As someone who also lives in Seattle, I'd be curious to see any verifiable citations to such a wild claim
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...
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
The same goes for savings, credit score, and other factors. These are not nearly as fungible as you seem to think.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why couldn't the same law apply to residential leasing?
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.
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.
Having a large non-white population is not a protection against race-related discrimination.
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.
If you offer to sign a 5 year lease at current prices, then yeah, can see why they might not go for 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Throwing around general statements like these when you don't actually know about the topic doesn't help the conversation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To be fair, _some_ anti-landlord laws are relaxed in this case, but not enough to make the worst-case scenario reasonable.
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...
I’m on phone but if you search “Kim Seattle landlord” you can get more details of various articles on the situation.
> 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!