximum they can get away with, costs are irrelevant

This is rarely true. Only universally true for large corporate landlords where there is an entire corporate structure maximizing every dollar due to personal incentives put in place by executives/ownership.

Small landlords (yes, even those with 6 buildings) are almost never min/maxing rent like this. They are optimizing for other things like time investment and hassle factor. And even doing the right thing.

I've both rented and landlorded. In neither side of those transactions over decades was I either paying maximal rent or charging it. When property taxes went up as a renter, my small time landlord would show me the tax bill and I'd pay exactly the increase. Same went for when I had tenants.

I'd go as far as to say the majority of mom and pop landlords are not looking to charge maximum rent. They only start doing so when they have a problematic tenant they are trying to "manage out" of the unit.

This is right. Increased costs are either passed on to tenants or decrease the landlord’s cash flow. Those are the only two options. I don’t have any data on which occurs more frequently. But what is true is an increase in expenses means less debt service is available so purchase prices come down.

>Small landlords (yes, even those with 6 buildings) are almost never min/maxing rent like this. They are optimizing for other things like time investment and hassle factor. And even doing the right thing.

Yup. Have a single residential in a otherwise commercial building in NYC. They pay ~50% market for a spacious 3 BR for a number of reasons; mainly because we have known them for a long time and they struggle with health issues so we never really raised them. Charging them market would put them on the street. They can afford the 50%, live nicely, and the commercial tenants pay market which pays for the building with a little leftover. If they ever move we will certainly charge more but I see no reason to gouge like others.

Purchase prices will come down because the percentage of rent available for debt service will decrease. So the cap rate will be calculated on a smaller denominator.

So a slumlord

> have a hatred for even well-meaning small landlords

In what way are you well meaning? You're only doing it for money.

The people not paying you rent are also only doing it for money.

Sucks when people behave like you, huh.

Yes I’m doing it for the money, I have to be compensated for my time and the financial investment obviously. People who decide to deceive me break not only a social contract but also a legal contract and a commitment they made at the time of signing a lease. If everyone acted like them, there would be no stable housing available for anyone. Talk about a bad take…

> Yes I’m doing it for the money

Right, so not well meaning. You said well meaning. You're taking that back. Correct?

You're upset at someone maximizing money at your expense. You like it when you maximize money at someone else's expense just fine. Correct?

The world's smallest violin is playing.

Please no 'I'm providing a valuable service' argument. We've already established your only interest is money.

I never said my only interest is money. At your job, is your only interest money? Do you not feel a social obligation to your coworkers; want to do good for your teammate and your company? Again, talk about a stupid take, as if humans are one dimensional like that. Corporate landlords and hedge funds that own apartment sky rises are probably only in it for the money. You can't say the same thing about every small landlord just because they make a profit.

I'm an open source developer. To me, it tracks that people can have other motivations and balance those with money/survival and all. What nikkwong is saying is, you can want to do well, have social obligations, take action to serve the community and not just your own benefit, and even want to do so because you sleep better and have nicer interactions with people as a rule. That tracks, I believe it, that's what I do.

The critics here are trying to make the argument that no you can't. Any such motivation is completely pretend, and everybody is 100% always dedicated to only their own benefit, not taking any of these squishier benefits into account ever, and you're fooling yourself if you think otherwise and you're conning other people on purpose if you PRETEND otherwise. There is nothing but paperclip maximizing, and we're all robots but some of us are lying robots.

These critics exist, and I'm sure they live their beliefs. Sucks to be them, even when they include the literal wealthiest people in the world, because they live those beliefs. They're inflicting them on the rest of us, but it doesn't make them correct, it just means the rest of us have to deal with the harm they inflict. Cheers nikkwong, thanks for being more of a gray area, like a lot of us are :)

I'm sure some slave owners were 'nice people'. Still slave owners, right?

But I treat my slaves better than everyone I know and I only have half a dozen! I don't only have slaves for profit!

Slave owners in the south were actually far more likely to be better people than today's landlords because they had far less choice but to compete with other people who engaged in slavery than landlords of today.

The 'only' strawman and the projections, oh my. 'Every accusation is a confession' remains true. 'Sucks to be them', 'inflicting them on the rest of us'. Gee, the person on the internet you know nothing about is 'inflicting harm' on society. Think of the landlord's feelings, they appear to be hurt! Look, he accused someone with an already high paying job who landlords in his free time of only caring about money! Only he said, does he not know that there can be multiple motivating factors? He said only fellas, only! I rest my case, only.

