Committee on Sustainability & Renters' Rights 3/18/22

Good morning.

Sorry.

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you.

Good morning.

This is the regularly scheduled meeting of the sustainability and renters rights committee.

Today is Friday, March 18th, 2022. And the time is 9 32 AM.

I am the chair of the committee.

Council Member Juarez.

Here.

Council Member Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Lewis.

Council Member Morales.

Here.

Or present.

Thank you, Ted, and thank you to all the members of the committee who are here this morning.

We have three items on today's agenda related to renters rights.

In our last committee meeting we heard from a panel of renters about situations when their landlords violated housing codes and renters rights and the difficulties they had getting justice.

In today's committee meeting we hope to continue that discussion.

First, the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections, commonly referred to by the initials SDCI, will present about how they investigate and enforce renters' rights and what powers they have and do not have to intervene when a renter calls their hotline.

Then we will hear from a panel of renters and renter advocates about their experiences when their rights were violated and their attempts to get redressal.

My office is regularly contacted by renters who are having their rights violated.

Sometimes their landlord has broken the law and other times they are subjected to conditions that are unacceptable but are not illegal, such as outrageously high rent increases.

However, we have also found that far too often renters cannot get justice even when the landlords have broken the law.

By working with renters over the years and discussing the city's enforcement procedures with the experts at the housing justice project, and at the STC I my office is gathering examples of where the city's enforcement procedures need to improve.

We need to develop legislation out of this committee meetings.

to overhaul how renters' rights are enforced.

I want to be clear that when renters email my office to report abuses, we often give them information about how to contact the STCI or the Housing Justice Project.

Sometimes we directly contact landlords on the renter's behalf or help the tenants organize among their neighbors, and many times we are able to help renters solve their problem.

However, just the magnitude, the number of instances where renters have problems far, far outweigh what we are able to do in this kind of method.

So the point of the discussion is not to say that renters can never get justice, because that is not true.

The point of this discussion is to find the loopholes and to close them, recognizing the fact that the problem is very widespread and prevalent.

Just it's not it's not an unusual thing or a handful of renters that face these problems, it's all over the city.

I want to give a few examples of the problems we have found in Seattle's enforcement of renters rights.

My office has spoken to renters who have gone for months without heat, no hot water holes in their ceilings.

walls and floors, mold or pest infestation that has persisted, as I said, for months, doors that are not secure, and so many other unacceptable housing conditions that are also legal violations of Seattle's housing codes.

Seattle's rental inspection ordinance requires buildings to be inspected, but most buildings are inspected by private inspection companies that are clearly willing to sign on to anything based on some of the conditions we have seen.

If a renter calls the complaint line of the SDCI, often a city inspector will visit the property.

The city inspectors are responsible and do a serious inspection once they come to the property.

However, that can only happen after a renter calls the complaint line and obviously most renters do not ordinarily even know, they're not even aware that they have this option of calling the SDCI and lodging a complaint.

When renters do call, it is when they are truly, and this is what we've observed on most of the instances, it's when they call, it is when they truly are at their wits end and they have someone like the Tenants Union, B-Seattle, or the staff in my office letting them know that they have this option.

Renters have many reasons to fear reporting violations because there is no rent control in Washington state.

Renters worry that if they ask their landlord for repairs, that could motivate their landlord to raise the rent.

And that is a commonly feared intimidation or retaliation that renters have reported to us.

Whether it's true or not, it is something that every renter I've spoken to thinks about.

And whether it happens in a given case or not, it is something that renters really fear.

And the reason they fear is that it happens.

often.

My office talked to a renter several years ago whose bathroom was so dilapidated she paid to install a new shower herself.

When her landlord saw the improved bathroom, they raised the rent because they thought they could get more for the improved apartment.

I mean that is just outrageous.

When a renter truly cannot take the conditions anymore and gets an inspector from the SDCI to visit the property, then the landlord is required to make repairs in a reasonable timeline or face possible fines But that clock to complete repairs does not start when the problem occurred, or even when the renter first contacted the landlord about the problem.

The clock starts only after SDCA inspectors visit the property.

So the renters who have, for example, been suffering with no heat for months prior to the inspection, get no justice for that time.

They still have to pay the full rent for all that time.

Even when a landlord fails to complete the repairs in the time required by SDCI, they are not necessarily fined.

In order to issue a fine, SDCI must first send the details of the violation to the city attorney's office, and then the city attorney's office needs to take the landlord to court and win a judgment for the fines.

In practice, this means that as DCI and the city attorney's office give a lot of extra chances for landlords to complete repairs before completing collecting fines citywide as DCI issued five fines, only five fines landlords, all of 2021 combined.

This is yet another example of how the rich and powerful in our society are being held to a completely different standard by the legal system.

Even when the city does levy a fine, nowhere in Seattle's law is the renter compensated for the rent they ended up paying during the time when those inadequate or dilapidated conditions persisted.

In my experience, the staff who work at the SDCI investigating abuses by landlords are dedicated to their work, but the structure of the system is totally stacked against renters.

One example that SDCI brought to the attention to my office is the enforcement of the law prohibiting landlords from entering a rented apartment without giving notice unless there's an emergency.

Under Seattle's law, if a landlord breaks this law, they are required, sorry, they are issued a notice of violation that essentially says they have to correct the problem, which is accomplished the moment they leave the apartment.

You know, because the problem is them entering the apartment without notice.

If they do it again, they get another notice.

In order to actually get a penalty, the landlord would need to enter your apartment without notice, stay in the apartment until the renter contacts the SDCI.

SDCI issues a notice of violation.

They remain in there for days longer.

I mean, this is just an example of how renters face problems at an almost at an absurd level.

All of these problems are the result of the terrible power imbalance between renters and their landlords.

And we will hear specific examples when we get to agenda item two, where we have renters and renter advocates speaking to us.

Our third and final agenda item today is a briefing on a bill sponsored by Councilmember Peterson that I support, which adds information about the amount of rent charged to the data landlords are required to disclose as part of the city's rental registration and inspection ordinance.

I believe this data will be helpful to demonstrate how rents are rising out of control and the need for rent control.

It is listed on today's agenda as a briefing discussion and possible vote, but I wanted to clarify, we do not intend to vote on that bill today.

This is an initial briefing and it will probably come to a vote at our next committee meeting on April 1st, but just wanted to reiterate, I support this legislation from Council Member Peterson.

Before we begin the agenda items, we have public comment.

We have 41 people signed up.

Not all of them are present, showing as present, but we will make sure that we call on every speaker and make sure that they are turning off their mute button and so on and so forth.

I will read out the names.

When I call your name, you will be prompted to unmute yourself.

And when you hear that, please hit star six on your phone to unmute yourself and begin.

And because there are so many speakers signed up, we will have one minute for each person to speak.

So I will call three names in a row.

And so please be ready if you know that your name is coming up.

So our first three speakers are Marilyn Yim, Angie Gerald, and Corey Brewer.

First speaker, Marilyn.

Go ahead, Marilyn.

Good morning.

My name is Marilyn Yim, and I'm a small mom-and-pop housing provider in D6.

I'd like the committee to ask yourself some due diligence questions before proceeding into policymaking.

Which key stakeholders were not informed or invited to give additional information and context at this meeting?

What is the other side of the story that's not being told?

How might that additional context change the situation and how we approach it?

Why were they excluded today?

Is the city taking a balanced approach to all housing providers, public housing, nonprofit and private housing providers?

What is the proportion of code violations in each of these sectors?

Remember that the city has lost 10% of rental housing registrations in just the last eight months.

There should be a massive wake up call to city policymaking.

What can the city do to maintain the housing units we currently have while encouraging and adding more?

What is the collateral damage of a heavy-handed punitive relationship to the city's ability to retain or continue losing rental housing particularly for small mom and pop housing providers.

If this committee's chair is unwilling to include housing providers as key stakeholders then I would ask that we move these issues to the housing committee or somewhere else to get a complete picture and have better resulting policy.

Thank you.

Our next speakers are Angie Gerald and Corey Brewer.

And then after that, Brett Frank Clooney.

But before that, I just wanted to acknowledge for the record that we've been joined by Council Member Lewis, who is a member of this committee, and Council Member Peterson, who is present today to discuss the legislation from his office.

And I also wanted to just let the public comment speakers know that when you hear that ding, it means you have 10 seconds left.

So don't stop when you're speaking.

You can go ahead.

But when the minute is up, the microphone will be turned off.

So we have Angie Gerald next.

Go ahead.

Hi, my name is Angie and I'm a grassroots landlord from Ballard.

At recent meetings, the committee chair and panel speakers have said derogatory, misleading things about small housing providers who made authentic public comments, calling us corporate fig leaves, referring to publicly confirmed issues as false narratives, and declaring that small landlords are clearly unfamiliar with how the eviction moratorium works.

Snide and civil commentary should not be allowed during council proceedings.

City Council needs to talk to and work with small housing providers, not mock or exclude or stereotype.

We need inclusion in the legislative process in this committee or another.

As you debate additional regulations, I remind you, City Council has already enacted a tsunami of regulations without any collaboration or feedback.

According to our RIO data, the city is hemorrhaging small locally owned rental properties.

Regulations that might make sense for corporations, nonprofits and government agencies do not unfold the same way for small scale rental owners.

Regarding a fire-damaged apartment building on today's agenda, I propose the city require renter's insurance.

We have Corey Brewer next, followed by Brett Frank Looney and Howard Gale.

Go ahead, Corey Brewer.

