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The last place I rented had pet rent AND a deposit. The rent definitely a junk fee. It did not accumulate or get tracked.
What exactly is the problem, here? Other than a small group of people wanting special treatment?
It should just be common sense. You have a kid or you have a pet. They damaged the property, you pay it.
Pet rent isn't about directly covering damage; it's more like buying an insurance policy that occasionally covers large pet-necessitated repairs.
The landlord can sue them, but that's a slow expensive process and there's a good chance they will never recover enough to pay for the damage.
Dogs are not people. Many in Seattle think their dogs are people, or even prefer dogs over people, but they are not, and they do not enjoy the same protections against discrimination.
If you have never been a landlord, I can see why you would think that "if they damage the property, they pay for it" is a reasonable rule that would work, because if your dog destroyed a door, the carpet, and the blinds, you are likely to be willing (if unhappy) to pay to fix it. If you have been a landlord, you know why this doesn't work, and you would also know why pursuing the damages in court also doesn't work.
(If you are wondering why: people do not pay. Deposits, which they also now capped in Seattle, often don't cover the damage. And suing people who have no money in order to get a judgment that you can't collect on is expensive and pointless.)
This just socializes the cost of pet damage onto everyone, which is why this is populist slop.
(Some of the other junk fees make much more sense: mandatory fees that you have to pay, that are fixed in nature, should just be in the advertised lease price. Think "common area fees" you can't opt out of.)
You know what behavior HASN'T been exceptional in my experience? Landlords playing stupid games with my deposit, trying to hold me accountable for nonexistent or preexisting damage, or just generically being irritating.
Let landlords ban pets other than registered service animals if they want to (none of this ESA nonsense), make sure the eviction process is timely and fair, and otherwise crack the hell down on the games they play with their tenants.
Landlording is so morally fraught that Adam Smith called it out in the Wealth of Nations as an example of unproductive rent-seeking. "Populist slop" is absolutely called for - there is almost no other industry of that size where so many unearned benefits accrue to the already-wealthy.
When a person doesn't pay for damages, how much damage they did very much matters. Why is that hard for you to wrap your head around?
So your Human Resources version of reality is actually the opposite of what's true currently and what always has been true.
As a matter of fact there's a great deal of science showing that people feel more comfortable around their own race and age.
Dogs on the other hand do not discriminate and will love you with no bias.
Charge for damage if and when there is damage. Anything else is ridiculous.
Also I'm not sure what the new law changes. Since 2016, Seattle has banned charging extra rent for having a pet. Subsection E states: "Other than the pet damage deposit authorized by subsection 7.24.038.A, the landlord may not charge the tenant any fee for keeping a pet."
1. https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal_code...
It doesn't change anything about pets, the grandparent poster's complaint is a dogwhistle.
What it does ban is shit like 'consigliere' trash disposal, where you are made to pay $50 a month for the privilege of not being allowed to use the building's dumpster. Instead, you have to pile your trash at your door, and then the landlord takes it to the dumpster. You can't opt out of this 'service'.
Oh, and the city's bill for trash disposal is still passed on to you.
Oh, and your building now smells like garbage.
(Landlords are, of course, still free to offer this as an optional paid service, which ~everyone will opt out of.)
This is an unsubstantiated assertion. I'd want to see evidence that things like this actually move the needle on rent vs things like available housing stock, zoning, etc which seem much more likely to actually impact affordability.
We had legal changes in the UK limiting what fees could be charged to tenants and it had no noticeable effect. The main impact was to stop letting agents charging both landlords and tenants, which reduced what they charge overall.
This is not a comment on more recent changes, or other changes, just those around fees.
If not, then high prices generally comes back to supply and demand, which is driven a lot more by zoning and building restrictions than by small differences in rental law.
Generally cities are expensive because people want to live there, and there is limited space for housing. The US especially has been very restrictive on density in urban and suburban areas compared to counterparts found elsewhere around the world. People wanting to live somewhere and a lack of dense housing for them increases prices.