Landlords are slave owners? Gosh. On the bright side, who knew Hacker News was so revolutionary?

Alex, how do you interact with AI? I don't, 'cos I don't use it. Are you one of the people who eke out performance gains by threatening to shoot the AI's dog if it makes a mistake? Or are you one of the people who are prepared to accuse those people of doing literally the same thing as extorting living humans?

I stand by, sucks to be the critics to whom everything is dominance and profit and nothing else merits the slightest consideration.

And yikes whoo boy does it suck to be a person who argues 'back in the day the slave owners were nicer than landlords of today because they had to compete with other slave owners'. WOW. what?

Good lord, renting a property to someone who voluntarily signs a lease is equivalent to slavery?! Give me a break.

I will say you're doing an excellent job of backing up OPs post. There absolutely are people with an unhinged view of reality who will aggressively try to screw over people they think are in the "wrong" group.

Arguing that poor people never try to abuse the system is some serious ivory tower BS.

Society isn't supposed to run on philanthropy.

What exactly do you mean by "well meaning small landlord"?

I just try to be the landlord that I would want to have. I respond to my tenants quickly, always give them concessions, let them pay late, or at a discount when they’re struggling, referred them to work at my companies, etc, etc. it’s not all about the money, it’s also being a good member of the community, for me. This is in contrast to a corporate landlord where your $1500 disappears into a void every month.

Look, I'm sure you're a nice person and a better landlord than many corporate landlords; and trying to do well.

I'm genuinely glad you're trying, and helping your tenants when you can; but I think you've drunk a bit too much of your own kool-aid.

From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.

What exactly are you asking for? They clearly are expressing empathy for others’ situations.

I live in a managed building that is completely soulless. I needed to extend my lease by one month before moving out. They wanted me to sign a new 12 month lease at a higher rate, break it, and pay a two month penalty for terminating early. This took over a month to get to something remotely human.

There is absolutely a difference between someone treating people like people and bad landlords.

Also, they aren’t throwing their money into a void. They’re literally getting housing.

“Money into a void” is the exact phrase that the _person I’m replying to_ used when comparing themselves to a corporate landlord.

What are you basing your judgment of OP on? He is listing various ways he goes above and beyond for his tenants even though he certainly doesn't have to. Your credit card company doesn't waive your late fees, yet he does when he knows tenants experience hardships. That's pretty awesome.

Also, the money doesn't go into a void: Tenants receive housing in return.

What judgment? I literally wrote that they’re a nice person!

“Money into a void” is the phrasing _they_ used!

> but I think you've drunk a bit too much of your own kool-aid

That (rather judge-y) part negates the "nice" part your started out with. I don't think OP "drank too much of his own kool-aid", he simply listed all the nice things he does for his tenants, which are great and well beyond what you could expect from an unrelated party in a contract for a service.

Yes, and then what was their last sentence?

I literally want to have a landlord. They provide a valuable service. I could afford to buy the places where I rent but actively avoid it.

The idea that landlords don’t provide a valuable service is a kind of willful denial of reality.

Much of the land in New England / northeastern USA was apportioned to proprietors without any service rendered, plus squatting on grandfathered regulations that no one else can take advantage of. The actual improvement is a service, but commonly it's something like a shithole house where the physical manifestation of the improvement is like 10% of the real estate value.

In someplaces like Kansas where people actually mixed their labor with the land (homesteading) to claim it and then improved it and the title transferred in capitalistic exchange, landlords are basically 100% providing a service. But in New York very little of the "value" provided has anything to do with services and labor mixed with the land as someone like Adam Smith envisioned as value generation. It's largely just some proprietor being handed land in the 1600s with the wand of a King, taking the shit by violence, then making regulations out the ass with violence (to make their shithole house pretend to provide a more valuable 'service') and then exempting themselves via grandfathering and then people exchanging title for same. Their service is a legacy of beating the shit out of Indians with weapons and then the populace with government and then allocating the value to themselves.

Maybe. But I had a landlord triple my rent in NYC because he wanted to sell the unit. I didn’t want to move but had no option.

>he wanted to sell the unit

You had an option if it was for sale.

Your handle is fitting.

> From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.