Good morning.

Corey Brewer, representing about 500 mom-and-pop housing providers in Seattle, not any large corporations.

Maintenance and property conditions are important, no doubt.

That's a high priority with my clients, and the same goes for most housing providers.

but there's a disconnect here.

We're talking about maintenance violations, but this conversation comes at a time when we've had a two-year moratorium on rent payments in addition to public calls for rent strikes and rent control.

Operating income is necessary in order to invest in upkeep.

It's very simple math.

I just wish that the committee chair would take a more collaborative approach to discussing these issues.

And on that note, to Council Member Peterson, thank you for your willingness to collaborate and listen to various points of view.

I also think that data is important, but I think your approach needs a lot of work, and we are more than happy to discuss that with you further.

Thank you for your time.

SCCI's presentation today will include a statement on their values of equity and respect.

Those values should be reflected in the engagement with all stakeholders including small housing providers.

In the past the committee chair and presenters have used derogatory terms to refer to small housing providers as hacks for corporate landlords and that we spread false narratives.

As I testified in the past the chair needs to include small mom and pop providers in the conversation about how to build a quote safe and livable and inclusive Seattle SCCI's purpose.

The data from STCI demonstrates how quickly Seattle is losing rental housing.

This permanent reduction is a direct reflection of the cumulative policy decisions this council has made.

Council Bill 120284 is another example of well-intentioned but ineffective and cumbersome policymaking.

Some of the information that would be collected would violate people's privacy.

The name, address, and phone number for small or owner-occupied places could be their home address.

Small housing providers care about their tenants and their communities.

Again, we are asking to work with you to create effective policy solutions.

Please invite us to the table prior to advancing in another.

Howard Gale is next, followed by Keith Haslerich.

Apologies if I'm not saying your name correctly.

And then Demetris Abu.

So go ahead, Howard Gale.

Howard Gale, District 7. I want to note gaps in the system with rental complaints to SPCI, especially as regards the very common practice now of property developer engaging in renoviction, that is making renovations to apartment buildings in a manner that makes them unlivable, thereby getting people to self-evict and avoiding regulations around rent increases and paying relocation assistance.

Cadence Realty, famous for this kind of renoviction at the Chateau Apartments, is doing that to my building.

Today I'm calling you from a hotel room because my building will be without electricity, heat, and hot water for a minimum of 21 hours, possibly without heat and hot water for days during the winter.

They had threatened to do this twice before when it was 25 degrees out.

SDCI will not recognize this as a complaint because landlords have permits and the issues are transitory even if repeated.

SDI claims they cannot take action.

Keith Haslerich followed by Dimitris Abou and then Aiden Nardone.

Go ahead, Keith.

We don't hear you, are you?

Okay, ready?

Hold the phone up and then when I tell you, yeah.

Go ahead.

Hello?

I don't see Keith on the list.

Oh, sorry, Keith is not present, I'm sorry, yeah.

Sorry, Dimitris Abu followed by Aiden Nardone and then Bruce Becker.

Go ahead, Dimitris.

My name is Demetrius Sabu.

I live in the Columbia garden building, Rainier court in Mount Baker.

Our landlord C has blatantly neglected awful conditions of our building and has ignored repeatedly.

Complaints for years, which is why we have been organizing alongside city councilman Sharma.

She wants the office for better conditions in our apartment.

I was dealing with a horrible bed, but of infection.

that I reported to the landlord.

They ignored me and tried to tell me I didn't have bed bugs.

It was after showing, this went on for over six months, and I happened to see a man from Pace Control Company in the building.

I was completely at the end of my rope.

I saw him, I broke down crying and begged him to spray my apartment, and he did.

This is Jess.

One of the nightmares I've been forced to endure in this building.

When my toilet broke, it took them two weeks to get it fixed.

Aiden Nardone followed by Bruce Becker and then Daniel Cavanaugh.

Go ahead, Aiden.

Aiden, you appear to be unmuted, but we can't hear you.

So maybe your phone is muted.

Oh, hello.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

Thank you.

Good morning.

My name is Aiden Nardone.

I'm a resident of District 6. So the city is planning on engaging, entering into an agreement with a research university to collect and analyze data about private landlords and their tenants.

Who would own the database?

Who would own the data?

Will this database be portable if the city changes contractors?

How much will this cost?

What is the revenue source?

Not sure about the need for utility bill information, but City Light and SPU has this information on file, why couldn't that data just be imported?

It's tied to a location or an address, not an individual.

Don't we already have a database, the RRIO run by SDCI?

Why can't their database be modified and upgraded to accept it?

We have Bruce Becker, followed by Daniel Cavanaugh, and then Musa Ali, who's the next speaker, is showing as not present.

And after that, it's Constance Nelson.

And I also wanted to just apologize to all the members of the public who are speaking.

We have lots of speakers signed up.

So if you don't get to finish your public comment, please send us your full comment, send it to my office by email.

Thank you.

So we have Bruce Becker next.

Thank you.

My name is Bruce Becker.

I'm a small landlord in Seattle.

I'm very concerned about this type of regulation because it's just reducing the rental availability in Seattle by putting an extra burden on landlords.

Requiring landlords to report this kind of information, I assume the purpose is to relate the rental cost with square footage.

But I don't know what the answers are to the questions.

Like, what is net rentable square footage?

Is that habitable space?

Is it uninhabitable space?

Does it include the garage?

What if the garage is habitable?

What about closets?

Is that included?

The other question is, is it vacant or occupied?

What's vacant?

Does that mean it's available to rent but not occupied?

Is it used for storage?

What if it's used by the owner?

Or what if it's under repair?

These are all perfectly legitimate questions that aren't really on anything that's being asked for.

I'm really concerned about the issue of condition and overall of the overall unit and which location, which also adds to its value.

These are things that are really very important.

We have Daniel Cavanaugh next.

After that, Musa Ali, who's not present, and then Constance Nelson and Patricia Bruce.

Go ahead, Daniel.

Hey, my name's Dan.

I'm a renter in First Hill.

I'm just calling to urge the Seattle City Council to support Council Member Sawant's proposal to strengthen the enforcement of renters' rights.

And I urge my fellow renters to get organized, because that's the only way we can win.

I found it really stunning, honestly, to hear what Council Member Sawant's office has reported that just in all of last year, the city government issued fines to only five landlords.

And I also just want to call out the fact that korey brewer other third person who spoke claims to represent mom-and-pop landlord and not a corporation at that but i think i think all uh...

i think he is actually a bp uh...

windermere real estate real estate one of the biggest uh...

corporation uh...

i have a corporation in the city i think millions of dollars uh...

so you know he's lying through his teeth i'm sure there are also small landlords uh...

but you know

I don't believe, Ham, we really just need to strengthen enforcement of existing...

Constance Nelson is next, followed by Patricia Bruce and then Jennifer Leckish.

Go ahead, Constance Nelson.

Since you appear to be muted, if you hit star six, you'll unmute.

Sorry about that.

I'm a small mom and pop landlord who rents to people in Seattle who work in a variety of lower wage jobs.

We think that data is important and would like to see the city focus on encouraging participation by partnering with research or trade groups who in some case already collect this information and aggregate it.

It is also worth mentioning the cost to collect this data will probably be passed on to the tenants in the form of higher rents and also disincentivize small owners who care about and know their tenants to stay in the industry.

Thank you.

Patricia Bruce, followed by Jennifer Leckish, and then Daniel Swanson.

Go ahead, Patricia.

Good morning.

My name is Patricia Bruce, and I'm a tenant here at Columbia Gardens.

I'm here to present my ongoing problem, broken stove for a year and a half, roaches, an application process for my friend who moved from New York City two years ago, and every time management gets their hands on the application, she does something wrong.

I went to see her last month about a wrong incident, and I became so frustrated with her.

I threw my hands up because broken stove, roaches, she doesn't understand anything.

She wants to bring me another stove from the apartment where they are infested, roaches, on the application process for my friend.

She put down his salary.

Instead of his salary, she put down what he had in the bank.

I went to see her, and I was frustrated.

I put my hands up in the air.

I put my hands up in the air, and I stated to her, I've had enough.

I've had enough.

I walked out.

She called the cops on me.

I didn't know anything about that until two days later.

Jennifer Lekish followed by Daniel Swanson.

And then the next two speakers are showing is not present, but we'll see if they show up.

Jennifer, go ahead.

Hi, my name is Jennifer Lekish and I'm a second generation housing provider providing 15 rental units in Seattle.

I'm not a corporate landlord.

I'm a full-time hands-on property manager and superintendent.

Please vote no on enacting the rent rate disclosure proposal.

Renting a unit is a private contract between two agreeing parties.

Requiring details of that contract to be disclosed to a third party is an overreach of government power.

If a tenant feels their rental is not meeting standards, they have been given the contact information for the city in the 31-page Renting in Seattle Handbook that by law must be given to every single tenant in the city.

If there is an issue with this process, then the Seattle City Council needs to take up this issue with the city and not with housing providers.

The Seattle's rental registration and inspection ordinance already imposes an administrative and legislative burden on housing providers.

Increasing reporting and certification requirements is unnecessary and will push more housing providers out of the market.

Thank you for.

Daniel Swanson followed by Daniel Wang.

I just wanted to note that the speakers Stanley Stokes and Daniel Johnson are shown as not present at this moment.

Go ahead, Daniel.

Hi, my name is Daniel and I'm a renter in District 4. I'm calling in support of Shaman's Bill to strengthen the enforcement of French's rights.