A lot of arguments against "big, progressive cities" seem to boil down to some form of "See, nobody wants to live in these cities because it's so crowded and expensive!" which doesn't make basic economic sense.
Not discounting the importance of supply/demand, or the damage that restrictive zoning regimes have done, but I'm not sure if this should be so strongly stated, depending on how you want to define "small differences in rental law". For example, per Wikipedia:
> In 1971, the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, a housing expert, said that "rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing". In 1989, Nguyễn Cơ Thạch, then Foreign Minister of Vietnam, observed, "The Americans couldn't destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by very low rents. We realized it was stupid and that we must change policy."
Obviously banning junk rental fees is not the same as rent control, but in either case we're talking about rental law that as an unintended second-order effect is going to (to some degree or another) discourage supplying rentals by making it harder to make money renting.
So, in the interest of being charitable to the OP, I think they're including zoning laws, building regulations, and so on in what they're saying: these cities claim to view housing as a human right, yet simultaneously seemingly do everything in their power to make it incredibly hard, expensive, and risky to supply it.
I don't agree that this attitude is exclusive to big progressive cities: the right theoretically claims to love free enterprise and deregulation, but in practice they're often just as happy with overbearing government control as long as it's their guy doing it. And if anything these days the right more than the left fetishizes certain images of American life that motivate stricter regulations on development; NIMBYism cuts across the political spectrum. But it's an attitude that maybe makes better bedfellows with the left and its intrinsic distrust of markets, and maybe afflicts those left-leaning coastal cities more because they're otherwise much better places to live and thus have higher demand.
And how exactly does the causality for this work, in your head? Rent is already high in the big, highly desirable cities, before this law.
Is this some new form of retro-causality? A law passed today drove rent up 5 years ago?
> Which, of course, means that non pet owners are now subsidizing pet owners and the damage and wear and tear that pets cause
But most people don't think that all. And I notice that you ignored all the other fees also...
Anyway there are moral arguments against junk fees other than "cost". Nobody actually wants to live in a world where service providers are constantly sneaking fees into things. It's just unjust and shitty. You and I both know that the only reason landlords include pet fees is because they get away with it, not because it's the only way to recoup losses or something like that.
I don't like nickel and diming either but that's not what this is about.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/adhd/symptoms...
"Hyperactive means being too active and having too much energy. It may include disruptive behavior."
"Run around or climb in situations when it's not proper."
So why would you not just do the same with pets? Pets soil the common areas of a building, requiring ongoing maintenance that can't always easily be charged back to a particular unit, so I can understand why some rentals would impose surcharges.
Eh, I'd be willing to wager it's because those cites are where many high-paying jobs are.
Anyway:
> Which, of course, means that non pet owners are now subsidizing pet owners and the damage and wear and tear that pets cause.
Or owners can just quantify and charge for the actual wear and tear? If someone's dog digs up the yard or their claws scrape the up wood floors, just charge them to fix it (or, more likely, take it out of the deposit).
That's why these are often viewed as "junk fees", they charge you for some potential damage vs. any actual damage.
That said pets is likely not the driver of increased housing costa by any means.
> There is no market incentive to advertise the all-in price of a rental unit. Research by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research documents individual businesses losing significant market share when switching to all-in pricing. A landlord that advertises an all-in price appears more expensive than competitors with a lower base rent and unbundled fees.
> Rental junk fees represent a market failure and collective action problem that will not self-correct. Regulation of these fees is necessary to level the playing field for landlords who are transparent about their costs and protect renters from unpredictable and predatory pricing models.
This legislature requires transparency in pricing. If landlords could handle that bare minimum of responsibility on their own, without being compelled by law, it wouldn't have been required.
Oh, and pet damage deposits are still legal.
Some people cause less than regular wear and tear. Some people cause more. If it gets too high, it becomes irregular, it gets pulled out of your damage deposit. If that's not enough, the landlord is free to sue.
None of this is relevant to this thread, though, because pet fees have been banned for 10 years in Seattle. This legislature isn't about pet fees.
/s
Somehow squirrel hunting is still tolerated in 21dt century!