Surely that's the case for all sorts of services we pay for. Renting a house is paying for a service. The money disappears and in return you get the service. A nice landlord (and by nice I mean - responsive to problems, following laws, empathetic to the tenant, trusting of the tenant etc) provides a better service than a bad one. Unfortunately you rarely know which kind of landlord you have until you move in.

I think it's fair to say that there are bad landlords, and that there are circumstances where landlords are exploitative. But that doesn't change the fact there are also circumstances where landlords provide a useful service to people. Buying a house isn't always practical - landlords should exist to provide a service to people who don't want long term financial commitments.

> From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.

Not true for everyone. I was quite happy to pay my previous small time landlord. We had a very productive business relationship, at least from my perspective.

He fixed the large things and I didn't have to worry about it. In return I did basic maintenance and bothered him maybe once a year on average when something larger needed fixing.

I felt I got plenty of value from that relationship and my money certainly did not o into a void. My current mortgage though? Most of that goes off into the void of the market and I miss my previous living situation quite a bit most days.

That’s awesome. When I was growing up my parents were denied housing because they had too many kids and were almost homeless one time until a nice landlord of the same religion agreed to rent to us. Please take your responsibility seriously as it seems you do.

That being said there are “professional” tenants that try to scam the system to the detriment of landlords and other tenants. I would fully applaud resistance to their efforts to take advantage of the system.

Honest question - how do you know a potential tenant is “leftie type”?

Honestly? not op but that seems easy.

It was an honest question.

Don't worry: they'll tell you.

The lefty landlords are an even bigger problem for housing affordability than the lefty tenants. They want the anti-property rights boot up the ass of anyone trying to build new homes or dwellings, under the auspices of endangered owls or environmental review or "character of the community" or the wetlands or whatever the current scam is. It's all the same commie shit but only for themselves and at the expense of everyone else, of course dressed up that the dumber and younger end of the tenants actually believe it's in their interest.

You know the horseshoe on the door that will stop the fae? He has just put instead of it maga hat with a tesla badge on it.

Social media? The problematic types of left- and right wingers don’t tend to be quiet.

Dyed hair, nose rings, tattoos, short hair on women, effeminate type looks on men, etc.

People on the fair ends of political spectrums tend to change their plumage to show their affiliation.

Short hair on women could just be German. Or a middle aged-career woman.

> And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants.

I know someone with something like 120 units. Unassuming nice old lady that makes over a million a year. She tries to rent to immigrants as much as possible since they don't cause issues.

The best people to rent to are illegal immigrants, you don’t have to do things like ensure they have livable accommodation as they first sign of complaint you just phone up the authorities and they get kicked out.

The net effect is most of the people I know with a rental or two in Seattle will only rent via direct referrals from people they know, which also allows them to rent at a lower rate. Their properties are no longer available to the general public. The demand is high enough that this works. Sucks if you are new to Seattle though.

This kind of non-payment of rent abuse exploded during COVID.

>stopped renting to leftie types

I’m curious how they’re managing to do this. I don’t give any outward signals of being a “leftie type” but I absolutely am. Conversely, I know lots of people who have a very punk look but are super conservative.

I'd like to try and give you some sympathy, but my last landlord was a well-regarded property management firm who left me with no heat from the end of October to the weekend of Martin Luther King Day in New England, effectively only fixing it once I withheld rent, got on the local news, and was threatening a lawsuit. So, uh... yeah plenty of landlords have done a lot to earn that reputation for the class as a whole.

That's true, but I think when you pick a place to live in, you're not only really only interviewing the living establishment itself, but also the landlord/property management associated with it. I make an effort to do all of the tours of the units myself and establish good repoire with the tenants from the get-go. It's certainly inexcusable if a landlord doesn't fix things that impair living conditions—in Seattle we have a law that things of this nature must be fixed within 48 hours which I think is a reasonable law.

Lefty tenant here. I def. stopped paying my rent a few times until my landlord fixed their shit or agreed to stop scamming me.

Last time I did it I signed a lease for a year, with 2 months of advance notice if I decided to leave (in the UK). I told them 2 months before the end of my lease, and they told me I had to wait for the end of my lease, then wait 2 months, and then I could be out.

I just stopped paying rent, and left them a horrible one star review on gmaps.

One day he showed up at my place (with soup who was coming to fix something) and tried to enter. I told him to stay out. And then he started crying and telling me how I could not just stop paying rent. I could tell how hard it was to be a small landlord.