A lot of commenters are talking about how housing providers haven't been included in this conversation, and to that I'd like to point out the mass movements that renters have had to build to even be considered in conversations like this.

The tax Amazon movement and the fight for the $15 minimum wage are good examples.

Renters already face a mountain of barriers in finding affordable housing options in Seattle, reporting poor conditions and negligence of their landlord once they've secured housing should not be a barrier or put them at risk for keeping the housing.

Entries need power to fight back against unfair housing conditions.

The scales are tipped in favor of landlords and that if a tenant breaks any part of the lease, they could be liable for fines, rent increases, or even lose their housing.

While landlords hardly ever see consequences for providing poor housing conditions or not making repairs.

At the rental I currently live in, under Windermere Property Management, we finally had someone come repair a broken window that had been reported three months ago.

The window repair people said we had

We have Daniel Wang next.

And then a number of speakers after Daniel Wang are shown as not present.

I'll just read their names quickly.

Just if you hear your name, please make sure you are able to get on the line.

Duncan Ernest, Zamzam Saeed, Karen Johnson, Diane Webster, Randall Benson, all are showing as not present.

And after that, we have Juna Basconcelo.

Sorry if I'm saying your name wrong.

But go ahead, Daniel Wang.

Hey, my name's Daniel.

I'm a renter living in District 4, and I'm calling in to demand the City Council strengthen the enforcement of renters' rights.

It's pretty odd to hear these mom-and-pop housing providers complain about renters' advocates misrepresenting their position or throwing derogatory terms at them and trying to prevent the end of the eviction moratorium a few weeks ago.

There's complaints about an extra burden being placed on landlords in the context of a tsunami of regulation.

What about the burden of the exploding rent on the renters who cannot afford to stay in their homes anymore?

What about the tsunami of renters who are getting kicked out of their homes after the end of this eviction moratorium?

The power balance between renters and landlords is fundamentally uneven.

where tenants are not as aware of their legal options, how to exercise them, are more afraid to exercise them for fear of retaliation, which will make them lose their home, not just some income on an investment, in the case of a landlord.

And it's clear how this manifests in the fact that in all of last year in this massive city with rampant malpractice from corporate landlords, only five landlords got fined last year for violation.

Fundamentally, this proposal from Council Member Salon is about making sure landlords aren't able to

The next speaker who's shown as not present is Juna Basconcello, and then Barbara Finney, and then Gordon Haggerty.

Go ahead, Juna.

Hi, I'm a tenant and a landlord now for about the last 10 years, and I also oversee the rental units for my immediate family members.

So I have a bird's eye into the way this policy affects just about everybody in this thing.

And I think that everybody, all of the landlords who are above board and are operating properly.

Everybody, we all want the same thing, safe, healthy, stable housing stock.

The issue we have here is that we're approaching it with a path that's taking us away from that goal.

The city needs to be encouraging the creation of new housing units.

Instead, you're punishing those of us already providing housing, the bad landlords and the good ones.

Why would anybody develop a new accessory dwelling unit or a mother-in-law apartment at their Seattle home if they're going to be faced with an onslaught of restrictions and attacks on their property.

They won't.

That's why we are beginning to sell our Seattle properties.

Those will never go back on the rental market.

Let's get collaborative.

We have the same general objectives.

We can do it if we work together.

Barbara Finney is next.

And I said Gordon Haggerty, but Gordon is showing is not present.

So the next present speaker is Emily MacArthur.

So go ahead, Barbara Finney.

Hi, I'm Barbara Finney, Council District 5, where the majority of residents are renters.

I'm a retired RN and current delegate to MLK Labor Council.

I've been a renter for years, but now I'm a homeowner and stand in solidarity with all working class renters in Seattle.

Last year, only five landlords were fined by the city for violating the rights of renters.

The city must be able and willing to meaningfully protect renters' rights when a renter reports violations to the regulating department.

Crafting legislation to strengthen the city's enforcement procedures when landlords violate tenants' rights and the law and give renters' release is crucial.

Committee Chair Council members to want unwavering solidarity with Seattle's working class renters and her Socialist Council offices, work with renters' rights movements, spearheaded rights and protections for renters in groundbreaking victories.

Other council members should step up to represent their constituents and co-sponsor new legislation to increase enforcement to protect renters' rights.

Thank you.

Emily MacArthur is next, and then after that Zoe Amer and Lawrence Kreitz.

Go ahead, Emily.

Hi, my name is Emily MacArthur.

I'm a renter living in District 2. I'm calling to urge the Seattle City Council to support Council Member Shama Sawant's proposal to strengthen the enforcement of renters' rights, but I also urge my fellow renters to get organized because that is the only way that we can win.

You know, I could talk about how every single apartment I've lived in since I lived in Seattle has had some kind of major issue that the landlord wouldn't address and that's both corporate landlords and small landlords including things like black mold that you just cannot live under and also the ways in which I was retaliated against but I just do have to I think respond to this idea that it's just too overwhelming to track how much uh...

unit cost or how big it is or to be a burden to understand the language uh...

other played out in the bill i think patently that the third and working-class people go to work to deliver packages copy the fact held they have to understand that word so that they can get paid for their job as a landlord it is your job to understand and to be able to track those things renters are under an immense amount of burden does not

Zoe Amir, followed by Lawrence Kreit, sorry if I'm saying your name wrong, and then Sarah James.

Go ahead, Zoe.

Hello, good morning.

The Democrats on the city council just a few weeks ago ended the eviction moratorium despite a long-standing declaration of a homelessness crisis in Seattle.

We rent control and tenant unions now.

And if the Democrats on City Council want the economy of the city to keep functioning and care about their constituents, they will support rent control.

Many renters are hanging on by a thread, making rent monthly, dealing with conditions like bedbugs, black holes, flooding, because they can't afford to deposit on a new unit.

And these are people with jobs, even multiple jobs.

People who are likely to face housing insecurity also have the highest barriers to going through the long bureaucratic processes to get their conditions improved.

Work control used to be a common facet of city life in urban areas like San Francisco and New York City, and now that's being chipped away, so it's time for renters to organize together, form tenant unions.

The next speaker is Lawrence Kreitz, followed by Sarah James, and then Margo Stewart is shown as not present, and then after that, Nora Schultz.

And I just wanted to let speakers know, when you hear the ding sound, you still have 10 seconds to speak.

Go ahead, Lawrence Kreitz.

Do we have Lawrence here, Ted?

Lawrence, you are still muted.

If you get star six on your phone, you should unmute yourself.

There you go.

OK.

Sorry.

I just want to make the point that we've had a housing crisis that's not only affected tenants, but it's drastically affected small landlords over the last couple of years.

And the city council's got to ask itself when it comes to new regulations, does this regulation add to housing supply?

Does it help affordability?

Does it improve tenant access to housing?

If it doesn't, you've got to lay off small landlords.

In Seattle, we've lost 7,000 rental units in the last nine months.

We need to carefully analyze what our policies have done and stop adding regulatory burdens, risks, expenses, and liabilities to landlords.

All of these increase rents over time.

There is no scenario in which fewer rentals is good for tenants.

Not just about this one proposal, it's about the cumulative effect.

My lease is now 78 pages long.

And just for the record, I've been in business for 35 years, I've never evicted anyone, and I've never had the housing complaint against me.

So lump small landlords in with large corporate ones, or to use anecdotes rather.

The next three present speakers are Sarah James, Nora Schultz, and Brogan Thompson.

And just want to let Jesse Seiden know, you're showing as not present.

So go ahead, Sarah James.

I'm calling to urge the city council to support Tashana Salant's proposal to strengthen the enforcement of renters' rights.

Landlords have so much power over us.

They control our homes.

And with rent so high in Seattle, the thought of moving is terrifying.

Renters don't report violations unless the situation is absolutely desperate, because we fear retaliation from our landlords.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I had a clause in my lease that said that I had to deal with bed bugs myself.

And I didn't understand that that was against the city law.

And nine months pregnant was spraying my own bed bug poison on my apartment because I didn't know what else to do and I was scared of losing my home.

Renters should not be charged if the things like heat and water and electricity don't work.

Those problems need to be fixed.

The city council needs to do something to hold landlords accountable, even small landlords, because it was a small landlord who let me sit in an apartment full of bed bugs with no assistance.

Nora Schultz followed by Brogan Thompson and then Gloria Betten.

Go ahead, Nora Schultz.

Nora, you are showing as still muted.

If you can hit star six, you should unmute yourself.

Still muted on your phone, so on your phone, star six.

You got it.

Sorry.

Thank you.

My name is Nora Schultz.

I'm a second generation property owner and manager in Renton, Washington.

I'm commenting in opposition to CB 120284. I want to appeal to this group to reexamine its attitude toward property owners and stop the adversarial approach to housing owners.

We are, my family is a small business and we treat our customers well and we value their tenancy.

We're the type of landlord Seattle wants to invest in the city.

However, we have turned down every opportunity to purchase property in the city of Seattle.

The onerous burdens placed on property owners by the city make it impossible to run a profitable business in Seattle.

Good landlords will not invest here.

The type of people you want to treat tenants well cannot make their business operate under the onerous burdens that the city has placed on small businesses, which is what we are.

Please start to include property owners in the developing good housing ordinances and stop demonizing small businesses that are trying to provide good housing for good tenants.

Thank you.

Brogan Thompson followed by Gloria Betton and then Eleanor Jordan.

Go ahead, Brogan Thompson.

Brogan, it looks like you need to hit star six.

You got it.

Hello.

This is Brogan Thompson.

You can hear me OK?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, I have a small fourplex in District 3, and I've supplied data in the past, and that's been very helpful.

But to mandate it, that's just another burden on top of all the multiple new ordinances that have been in place in the last few years.

So yeah, data is good, but I hope it should be accurate and accessible.

Like, for example, in the past, the Dupree and Scott That's worked very well with hard data, and then we can work from that to do proper ordinances.

Thank you very much.

Goodbye.

Gloria Betton, followed by Elna Jordan, and then Rose Price.

Go ahead, Gloria Betton.

Go ahead.

Good morning.

My name is Gloria Betton.

and I live in the Columbia Gardens residence.

And I am just calling to beg the council members to maintain their positions as councilmen and to assist and support Council Member Siwa, who's been a beautiful advocate that we need, not only in this community, but in Seattle.

She has been a wonderful advocate.

We need her to make sure that the landlords are held accountable for when they violate our rights and prevent them from not repairing the apartments that they want to continue to increase the rent on.

That is ridiculous.

We are not going to, we're not going to have it.

So please support a councilman to help us to take care of this soon.

Thank you.

Elna Jordan followed by Rose Price and then Oscar Brain.

Go ahead Elna Jordan.

Good morning.

Good morning.

This is Elna Jordan.

I'm also from Rainier Court.

I actually got flooded out while the water was off and they left me in it.

And I do understand now how the elderly becomes homeless.

This property management really needs to have, needs to be seen for what they are.

There was no maintenance for five years.

They left me in it.

What if I was in a wheelchair or if I was in the bed and couldn't move?

I'm really concerned about our elders left in that building because they're afraid.

And I've called the city and I'm ready to go to the media because it's ridiculous.

And something needs to be done and some attention needs to be put on them.

I'm going to continue to fight and I hope that some

Rose Price, followed by Oscar Brain, and then the next present speaker is Michelle Leclec, and then Sonia Ponath is the last speaker.

But I will keep looking for people who were not present and if they show up before we close public comment.

Go ahead, Rose Price.

Hi, I'm speaking for Rose, who has recently had a stroke and is unable to give the entire comment, but these are her words.

My name is Rose Price.

I'm a tenant who lives in the Rainier Court Buildings in Mount Baker.

I've only lived here for four months, but I've faced repeated harassment from the landlord because of problems with my Section 8 voucher that are not my fault.

Many of my neighbors have waited years for repairs and are still waiting.

The treatment that I have faced and my neighbors have faced have been demeaning and unacceptable, and I strongly believe that landlords need to be held accountable when they violate our renter's rights and we really need stronger enforcement from the city to make sure that those landlords are held accountable and that we are living in good conditions here because partly that's not the case.

Thank you.

Oscar Brain followed by Michelle Leclec and then Sonia Ponath.

Go ahead, Oscar.

Hi, I am the tenant in Senior Breach.

I have lived in rent-controlled jurisdictions in Toronto and Vancouver, D.C. And I can tell you landlords are not lining up at the food bank over there.

They were wealthy.

Rent control and tenant protections only kept them honest.

So all this complaining and whining for tenants, this is too difficult for them, is completely made up.

Another thing that concerns me a lot is illegal clauses in leases.

and severability clauses in leases.

I think that severability clauses in leases should be banned because they actually force tenants to abide by illegal, oftentimes illegal, clauses.

And the tenant doesn't have the resources to fight that.

Another thing is situations where my tenant, my landlord here, went into my bank account twice to get the rent.

And the first time they got the money, the second time not, they charged me a bounce fee, even though they got the money.

So that's a problem.

And I support someone.

Michelle Leclec, followed by Sonia Ponath.

And Ted, are there any other speakers who are present but I'm not aware of?

There is a Diane Webster who is present.

Yes, there's somebody named Diane Webster.

And then I see somebody that's just called misnamed caller.

So I don't know who that would be.

I apologize.

OK, maybe we can close.

But we have OK, so we have Michelle, then Sonia and then Diane.

Go ahead, Michelle.

Hi, my name is Michelle.

I'm a tenant who lives at the Rainier court buildings in Mount Baker.

I'm calling to tell the city council about how my landlord's fee and coast has violated my renter's rights as well as my neighbors and forced us to live in bad conditions.

I've had mold for two years in my bathroom from the first day I moved in a brand new building and it took them almost two years to fix it.

Uh, they didn't fix it until like two weeks ago and the what the law was appealing.

And also, they only fixed it a few weeks ago, and my unit was also new building, like I said.

My heater went out for eight months, and I had to go buy one from Lowe's to keep heat in my bedroom, and they just fixed that recently.

They just haven't been enough to ensure a space-wide environment for our seniors because some of the residents they moved in are not doing lawful things.

I believe that.

Next is Sonia and then Diane.

Go ahead, Sonia.

Hi, this is Sonia Poneth.

I'm a working mom and a small landlord.

I am in support of this proposal to strengthen the enforcement of renters' rights.

I just want to mention we just voted to raise property taxes quite a bit.

And for sure, corporate landlords are going to pass it on to renters.

And I'm afraid some small businesses will have to as well.

And I say, if you look at yourself as being in the business of providing homes, then there is paperwork and other work involved.

You've also got to be prepared to take a loss.

And there's been plenty of money to help with the loss during the pandemic.

The renters have very few resources.

So, you know, Also, another thing is the interests of landlords and tenants are diametrically opposed because it's all about profit.

And I understand as a small landlord, it's hard to swim in that sea of the huge corporate landlords who are making the majority of the money.

But right now we have no rent control.

We have no real publicly owned social housing.

So I'd say instead of complaining about paperwork, you join us to work collaboratively to build public housing and

We have Diane Webster, and I see Stanley Stokes is also showing us presence.

So go ahead, Diane, and then after her, we'll have Stanley.

Hi, my name is Diane Webster, and I'm a tenant who lives in the Rainier Corbulus in Mount Baker, and I'm calling to tell the Seattle Counseling about how my landlord, he has violated my renter's rights and forced me to live in terrible conditions.

I have a problem with my concrete floor.

I stay on the first floor and it gets really cold.

It gets really cold on the floor and I wish I could, or should I say, everyone needs to have rugs.

I've been here seven years.

and my neighbors have been having problems with flooding, roaches.

I have said about the flooring, but I haven't been getting no, you know, no response enough that I have two animals and it's really hard for them when I take them baths and they have to come out and get on the cold concrete.

And, you know, they tended to get sick

Our last speaker, who is showing us present, is Stanley Stokes.

Go ahead, Stanley.

Ted, is Stanley unmuted?

Go ahead.

Yeah, I'm Stanley Stokes.

I'm at the Columbia Law Department in Rainier Court.

And I'm really not having no problem in my apartment right now.

I feel that if they could fix everything in my apartment, they could fix another apartment.

But my concern is about the restrooms downstairs.

Being a senior citizen, we really need access to the restrooms.

I feel like if the mailman can have a key to the restroom, then the tenants can also have a key.

That's my main complaint right now about what's going on at Columbia Garden.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you to all the members of the public who spoke in the public comment for this committee.

I'm sorry for those who were showing is not present.

I don't know if you had technical problems.

I mean, technological problems or not.

But yeah, be in touch with our office and let us know if you I want to send your public comment in email or talk to one of my staff members on the phone, either way is fine.

Our agenda item that we're beginning this committee after public comment with is the presentation from the Seattle Department of Construction Inspections.

I know you all have a PowerPoint presentation as well to share with us.

So I will hand it over to you.

Please do introductions for the record and then take it away.

Good morning.

Council members, thank you very much for having us here today.

I am Faith Lumsden.

I am the Code Compliance Division Director at the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections, SDCI.

You'll hear us speak about that and many other initials during our presentation today.

We'll do our best to be clear about which programs we're talking about.

I will ask my two managers to introduce themselves before we start the rest of the presentation.

Jeff.

Good morning.

Jeff Talent with SBCI.

I'm the Rental Programs Manager is my title.

I think one of our slides will describe a little bit more about what we do.

So I'll hand it over to Michelle there.

I'm Michelle Hunter, I'm the Code Compliance Inspections Manager.

Okay, we will ask Jeff to go ahead and share the PowerPoint presentation on screen.

I want to thank Council Member Sangwon for your introductory comments about our process and also about some of the very real problems that tenants face with their with their ability to access services from us and other providers, as well as with their actual housing units.

So Jeff, you want to move through the next slide quickly and on to the third.

Our purpose, you heard, is to help people in Seattle build safe, livable, and inclusive, and build an inclusive Seattle.

For us, Jeff, go ahead.

Our part of that is enforcing compliance with a very wide range of regulations.

We have inspectors who work out in the field and have been, for the most part, out in the field.

And then we have a rental housing program that is focused on the rights and responsibilities of landlords and tenants, also a lot of outreach.

And in that program, we have our rental housing registration and inspection ordinance program.

I mentioned the many acronyms that we tend to use.

Please interrupt us if we get too free with those.

But POTA, property owner and tenant assistance, That is the group of our folks who deal with most of the rights and responsibilities, questions about evictions, many of the other requirements that we try to explain in some of our public information.

I also mentioned briefly the rental registration and inspection ordinance.

So that program requires rental housing providers to register with us.

and to be inspected not frequently, but at least once every 10 years.

Some of them are inspected at least once every five years.

TRAEO, Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance, when tenants are displaced by development or by a change of use, they can be eligible if they're very low income for relocation assistance.