I told him that I would resume paying if they signed smthg to agree to let me break the lease at the year end AND reimburse me the fees that appeared at the least minute, a year ago, right as I was signing the lease in front of them.

They agreed, reimbursed me my caution/deposit at the end, easy.

Would recommend just stop paying your rent if anything ever happens. I would do it again.

> I def. stopped paying my rent a few times until my landlord fixed their shit

In most municipalities, this is OK so long as the thing that needs to be fixed is a habitability issue. Heat, water, etc

> One day he showed up at my place (with soup who was coming to fix something) and tried to enter. I told him to stay out.

??? You wouldn't let him solve the issue you stopped paying for? How do you justify that?

The issue he stopped paying for was an explicit rejection of their tenant rights, and fixing a separate issue doesn't fix that.

I let the soup in.

If you own 6 houses, you don't only have an income the size of a full-time job but also make money out of the appreciation of property prices. Couldn't you and your immediate family retire by just selling these 6 houses? Or is the situation different in Seattle?

Also you are saying you are also working as a senior SWE. How are you so involved with 55 tenants and balance a full-time job at the same time? I've known people with 1 tenant who needed days off to deal with their issues, I find it hard to imagine personally dealing with 55.

Honestly curious here

I could sell all of the houses and retire, yeah. Especially the poor performing ones, after accounting for the mortgage I am in the red on two of them every month. I don't know if I expect property prices to appreciate in Seattle as we're flooding the market with housing and in the US we're having some unstable demographic shifts so I try to select properties that perform well on day 1, going forward.

Yes, my family also asks me how I do it. I am just working constantly, from sunup to sundown; pretty much 7 days a week. I don't always do a perfect job juggling the responsibilities but I do my best and I think 99-100% of my tenants would say they're enjoying the accommodations; and I think my manager would say my performance is good. Hoping I can get married and start a family soon and at that point I think hiring a property manager would be the correct move. But I have a very high amount of resilience to stress and being upset so being consistently under pressure isn't too much of a problem for me personally.

Also keep in mind there are certain types of tenants that are lower maintenance than others, so proper tenant selection is important.

> corrosive to the social contract

What we see is iterated prisoner's dilemma. Enough people have had their landlords play "defect" against them (rent rises in excess of wage inflation, evictions, failure to do maintenance, intrusion) that the public have started playing "defect" against the landlords.

Same as in a lot of American public life.

Also like, objectively the courts are on the side of evictions. They have lots of practice and your local PD will be happy to help. The process works just fine.

Most places have a pretty clean eviction process: You provide a very short notice, 14 days for non-payment, and then get a court hearing.

If landlords are upset that it takes a long time to get to a court date, sorry, get in line with the rest of us who can't get basic Justice because the US doesn't fund public services, which the court is.

Like what do you expect, that we just throw people out onto the street on your word? Do you not see how obviously that will get abused?

As someone who also lives in Seattle, I'd be curious to see any verifiable citations to such a wild claim

He said “anecdotally”. In any case, I was wondering that if I know a friend who does this, how could I ever present a verifiable citation for it? You may have to rethink your ask.

Anecdotes aren't usually admissible as evidence, is the thing

https://www.discovery.org/a/nightmare-tenant-in-bellevue-con...

I’m on phone but if you search “Kim Seattle landlord” you can get more details of various articles on the situation.

That is such a sad article.

Sure, but the comment upthread could provide evidence that "it is still common enough that it has become a real problem".

Okay. I can anecdotally tell you that user jandrewrogers does not know of any cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. Our anecdotes cancel each other out.

> how could I ever present a verifiable citation for it?

There would likely be at least one (1) report of such a wild claim due to how wild it is. We wouldn't need anecdotes!

I only know of one https://komonews.com/news/local/twitter-shutdown-seattle-off...

I mean, Elmo's SpaceX is busy lying about being "In Redmond" too (they're in Redmond Ridge, a significantly more rural area about 6 miles away)

There are such people. I have a unit in Seattle that sits empty because I don't want to risk getting stuck with such tenants.

In Seattle, you can't:

1. Evict people from November to April (it's "winter"). 2. Evict people with schoolchildren during the school year. 3. Run background checks on prospective tenants. 4. You _must_ rent to the first qualifying tenant. 5. You must offer 3 months in rent as compensation if you decline to renew the lease. 6. The maximum rent increase is capped.