And then the new ordinance that council passed last fall on economic displacement and relocation assistance.

So Jeff, if you move the slide, as I said, we have these two major programs and I've described quite a lot of the rental housing side of things.

That is the side of our program that administers grants to some of the tenant services organizations that we actually heard from today, our website, Renting in Seattle, and our several other tenant assistance programs.

On Michelle's side of the program, housing inspections is a major focus of our group, but her program is also the one that does all the land use code inspections and shoreline code enforcement.

We enforce for construction without permits.

We run the vacant buildings programs.

We work on tree protection and enforcement and then weeds and vegetation enforcement.

So lots going on in Michelle's division.

I'm going to turn it over to Jeff who will talk a little bit about how do tenants access our program?

How do they find out about us?

And what are we seeing with the way tenants access our compliance and enforcement programs?

All right.

Thank you, Faith.

Um, yeah, I think the first step in thinking about compliance is having the community aware that there are rights and responsibilities and that there are services available to help.

So that's, that's an important part of our work that we've built up over the last few years.

We have a extensive outreach program that includes our web portal which is Seattle.gov forward slash renting in Seattle, and that contains a lot of information about rights and best practices for renters and tips for landlords.

We've got our two phone lines are renting in Seattle phone line.

at 206-684-5700 and our code compliance complaint line at 206-615-0808.

And both of those are staffed during business hours.

And that's our primary place where we take in questions, concerns, complaints, and then distribute them to the appropriate folks in our organization to follow up on.

We have infographics and videos, and those are available in up to 14 languages.

And then we do trainings and community events.

Quite a bit more before the pandemic, it got scaled back a little bit sort of more virtual training over the last couple years here.

But we try and be out in the community and out meeting with organizations to talk about rights, best practices for renters, resources that are available.

You know, one of our main messages is call us.

If you're experiencing a problem, like a lease filing, potential lease issue, housing complaint conditions, give us a call.

That's a good place to start.

We also have a grant program, and thanks to the council for helping fund that over the years here.

The grants focus on education, organizing, and assistance and counseling to tenants, with a real emphasis on working with community partners that reach communities in Seattle that may not naturally want to hear from the government, like SPCI, or may not even know we exist.

So we've been doing the outreach and either because of some conditions in the city or because of our outreach or because of expanding tenant protections that we're definitely seeing an increase in landlord-tenant related calls.

We've got kind of two buckets there.

Housing complaints, that's the term we use for housing conditions like broken sink or the heat not working.

And then we've got our renters' rights complaints that come to the POTA group that Faith talked about.

And those are usually rent increases, lease questions, and such.

And you can see that from 2017 going up this chart to 2021, we've had a steady increase in both of those.

So things are quite busy in our office right now.

And so far, 2022 seems to be on track to be even greater than that.

This is just a handful of common complaints.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list.

On the housing side, kitchens and bathrooms come up a lot just because there's so many things that can go wrong.

Leaky faucets and moisture problems, ventilation problems.

Pests, rodents, bugs, bedbugs keep coming up.

Security issues like locks and windows and then fire safety, smoke, inoperable smoke detectors or CO detectors are very common.

On the rental housing side, the landlord-tenant issues, deposit returns, rent increases, eviction notices.

As Council Member Sawant mentioned, entry without proper notice are some pretty common.

issues that come up, you know, especially here in the last few months, the rent increases and the eviction notices have been probably the most prevalent things we're hearing right now.

Looking at case resolution, this sort of supports some slides that are coming up.

You can see over the years that we have kind of a 50-50, 40-60 split of what we call enforced compliance and voluntary compliance.

The voluntary compliance usually, and this is all of our code compliance cases, we didn't break this down to just landlord-tenant issues, so this does include a few other types of things we deal with, like junk storage or vacant buildings.

But overall, it's this 60-40 split with a small percentage going to the law department.

And as was mentioned before, pursuing fines and penalties and going to the law department is a slow and very time-consuming for our staff to pursue.

And, you know, we're successful with either the voluntary compliance of getting the issues solved quickly or using enforced compliance, a little bit more stern approach to getting issues resolved before this progresses to working with the city attorney's office on a lawsuit.

So voluntary compliance is usually our goal.

That's where we, that's how we come in.

We look to do problem solving.

First, because we find it resolves the issues faster.

It keeps tenants in their homes and helps promote a better relationship with the landlord and the tenants in the long run.

It efficiently uses our resources.

It's just a lot faster to get an issue resolved quickly.

And our inspectors are perceived as having a more neutral role.

That's better when they come in as a problem solver than an enforcement role.

I think I will stop there and turn it over to Michelle at this point.

Thank you, Jeff.

So how our process works when we get a housing complaint or a renter's rights complaint is, first of all, they call on one of our two numbers or reach us by website.

They make their complaint, and that goes to a team of people who then sends them over to a supervising manager who then assigns it to an inspector or a code compliance analyst.

And they do that based on how many cases the person already has, as well as the area the inspector works in.

The staff work through their complaints and questions in the order they're received, except for emergency housing conditions and eviction problems.

Those get always priority in our office.

We use several tools to get our compliance.

The first most important thing is after the complaint comes in, we talk to the renter and find out what's going on.

Then we talk to the landlord.

The landlords either present their notices, issue the deposit return, or make repairs based on our contact with them and telling them about the issue or by sometimes notice of violation and sometimes just by phone, depending on the type of complaint.

Our emergencies are our top priorities, and those are things like no heat, no water, sewer backups, those for getting inspected within one day or to the next business day.

In 2021, we issued 22 emergency orders.

All but six of them were resolved.

And at those six properties, we issued over $100,000 in emergency relocation assistance.

It's important to know we don't actually have an emergency relocation fund.

We recoup that money from the landlord.

That money went to 22 tenants this last year.

16 of them were from one very severe property.

Physical issues with the living space always get a notice of violation, and the notice of violation comes with the compliance due date.

We have to give at least 10 days for an appeal, and usually we give 30 days to comply.

The way the notice of violation works is, again, it allows time for compliance.

And then if compliance is not achieved, penalties start to accrue.

Those penalties can be up to $150 a day for the first 10 days, and then $500 a day afterwards.

Plus there are inspection fees.

However, to actually collect those fees, as already been heard by the council member, we have to go to the city attorney's office and have a case filed.

and then seek the penalties through that civil action.

So that process takes a very long time and is only used when we don't get compliance.

Again, since we get compliance most of the time, we only have to do this about 1% of the time.

Citations are another tool that we have for a very small number of case types.

They are used for security deposits, the right of first refusal, receipts for payments, all of those fall under one ordinance, which gives us the right to issue a citation.

Usually we issue a warning first and then the penalties apply automatically at $500 for the first violation and $1,000 for the next violation.

Then if we're still not achieving compliance, we can issue a notice of violation and take the case to court.

The citations are appealed to the hearing examiner.

So that's a faster process than going through the law department as well.

Some of the challenges we face with housing inspections are inspectors have to make appointments with the person to walk through during business hours, but that's the way we get access to the unit is through the tenant who lives there.

Many renters call just as they're moving out and inspectors aren't able to get to the property in time to inspect.

Sometimes issues just get fixed before we get there, which is a good problem to have.

Sometimes we just can't reach the tenant or they don't return our calls.

We also had process changes during the pandemic.

There was a time period where we weren't able to go into housing, but we started a virtual inspections process to help us reach those tenants.

And where we weren't able to do housing, where we weren't able to use a virtual inspection, they waited until we were able to go back into housing.

But we are back into housing now and we're working through our backlog.

The backlog is fairly big and that's causing us to have a slower time period to get out on inspections because the case management is, or the cases are so backed up.

You can see that in 2021, we really had a hard time getting out and the first day to the housing inspection after the call took 42 days.

We have 143 open housing cases, which are in the notice of violation process and 317 open housing complaints.

The POTA group, as we said, they do the renter's rights, has 46 open notice of violation, but they have 921 complaints and questions waiting for them.

Sometimes those complaints are already in the investigation process, so it's important to know that complaints can be already being talked to and trying to resolve the problem before a case is opened.

With that, I'm gonna turn it back over to Faith to finish us up.

Thank you, Michelle.

So we tried to keep our presentation fairly short today.

I just wanted to focus the council's attention on a couple of things.

One, we have had quite an increase in call volume over the last four to five years, partly because of better outreach and training on our side, partly because we have new regulations that are covering a broader range of issues.

And we're really pleased with the fact that our business is going up because this is really, really important work.

And I think Council Member Sawant, you said in your experience, our inspectors are in fact, very committed to doing this work and resolving problems that they find out there in the community.

It has been tough for us, as you heard, with the pandemic keeping us out of the housing inspection realm.

We are now able to move back into that, but like many organizations, we've had staffing shortages and Again, had some people who were not able initially even to go back out in the field.

We are working hard on reducing that response time.

I don't know if any of you were here back in the good old days when we did less, frankly, and had probably a higher ratio of inspectors to complaints.

We used to have a goal that was for the inspectors to be able to reach, usually by telephone, sometimes by email, to get in touch with complainants within seven days of that complaint getting assigned to them.

And then the inspection time would usually be within three weeks or so, sometimes a month.

So we're far beyond that today, but we are working on reducing that backlog.

And I think with that, we'll just close this part of the presentation and we're happy to answer any questions that you have of us.

Thank you so much everyone from ISTCI and thank you Faith especially for helping to lead this work and I know Faith you'll remember we I think we first met personally when we were at the shadow apartments I believe and

Yes, that was a long time ago, very early in our rental inspections program.