Oh, and eviction process takes about 1.5 years now because the courts are overloaded and the tenant can use procedural tricks to drag out the process.

If you want names, this case made newspapers: https://wealthandpoverty.center/2025/02/11/the-bellevue-squa...

I explicitly bought in Lynwood so I’d have the option to rent out my house and avoid king county

Apart from maybe being a little more flexible on evictions, none of the other reasons seem problematic.

For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?

The giving tenant three month rent thing is for a very small circumstance - for example huge rent increases if the tenant income is low, condo remodeling, etc. The wording is: “landlords who issue a housing cost increase of 10% or more (within a 12-month period) must pay relocation assistance if the affected household earns 80% or less of the Area Median Income and chooses to move.”

Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.

It seems like you don’t like the tenant having any rights, and you want to impose your will upon them.

This is an insanely bad take.

> For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?

You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building. When the government forces you to choose the first applicant who meets your selection criteria, your selection criteria becomes incredibly strict—720+ credit score, makes 4x the rent, etc. Especially when evicting a bad tenant becomes basically impossible, landlords work even harder to vet candidates, meaning there are a lot of false negatives that aren't offered housing. Seriously, you can't evict a tenant just because its winter? You know how many people take advantage of that — read my sibling comment in my thread. I myself in Seattle have dealt with multiple tenants who have done this so they could have free rent as their lease expired. What do you think this does to my tenant selection process? I up the bar.

> Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.

You act like there's an oligopoly that dictates rent prices from their mountaintop that we all have to abide by. We live in a free market, and small landlords compete with large buildings for tenants. Creating these types of caps just makes the system less efficient — focuses efforts on the false pretense of tenants rights rather than the true equalizer like building more housing. And honestly, it just drives small landlords out of the market who can't handle it. This just leaves corporate landlords who are certainly less tenant friendly and will further this tenant vs landlord arms-race. We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.

> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building.

That’s basically discrimination? Make a strict selection criteria, that’s fine. The city also has affordable housing for people who don’t qualify. You set what works for you, why do you care if it’s too strict?

I am not acting like there is an oligopoly, but not having tenant protections means tenants are at the mercy of shitty landlords. And there are a TON of them. Am I not supposed to have any rights, and the landlords gets to do whatever they want? Free market doesn’t mean regulation free.

Edit: you said “We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.” - what do you propose? What about landlords who don’t want housing built because they like owning a scarce asset? What kind of rights do you think tenants should have?

Yes, discrimination based upon characteristics that aren't immutable is perfectly fine and something we do every day. I discriminate against my neighbor who invited me over drinks in favor of my best friend who invited me to his birthday. I discriminate against the potential hire who doesn’t have experience in this line of work in favor of the person who’s a nationally renowned expert. I discriminate against a tenant with a history of failing to make rent in favor of someone who consistently provides payment every month. People are different and valuing one over another in specific contexts is hardly scandalous. It only becomes a proble if you decide to discriminate against someone based upon immutable characteristics such as their race, sex, national origin, etc. because you’re not treating them as an individual.

I get where you’re coming from, but none of them are scarce inelastic resources. The work one especially doesn’t feel like discrimination.

It’s also very different - you’re hiring someone to do a job for you, vs wanting someone who’ll pay rent on time and not destroy the property. A mediocre employee vs an excellent employee can make any huge difference to a business.

That’s not the case with renters - if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.

Your experience as a renter is not the same as the experience of a landlord. If you've been on your first job for a month and you pinky swear to pay rent on time and the next candidate has been on their job for 3 years then I'll take that candidate every time. It's a risk calculation. You are more likely to lose your job than the other candidate, and when you do and can't pay rent anymore and won't leave then that is a very expensive problem for me.

The same goes for savings, credit score, and other factors. These are not nearly as fungible as you seem to think.

If everyone did that then how’s the person with a new job able to get a home? They might not all do it but it severely affects choices.

You also have more capacity to absorb a short vacancy in case this person is to lose their job. Can’t derisk your way out of everything.

It sounds like you never had to deal with shitty landlords, or didn’t really struggle too much in life.

> If everyone did that then how’s the person with a new job able to get a home?

That's exactly my point. If the regulations weren't so insane and burdensome (see other posters' points on not being able to evict promptly for nonpayment, for example) then the person with the brand new job would be able to quickly rent a home because it's not an undue risk for a landlord.