I think my group learned a lot from some of those early meetings and as did you and our tenant services group as a whole.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you again for the work you all did.

The department did in that issue with the shadow apartments.

And that was a really an excellent example of where when renters got organized and they were aware of what rights they had and they were able to involve the SDCI, we got a lot of problems fixed.

And then, of course, the renters, as you all know, ended up winning actually much more than getting their problems fixed.

They also got compensation for it.

I don't want to suggest it's the rule, it's the exception to the rule, but it shows that when renters get organized and fight for their rights, it can actually work, like in that instance.

So I have several questions to follow up from your presentation, and I see Council Member Morales' Zoom hand up as well, but let me go ahead and start with one question for starters is, In terms of the process, you all explained about how the SDCI works through complaints.

One of the points you mentioned, and my office has been aware of this for a while, and it was reiterated on your slide 13, I believe, where it says that many renters call just as they're moving out and SDCI is unable to inspect before they leave, which of course is consistent with what we have seen through renters, just anecdotally, it's the last resort and often they don't know that they could have called the SCCF for a long time.

They eventually find out, but by then conditions are so bad or they have persisted for so long that they've just ended up choosing to move, which is not, which is the last resort, but they have chosen the last resort by then.

But then, so my question in terms of the process for the city is, So, is there anything in the law right now where the SDC is required to inspect even after that tenant leaves because it's about that rental unit, and if the renter moves and that renter is not facing that particular problem, but some other renter the next tenant is going faced that problem.

And we've heard from many renters who say that actually, you know, I moved out and finally out of desperation, but I really feel for the next tenant who occupies that unit after I leave.

And so, and I believe this happens frequently enough, and it really also illustrates the terrible power imbalance between renters and landlords.

But what does the law say right now?

And the reason I'm asking, obviously, is because if it doesn't require that the city should inspect, even if the renter has left, the tenant who made the complaint has left, but still the unit still needs to be inspected.

Yeah.

Right now, we are not able to require a landlord to let us into a unit if they don't want to.

So the only exception to that is through the rental inspection program.

We do have those regularly established Rio rental registration and inspection ordinance inspections.

If we find through a Rio inspection that there are units, several units with several problems.

Through our auditing process, we can require additional units or all units to be inspected.

It is sometimes, in theory, it's possible to get a warrant to go into a particular unit that a tenant may have vacated, but getting a warrant requires going to court and proving showing that there is, I've forgotten which legal standard we have to meet to get a warrant, but it has to be, it's not beyond a reasonable doubt, but there's a preponderance or a very clear statement that there are real problems.

So we would not be able to speak to that.

Very few tenants are willing to come and testify in court because, you know, they're busy, they're working, they just moved, So getting warrants, we never have.

We have always, we can call a landlord and ask.

We can say we got this complaint.

Right now, because of the backlog, we probably wouldn't have the capacity to start a program like that.

But for us, finding a way to assure a tenant that we can help them and that we have requirements to prevent retaliation is what we found is best.

I mean, clearly we're getting more calls, so more tenants are learning.

But as you heard today, people do wait.

They will wait months.

And that is something we wish we could prevent.

Right.

Thank you.

I really appreciate that.

And that's precisely why my office genuinely wants to make sure that we close all the problems.

I mean, obviously, it's not going to change the system by itself, but at least if we can reduce the problems that are there within the loopholes in the current law, And just to follow up on that I mean I just also wanted to clarify that one of the reasons and you, you sort of address this but one of the reasons, tenants don't follow up, and even when they know that they have a, they can complain to the SEC and they don't do that, not only because They do it when they're desperate, as I said before.

But also, they do have a fear of retaliation.

And then they report it often.

And tenants have told us this.

They report it as they're about to move out because they want to make sure the next tenant can have a better living condition.

But clearly, the law is not addressing that because, as you said, the landlords are not required by the current law to let SDCI into the unit.

You can enter the unit as a city inspector only when the tenant lets you in.

And I think the intimidation and retaliation obviously is a big point here.

But I also wanted to one follow up on one thing you said, you know, you know, you said, as you said, the Rio allows you to you know, allows you to look into the conditions.

But isn't it true that the landlord is free to choose a private inspector?

And then if they chose a private inspector, as opposed to the SDCI inspector themselves, then SDCI does not really get access to that kind of inspection.

They look at the private inspector's report.

Am I right?

That's true.

So the law requires that we offer the ability for a landlord to hire a private inspector.

If they do that, if they hire a private inspector, they need to inspect and don't want to share their data with us.

then they have to inspect all their units.

We have pretty good inspectors, but I will admit we have had some inspectors who have been a little bit lax.

Jeff, your program, Rio, runs that.

We work pretty hard.

We do some follow-up surveys with tenants to see what they've had.

We try to encourage people who feel dissatisfied with that private inspection to contact us.

But again, it's sometimes really, really hard to get people to trust government.

And it's hard sometimes to get the private landlords to trust government, to feel like we'll do a good inspection and not take them to court over a loose electrical outlet cover.

So it's a balance.

Yes, I'll just say, though, that we are so far from a situation of a landlord being penalized for a loose electric light bulb.

I mean, honestly, the reality is the exact opposite, where tenants are facing major problems.

And I'm not a housing inspector, but I would imagine that other than a broken furnace or anything like that, the black mold and roach infestation, these are long-term conditions.

These conditions don't develop in one day.

So clearly these are conditions that have been neglected for months, maybe even years.

So I do think that the proposed legislation, just a note for myself and Ted and with Asha's help and your help, I think we need to make sure that we address that aspect as well in terms of who is doing the inspection and what is the quality of that inspection report?

Because it's not like it happened in one day.

Council Member Morales, I do have other questions, but I wanted to invite Council Member Morales, and then the other council members, please indicate if you want to speak.

Thank you.

Thanks for this presentation.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I just lost my notes.

Here we go.

Okay, so I have kind of two questions.

The first is that last year we were working to provide greater protection through the Just Cause Eviction Ordinance.

We learned that that ordinance would need to be updated to reflect changes at the state level.

So I'm interested in a progress report on that.

But regarding this, I guess I want to zoom out a little bit because you talked about all the different things that your inspectors are responsible for in addition to the housing issues.

And so we don't have to answer this now, but I'm interested in how many inspectors you have, what's the backlog on the non-housing issues, the average number of cases per inspector, how long does it take to resolve those other cases?

Because as you said, if there's more things that your inspectors are responsible for, And as a result, some of these renters aren't getting the service that they need.

That sounds to me like we need to perhaps increase your capacity to be able to do the things we're asking you to do.

So if you can answer any of those now, that'd be great.

If not, I would like to follow up with you and get some of that information.

OK.

I think what I would like to do on your second question is defer for week or 10 days, we are just wrapping up our year-end report for the Code Compliance Division, which we typically send to the council, the mayor's office, and then post on our website.

And that will, I believe, cover most everything that you've asked and then we'd be happy to answer any more specific questions once you've had a chance to see our annual report that does cover the whole spectrum of everything the Code Compliance Division does.

I'm going to turn it over to Jeff for an update on that reconciliation bill of what happened at state and city in the last couple years.

We've been working on it.

We've we've been talking with the law department.

We've got we sort of know the broad strokes of where recent state changes intersect with the city law and where we need to make some adjustments.

I think a lot of it's going to be very technical in nature.

you know, way down deep in the code language, just correcting some terminology and such.

We held back a little bit to see where the state legislative session would go this year.

And as far as I know, there were no additional changes.

So I think we're just about ready to pick that up.

I mean, capacity on our part and capacity on the council's part to be ready to receive it, I think, is just a discussion we probably need to have through the council staff there and decide when the right time is.

Thank you for those responses.

And I would also be interested in the responses to the question that was asked by Councilman Morales, because all of that information would be very relevant for us to understand the scope of the problems so that it will help us in drafting this new legislation.

I have questions, but I wanted to wait for other council members to have an opportunity to.

ask questions or make comments.

I don't see any.

So let me just quickly go ahead and ask a couple here.

One is, and I don't know if you already answered this in the process of answering questions, but do you do an inspection every time a renter requests one?

And how often does that happen?

I mean, like what is the nature of how you do it often.

Does it often require that or does it always require that?

And also, can you give us a sense of how in the pandemic era, in the lockdown era, you all mentioned that you switched to virtual to some degree.

I mean, it doesn't seem like it would work for everything, but to what extent did you use it?

And I'm specifically asking that also because in the panel that's coming up in the next agenda item, one of the speakers who's going to speak, one of the renters, they say that they did send a complaint to the SDCI.

I believe it was during the lockdown period.

I'm not positive about that.

But in any case, they didn't receive a response.

So I'm wondering if you had issues also with getting back to people last year just because of all the backlog, as we were just discussing.

And also, to what degree do they have these virtual inspections worked?

Yeah.

Michelle, can you speak to that with how your inspection groups are handling that?

Yeah.

So it wasn't only a small number of cases where we were able to use virtual inspections to be successful, but they were successful.

And re-inspections particularly were easier for us to do because we'd already been in the housing and identified the problems.

But we had about 81 virtual inspections last year.

We'll be continuing to work on how we can use those as a tool when a tenant doesn't want us to come into their unit for whatever reason.

Yeah.

It's true, though, that our virtual inspections, they don't give us a full view of everything that is in the unit.

It's really hard.

It's hard to smell if it's mildewy, and it's hard to touch a surface and see if it's spongy.

It's, they're okay for some things.

We probably miss a lot, but maybe we get the one thing the tenant was calling about.

My impression, Michelle, is that most housing inspections do get, or housing complaints do get a physical inspection now when we can reach the tenant.

We lose some, but if the tenant wants us there, we will get there.

And it now is taking quite a while, but as I say, it may take three or four weeks or more these days, but we are committed to inspecting anytime a tenant will let us in.

Okay, that's definitely helpful.

And I will go ahead and ask one more question, but I'm also realizing that in the interest of time, we will have to follow up with you.

offline and we will definitely do that because this discussion and your presentation has definitely provoked some useful questions, I think, that will help us draft this bill.

One question that I wanted to ask right now, though, before closing this agenda item is, does the city attorney's office, in your experience, ever refuse to take a case to court after you request them to do so?

And generally speaking, what are the parameters that are used to take the legal avenue?

I would say it's very rare for them to refuse, but I can, they have on occasion when our case is not fantastic, they often are reluctant to take a case that is in compliance.

And we have, had cases where in a particularly egregious situation, we wanted penalties.

And so they have taken a couple of those.

Part of it is their workload and the other cases that are waiting.

And part of it is they don't want to take a case that they think they're definitely going to lose.

Every once in a while we have a disagreement about the law and they get to make that decision.

Sometimes we issue notices and they tell us, ooh, I don't think you guys are right.

That happened once a couple years ago, made me unhappy.

But we wound up settling that case.

So we have a really good working relationship with the city attorney's office.

And I think my team does a very good job of interpreting the code and applying it out in the field so that we do build good cases most of the time.

Right.

That was also very useful.

Thank you, Faith.

And sorry, I said that was the last question.

But one last question is, are there is I believe I know the answer to this question, but I'm going to ask anyway.

Are there penalties like legally?

Are there penalties for landlords for retaliation or harassment related to the STC process?

There are penalties.

The retaliation provisions are, you know, it's actually fairly, it's a fairly strong retaliation provision.

So if a tenant complains to us and the next month after their landlord fixes whatever, he raises their rent, we are, able to say that appears to be retaliation.

You need to hold off on that rent increase.

You can't do anything that decreases services or increases costs for 90 days after a tenant complains to us.

However, the retaliation provisions are in the regular housing code, and under the housing code, we only issue notices of violation.

So if they raise the rent in retaliation for a tenant making a complaint, their compliance is to withdraw that rent increase.

And then they'd be in compliance and we wouldn't proceed to penalize them.

So it's very unusual for us to actually collect a penalty.

We don't have citation authority for retaliation actions, we can only issue notices of violation that, and we want people, we'd rather get them to withdraw the rent increase than collect $500 from them.

And how often have you penalized landlords in that way?

Like how often has that happened?

To actually go to court on a retaliation claim, I don't think we ever have.

Michelle, you may recall, or Jeff.

No, we haven't.

Yeah.

Landlords do typically just rescind the notice, and so that's how we get compliance.

Right.

So we have not really imposed penalties for anything like that.

It comes up somewhat regularly, and we do address it.

But yeah, again, the landlords just won't send the notices.

Okay.

And actually, all of this is also highlighting how there is no, I mean, there's one big hold here in the law overall where the tenants get no redress.

So even if the conditions are fixed, as you report, you do get compliance once a complaint is lodged most of the time.

However, you know, for example, if the heating was off in winter for three weeks, the tenant is still paying the full rent for that month.

So there is nothing that the tenant can do to get compensated, get any monetary compensation for the really bad condition.

I mean, that's not a minor thing, not having heat on a cold winter day, that's a really, that's an egregious thing.

And so, we yeah it is it is it is a it is a problem and also even under the even even in the instances that you were talking about where you say you say that you know you prefer that they comply with the law and then you the pressure of that maybe forces them to rescind that rent increase and all of that but one question that raises is if the landlords have the option of just reversing their retaliation.

They don't actually face penalties for attempting to retaliate.

How do you or how does your department feel that would discourage continuation of these predatory practices?

And I know Ted also has a question, but yeah, please go ahead and answer that.

Yeah, I guess I don't really, I'm not sure I know how to answer that.

I think in our experience, the more landlords know, the better.

Most of them really like to avoid us.

Even though we work to be neutral, they still really like to avoid us.

So for us, we have been most successful when we do outreach and education.

And regardless of penalties that might or might not get imposed, Landlords, they don't want to deal with us.

They want us to be happy and go away.

So for us, avoiding things like retaliation is a lot about education, at least right now.

OK, thank you.

And Dad, you had a question?

My question was along those lines.

I just wanted to confirm what we heard earlier that the city attorney's office is reluctant to take a landlord to court if the landlord is in compliance.

And so I think that's what I heard.

So just if I understand what that means, if there's a landlord who For example, how to repair that they were supposed to complete and they didn't do it within the time frame and then they started to accrue those penalties of $150 a day and time goes on and those penalties build up and then.

And then eventually, you and SDCI get to the point where you say, OK, something has to be done here.

You send it to the city attorney's office.

The city attorney's office is now looking at bringing them to court.

And at that point, the landlord says, uh-oh, OK, I'm going to fix it.

So now they're in compliance.

Does that mean that the city attorney's office now says, OK, forget about all those fines that accrued.

Yeah, I you know, I would say if in the situation you just described, I think at that point, if it had gone on for so long and was so bad that we referred it and then they complied in those cases, we do frequently collect a penalty.

We just don't see it so much with housing code issues.

So They do work with us if we say this was just a completely egregious case and we want some penalties and we feel like we need to make a point.

They will work with us.

It's not a forever, but it has to be really bad.

I actually do see the exact situation that Ted just described.

We see that frequently with people who have built things without building permits, and it often takes the threat or an actual lawsuit to get them to go through the building permit process.

And when those come into compliance, we do usually collect some number of thousands of dollars, five or 10 or more, depending on the issue.

So it's not unheard of.

I just think most of our landlords do fix things before it gets to be really, really egregious.

Thank you everyone from the department for construction inspections.

We'll definitely be following up with you because we're going to be working on this proposed legislation and I just in closing this out and starting the next agenda item I do want to It seems pretty striking to me that just in terms of the law, this is not a comment on the SDC.

As we've said many times, the staff are extremely helpful and knowledgeable and committed to the work.

But in terms of the status quo of what both the legal requirements on landlords and also just the social dynamic of the landlord landlords having far more power than than renters.

It is I cannot help but be struck by the overwhelming contrast between how if renters don't pay their rent, the law is applied aggressively.

I'm not this is not an advocate advocacy for not paying your rent.

Obviously, everyone has to comply with the law and And in our experience, overwhelmingly, renters strive very, very hard to pay their rent.

And overwhelmingly, I mean, I can't actually remember a single instance where when the rent was not paid or was not paid on time, it was not because of financial desperation.

When renters are in financial dire straits, that is the only time when they fall short.

We've heard of instances where Tenants were taken to court just for falling short by $3.

I mean, this is this is not a made up thing.

It is an actual thing that happened and that tenant bravely fought and defeated her eviction notice.

But the point is that the law is applied so aggressively against renters and on the other side, it seems that the landlords can get a friendly reminder.

Yes, they can get fined in some cases, but they get so many chances to do the right thing.

I just find that really glaring and we do have to do something about it.

And I'm not pretending that this one legislation is going to fix that.

It is an important thing, however, but it also just highlights the nature of the so-called housing market in our system and how much, how disproportionate the power is between landlords, that landlords have against their tenants.

And I also wanted to just also mention that, I mean, and this is specifically what we want to follow up with the SDCI about, I mean, we hear that there is compliance on a timely manner, but that's not what we are hearing from I mean, we just heard the tenants of Rainier Court and this is not the first time we've heard from them in public comment.

And I have personally, my staff and I, we have visited that location many, many times.

We have witnessed those conditions and those conditions aren't being fixed.

I mean, I think some of them have been fixed, but overwhelmingly they still, those conditions still languish.

So we would definitely want to follow up with the SDCI specifically on that issue as well.

And I want renters who are watching this to reach out to us if you haven't already done so.

So now, I want to switch to item number two where we have a renter and renter advocate panel and I realized that we are running a little bit late but that was because we had a good problem which is many people, members of the public showing up for public comment.

But I want to start quickly with the two renters we have on our panel and then we will call on the renter advocate.

So first we have Jesse Seiden, sorry if I'm saying your name wrong, from a Wallingford apartment building.

Jesse, please introduce yourself for the record and then make your comments and then I'll call on the next speaker.

Hello, everyone.

So I was living in the Audrey apartment complex in Fremont.

And on February 25, in the morning, it burnt the front end of the building burnt down the first four apartments and shortly after the next day, the The whole place was robbed because the rent, the apart, the, sorry, the...

The landlords did not properly secure the building and we were all looted.

They just kicked open the doors.

There was nothing that was, there was no security that they were supposed to do in a vacated building because we were told that we couldn't even live there.

And after, just after the fact, really had no assistance besides the, the Red Cross to help me transition into a new place.

And since then, the landlords haven't assisted us at all.

They try to have us sign a document to just get our security deposits back and then thus not having anything to do with us after the fact.

Luckily, we all banded together and made sure that we did not sign that.

But yeah, just completely have felt neglected the entire time having to deal with my stuff.

Luckily, things are getting better, but literally the most traumatic experience of my life.

And I should mention also, there were no alarms that were going off at all.

And we all made sure that ours all were working and had batteries.