You can't ask landlords on the one hand to open their home to anyone, and on the other hand deny them the right to remove tenants that don't hold up their end of the bargain. Do you not see how that's completely unfair?

> You also have more capacity to absorb a short vacancy in case this person is to lose their job.

That is not a universal truth. Landlords have debt service/mortgage payments, taxes, maintenance, insurance and other payments. Especially smaller landlords actually do not - at all - have the capacity to absorb a vacancy or (even worse) a non-paying tenant.

> Can’t derisk your way out of everything.

Yes, but unduly moving risk from one party (tenant) to the other party (landlord) is certainly not the way to go either. If I just take your car and you don't have any recourse to get it back for 6+ months because the courts are backlogged and everyone else goes "well, you have a car, so you must be wealthy, what are you complaining about?" how would that make you feel?

> if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.

Based on those two sole criteria, no, they aren't. Person A might call weekly about trivial matters that they should be taking care of themselves (lightbulb burned out, oven needs cleaning, refrigerator water filter needs replacement, etc.), while person B just takes care of things and doesn't bother the landlord.

Yeah but you can’t eat your cake and have it too. Part of renting is responding to complaints. If you don’t want to do that then you shouldn’t be renting.

I had a landlord ask me “you’re not going to call me for basic things right?”. I’m paying you money, I’ll call you whenever I want. Didn’t rent from him. You can tell me do it yourself but why would I put money into someone else’s property?

This is such binary thinking. People have different ways of interacting with people. Some people are easier to deal with than others, and that was the parents' point, not that they never want to respond to reasonable complaints.

Landlords should provide well maintained housing and respond to reasonable complaints, and tenants should be swiftly evicted if they don't pay rent or destroy the unit they're living in. That's fair to both sides.

> That’s basically discrimination?

Discrimination is fine, as long as the discrimination is not based on protected classes. If I were a landlord, I'd discriminate against people who act like assholes, for example, regardless of their ability to pay the rent, my rationale being that an asshole will likely be a problem tenant. And that I just don't enjoy dealing with assholes. Not sure "no assholes" is a reasonable thing to list on an official rental advertisement.

> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house

We already tried that. It turns out that people are racist, so now we need laws to protect against that. It sucks for all the decent non-racist folks but the alternative of not having those protections was far worse.

If you force people to have someone in their house that they don't want, they are not going to rent their house out. This will lead to less units on the market. Your point about racism is fair, but I don't think the answer is a solution that reduces rentable units on the market.

What alternative solution to housing-related racism would you suggest?

The one that actually exists? Have you never heard of the HUD fair housing initiatives programs? You hire a white actor and a black actor with the same job, income, credit, etc and if a landlord consistently refuses to rent to the black actors, you sic the DoJ on them for violating the Fair Housing Act

Nope, I hadn't heard of that. Neat. I see two problems though:

1. I can see this being effective against larger landlord that will have many units available every year, ensuring that adequate testing can be performed. But on smaller landlords with only a few units, it seems like it'd be hard to test. (for example, you get rejected from an apartment. The landlord rents it out to someone else. You file a FHIP complaint, but the landlord no longer has any units available so they cannot test.)

2. It seems like this is largely driven by complaints? If I was rejected from an apartment, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to glean whether or not it was based on race.

Re #2: I feel like people of the kinds of races that often get discriminated against have pretty decent radar when it comes to figuring out why they were rejected.

Okay, sell it to someone who will live there then. You're not a saint for taking a unit someone wants to buy and forcing them to rent instead.

How is renting different from hiring in that regard? Nobody would consider requiring employers to hire the first qualified candidate, but at the same time, we don't allow employers to discriminate on the basis of race.

Why couldn't the same law apply to residential leasing?

Are we sure that law is working as intended? Or are employers simply not admitting to factoring race into the decision? It is next to impossible to prove a candidate was rejected on the basis of race, especially when you can legally reject someone for not being a "culture fit" on the team.

I'd also argue the stakes are higher when leasing, so landlords will be less likely to take a chance on a race they don't like. Most jobs in the US are at-will employment so you can be fired at any time for almost any reason, but evicting a tenant can be a long process.

>t is next to impossible to prove a candidate was rejected on the basis of race

It is possible to prove a company is disproportionally one or the other when making the claim. Of course when an industry has far less applicants or members of a certain group that's to be expected but still. Consequentially I've heard of some pretty blatant race based selection especially in the US. It's just that that selection ends up excluding white people (or east asians) A while ago I even discussed with a hr person here on hn who was defending their hiring of that sort with the most flowery wording about 'just giving priority' or 'reaching out to members of their prefered group specifically' fist if all they get is not the desired group.

This is utter BS. Seattle is about 40% non-White. And has never been racist, or even had slavery (outside the Native population).

If you think there aren't any racist landlords in Seattle (or any particular place), then I have a bridge I'd like to sell you...

Having a large non-white population is not a protection against race-related discrimination.

Of course there are racist people in Seattle. But they are not a significant part of the population.

I've lived in properties with no form of rent control whatsoever. Landlords issuing 10%+ rent increases is awful. it denies you the stability that's granted by fair/consistent rent increases. It erodes the community fabric by having a revolving door of tenants who live there 1-2 years before leaving.

I do agree that we should focus on other remedies such as building more. However, even in a market with ample housing, I'm not convinced that some Landlords would still just as happily take the 'I bet they'd rather a 10% rent increase than deal with the hassle of moving' gamble.

Most of the people I've met who are anti rent control/stabilization usually don't have the pleasure of a landlord who has decided to engage in such tactics. Almost always they argue from some place of guaranteed housing safety.

this is an issue that applies to people making 30k and also people making 300k.

You could sign a longer lease and get the stability you desire. Negotiate a five year lease and stability is yours.

None of the landlords I’ve rented from wanted to do that. Sample size of like 8.

I've done it multiple times. Everytime I wanted to do it, it was possible.

If you offer to sign a 5 year lease at current prices, then yeah, can see why they might not go for that.

I would definitely take it, personally. I have never increased rent on any of my tenants in Seattle, ever. I've had some tenants for 7 years+.

I like the approach Finland took when it abolished rent control in the 1990s. Basically, you are not allowed to chain fixed-term leases indefinitely. If the actual intent is that the tenant stays until further notice, the lease agreement must reflect that.

Now, if you have an indefinite lease, the landlord can't increase the rent, unless the basis for the increase is already in the agreement. Typically the rent is tied to a measure of inflation, and the landlord chooses once a year if they should make the increase.

That's actually fine, but the people who oppose rent control would probably not accept that because that's basically the system (give or take) that already exists in places where rent control already exists.

My ex also had a lease that stipulated automatic 5% increases, until they made him sign a new agreement mandating the non-negotiated increase would be 7.5% instead.

NYC has a particularly spectacular brand of hostility towards tenants (the latest trend I've seen is, instead of broker fees, absorbent move in/move out fees paid to property managers).

Are you also wanting a company to have to hire the first qualifying candidate and immediately stop all hiring? That is nonsensical. A landlord and a tenant should be free to contract as both parties wish.

Does this "first tenant" rule not incentivize people to apply immediately, sight unseen, and then they just eat the credit check fee on the apartments that they end up not choosing? Or maybe they can even bail before the credit check is done, if they can see all of their candidate apartments in that time, or at least do see the one they applied for and decide they don't want it?

> Does this "first tenant" rule not incentivize people to apply immediately, sight unseen

Is that a bad thing? Presumably that means they liked something about your rental. Happened a ton during COVID.

> Or maybe they can even bail before the credit check is done, if they can see all of their candidate apartments in that time

I highly doubt this happens in practice. It can be like $50 per application easy - renters are in general cost conscious. I certainly only put down the fees on apartments I’m serious about (usually two max). Why waste money?

> It seems like you don’t like the tenant having any rights, and you want to impose your will upon them.

No. Have you heard the phrase: "justice delayed is justice denied"? I want this rule to apply to _everyone_.

Also I would agree with all those rules with one addition: unpaid rent should not be discharged during bankruptcy.

The fact that you cannot evict your tenant until they get a court hearing IS the system providing justice. It's ensuring that a landlord can't just throw you out on a whim, and you have to figure out housing until you get a court to say "Actually you weren't allowed to throw out that tenant" and have to deal with evicting the new tenant who was moved into your unit and also get you back into it.

It sure seems funny that it's only "Injustice" when it hurts the landlord, because apparently landlords aren't allowed to read the history of before we had these kinds of things.

If you are upset that court takes forever now in the US, congratulations, join the rest of us. You are not special in that regard.

Nothing on that list sounds like a particular hardship. Your "Oh, and" is unfortunate and ought to be addressed, but then again, that was intended as your cherry-topper, not your main course.

This is people's _homes_ we're talking about here, not a baseball card where privileging the owner is without too much consequence. If you lack the empathy to understand why this is a special case, maybe don't be a landlord.

Actually landlords have a reasonable expectation you don't turn _their home_ into a crack house and no one should be forced to rent to scumbags.

So do other nearby tenants who aren't crack users.

Why should landlords have that expectation? I think the default case should be that when someone rents a space they have freedom to do what they want with that space until they stop renting it, and then when they stop renting it they must be forced to return it to its original condition.

Did you know in Australia it's normal to give your landlord a tour of your house every 3 months to prove you haven't broken it? That's completely ridiculous.

And how exactly do you "force" the deadbeat broke tenant that trashed your house to return it to its original condition?

Keep their deposit

$600,000 asset vs a $3000 deposit

It’s not like they don’t have insurance (they do) to cover the cost of damages.

No. There is no insurance in the world that covers the cost of eviction, loss of rents, or intentional damage/vandalism.

Throwing around general statements like these when you don't actually know about the topic doesn't help the conversation.

I researched this. And there are no insurance companies in WA that offer these kinds of products for landlords.

Renters insurance primarily covers damage to _their_ property and only some narrow cases of damage to the unit (e.g. fires, flooding, etc.). A deadbeat tenant also will likely not be paying for insurance past the first month.

To give you some perspective, the eviction process costs around $20000 right now in legal fees. And you'll need to pay them, because the commie "housing justice" redistributionists know all the procedural tricks to delay and derail the process. Even in the best case, you're looking at a year of delay, and it can be more than 2 years for people with children. So that can be $100k+ of loss.

No insurance company is going to assume these kinds of risks without sky-high premiums.

A deposit doesn't even cover the legal fees to evict a tenant (which can be north of $10,000 between lawyer, filing fees, and so on).

Add to that loss of rents for multiple months (while the landlord has to pay mortgage, insurance, taxes) and damages to property, and now you're asking a landlord to pay tens of thousands of dollars of their money.

> _their home_

It's not their home.

They can't walk in, wipe their shoes on the hallway rug, make a pot of coffee, use the bathroom, turn on the TV, and take a nap on the couch. At least not without their tenant's invitation.

When they chose to rent out the house they yielded some of their property rights. The old landlord argument that "it's my house I should be able to XYZ" doesn't hold water.

It may be the landlord's house, but it's not their home. A home is something you live in.

I don't understand why you wouldn't sell and invest elsewhere in this case.

Apparently, even with all these rules designed to damage the profitability of landlords, being landlord must be extremely profitable as they keep doing it.

It's not. Seattle is losing small landlords left and right. Instead, people are selling houses to large management companies that can spread the risk across multiple units.

https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/mega-property-inves...

People who have just one unit are usually not renting it for mega-profits but to cut their losses. It's moving due to a job with the mortgage underwater or slumping market so selling would incur a heavy loss or you want to come back and live in the house eventually, or inheriting a house where you'd like to move but unable at the moment due to job or family circumstances.

Even if you don't live in the house it still costs money in taxes, maintenance, and possibly mortgage so renting it would offset that. Having someone living in the house would also reduce maintenance costs. However, if renting can cost you more money at the end due to tenant protections, it would be wise to take a fixed loss of keeping the house empty than try your luck on rental market. Landlords with multiple units can price the risk into the rent so they can come ahead but with just one unit your risk-adjusted rent will be way out of the market.

Many people do. I certainly never wanted anything to do with that rental market when I had a vacant condo.

The unintended consequence is that there are closed rental networks that never advertise and only rent to vetted people with reputation on the line. These often have cheaper rents than publicly advertised rental properties because the risk of bad tenants has been reduced.

It turns the public rental market into an adverse selection phenomenon. Over time, the best tenants have access to cheaper better rentals that are never even visible to the average rental tenant.

I bought the unit from my neighbor as he was moving out. It's a townhouse, so I share a wall with that unit.

To be fair, _some_ anti-landlord laws are relaxed in this case, but not enough to make the worst-case scenario reasonable.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/seattle-area-landlord-tr...

One news article mentioned he worked in the medical field and when he was approved to move in, his income was $300k+).

The state actually ended up helping cover the lost rent and paid for the tenant’s legal bills for fighting the eviction.

https://www.discovery.org/a/nightmare-tenant-in-bellevue-con...

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