But I woke up to my fellow neighbor pounding on my door, saying that there was a fire and I had to get out.

So I could have died.

So yeah, that's my say.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you so much, Jesse and if you're able to stay, please stay.

I just, it is just horrendous what you were put through and I definitely think we should talk to you and your fellow tenants, you know, or previous fellow tenants to make sure that At the very least, at this point, your rights are being met.

I'm really glad to hear that you did not sign that document.

I read through that document.

It is outrageous that the landlord attempted to do that.

And as you said, you could have lost your life had your neighbors not warned you.

Thank you so much for sharing that story.

And we have Ellen Anderson next, who is also a renter in the city.

Go ahead, Ellen, introduce yourself and then make your points.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Ellen.

I'm a full-time student studying psychology at Seattle Central and I live in District 2 in Beacon Hill.

I just want to thank the You say thank you to council members want and her office for inviting me here.

I think the experience that I'm sharing with the committee today is, you know, pretty common.

And yeah, so the rental home that we lived in is about the rental home that we lived in until about three months ago.

So everyone in our house of four roommates is under 35, has decent jobs, but finding housing was still super difficult for us.

I love my housemates, but like most young people, living communally is not like some lifestyle choice, it's an economic necessity.

And even with four incomes, we don't have the luxury of prioritizing quality housing over cheap housing.

So when we moved into our house five years ago, we were super excited because the rent was quote unquote reasonable for Seattle standards, meaning that it was actually an affordable rent with our pooled incomes.

The house had a big backyard, a fireplace and was on a convenient bus line.

But from the start, we knew that the house was going to have a lot of problems.

But what kept us there, despite these problems, was the fact that in five years that we've lived there, our rent never got raised.

And anyone who's been a renter in the city knows that in the last decade, rent increases have been out of control.

And unfortunately, two of our roommates came to our house trying to escape a rat infestation at their previous home.

But unfortunately we battled the super intense rat infestation in this house as well.

And that lasted for months, and we begged our landlord.

call exterminators.

I personally spent hundreds of dollars on pest traps.

I slept in our living room on and off for months because the sound of rats fighting in the walls would keep me up at night.

And I paid the full amount of rent for both of those months, fearing that if I didn't, we would all be evicted.

Our landlord faced no consequences.

We ended up having to deal with the whole situation ourselves, and not a dollar was cut from the rent we had to pay to compensate time or money that we put in, and the months of stress and difficulties that we faced.

Over the course of the five years we never missed rent, we never paid late, we worked hard to improve the spaces that we were living in, despite the fact that we did not own it.

We gardened, we painted, we rewired where necessary, but the final straw was when I woke up one morning, I put my feet down and I realized that I was standing in seven inches of standing water.

The response from our landlord was laughably inadequate.

They drilled holes in the foundation for what they told us was so that in the future, the floodwater would have a place to drain and gave me a large fan to put in my basement room.

The room still reeked of persistent damp really moldy smell and surely the drywall and baseboards who which were warped and clearly full of water were compromised and the flooring was never replaced the landlord's explanation was that a tree root.

was growing into the foundation and had cracked it, which indicated very serious and dangerous structural issues with the entire house.

And the leak from the other side of the basement, they had no explanation other than it had rained very heavily, which is common in Seattle.

And that's just what happens in houses sometimes.

And I think that this really drives home the horrible reality facing renters where if we skip our rent once we could be evicted and made homeless but our landlords could and would leave us in unlivable and dangerous conditions and face no consequences.

One of my housemates filed an online complaint on the SDCI website to request a housing inspection because we were increasingly concerned that the entire house was not safe for occupation and highlighted that in my room particularly was completely unlivable.

Unfortunately, we never heard back from SDCI by phone or email, and we were forced to move out of the house.

I fear for the future tenants who are going to move in because the reality of renting is that it's super easy in the short term to hide damage.

In this situation from floods and mold, without addressing the fact that this house needs major structural repairs and likely should not be inhabited until those repairs are carried out.

I have no doubt that SDCI, especially hearing from, just now hearing from them, like many other resources in Seattle, are underfunded and incredibly backed up with requests.

We're really lucky.

We were in a position to, you know, be able to barely afford to move, but the move basically drained the bank accounts of everyone in our house.

And the fact that the global COVID pandemic and the economic crisis has not ended really means that our house, that me and my housemates, you know, are one paycheck away from a major, or one injury away from not being able to pay rent.

And this makes it incredibly shameful, I think, that the majority of the city council voted to repeal the eviction moratorium on top of the pandemic and the worsening house crisis.

Um, and we've seen, you know, now in our new house, we're paying almost twice as much rent.

Um, and we've lived here for two and a half, almost three months, and we're already struggling with our new landlord, um, not addressing broken appliances or leaks that we're finding in our house, um, that we noticed the day we moved in.

Um, and I think this is why we need rent control and to support the kind of legislation, um, that we're seeing council members and want put forward.

Um, we really need to strengthen tenants' rights because I think, uh, if this experience has taught me anything, that landlords are going to continue to prioritize profits and not housing.

Thank you very much for listening me out.

Thank you, Ellen, for sharing that story.

And we'll rewind.

We have follow up points for Jesse and you both.

So if you're able to stay, that'll be great.

Can we have Tram, Tram Larson go next?

Thank you, Tram.

Hi, good morning, thanks for having me.

So my name is Tram, I use she, her pronouns.

I'm the Community Engagement Manager at the Housing Justice Project.

I just want to start this off by saying that we are very appreciative of SDCI.

We have a close relationship with them.

You know, the tenants that make their way to our clinic because they're getting evicted are generally, you know, facing some type of habitability issues at their apartment.

So, you know, those, we try and connect them with SDCI.

I, so I will just say though, I have a lot of friends just personally that aren't aware of SDCI.

So I think this is just a larger issue of capacity for them, but also just getting the word out there.

So, you know, supporting, you know, Councilmember Sawant's, you know, proposal would allow It would be great if we could have like a tenant advocate, you know, those groups that would be able to enforce discrimination laws, the city ordinances, just because SDCI isn't able to do that.

They have very limited power to be able to enforce the laws.

You know, they can't seek injunctions.

A lot of What they do is reacting to complaints, issuing notice violations.

But like they said, if the landlord stops doing that, then the case is closed.

But if we could have tenant advocates like HJP or the Tenants Union or Be Seattle, who are generally probably in contact with a lot more tenants, um, then S.

D. C. I. Is we would be able to bring those cases forward right on behalf of the tenants and get them some type of relief rather than just kind of waiting and hoping on the inspection happens.

Um, because the landlord can just stop doing it.

And then, you know, once they've been issued a notice and then they can resume it again.

I'll just share an example of a tenant that I was working with during the moratorium who was still paying rent but they called us because they hadn't had water for over two years.

This was not an issue that was raised to SDCI because they didn't speak English and so there's So there are so many reasons that tenants aren't able to reach out to SDCI.

And we were able to make contact with the landlord and try and get it resolved.

But eventually, you know, after months and months of Going back and forth, it turned out that there was an actual issue with the water pipes.

It had been damaged during construction of townhomes, and the landlord just opted not to fix it.

They didn't technically have to.

And eventually, you know, SDCI issued a notice and that the building, you know, that the house wasn't habitable and the tenant didn't have anywhere to go.

But during this entire process, the landlord was still collecting rent and they were they actually raised the rent quite significantly for this tenant who is on, you know, very limited income just due to their age and not they didn't have the ability to work.

So it's situations like that where the tenants are in contact with us and it would have been great if we were able to do something on their behalf and get them some type of relief and damages, but we don't have that power currently and neither does SDCI.

So I think if we could establish something like that, that would be wonderful.

I understand not all landlords are bad, but there are some landlords that aren't doing what they should be doing, and those tenants shouldn't be just left out and left there to just kind of figure it out themselves and hope for the best.

I think as a society, we should be protecting vulnerable folks from being exploited like that.

Thank you so much, Tram.

I definitely agree.

I mean, I know good landlords.

There was a good landlord who testified today who said she supported this legislation.

And I know others as well.

But at the end of the day, this is also a question of what laws we have.

And also, if landlords are being good to their tenants, they're not going to be affected by these legislation in any way, right?

I mean, this is the point that we've been repeatedly making, that if you're not mistreating tenants and not exploiting them, then it's not going to affect you.

Similarly, if you're not having skyrocketing rent, then rent control policy will not affect you because you're treating your renter tenants in a decent manner.

But just before I go to Kate next, Tram, I just wanted to clarify, did you say that the tenant you talked to did not have water for two years?

Yes, he did not have water for two years, was still paying rent every month and paying for his own water.

He literally had to go buy those jugs of water to be able to cook, take showers, use the bathroom.

Oh my God, I mean, this is an egregious case.

If you don't mind, Tram, can my staff follow up with you offline just to get more details?

I know that that's already, I mean, it's an issue from the past, but I think it really helps to highlight why improving the law is necessary.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Kate Rubin, did you want to go ahead?

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Seattle also works pretty closely with SDCI and SDCI is usually the first thing that we tell a tenant who is experiencing problems in their building that their landlord isn't fixing.

We're very quick to tell them, report them to SDCI, and we get pushback a lot from tenants who don't want to upset or offend their landlord, especially if they get the runaround on getting the inspections, like, oh yeah, I'll get to it, or a lot of the smaller mom and pop.

folks say, like, they have limited time, they have limited funds, they'll get to it as soon as they can.

And the tenants, of course, have empathy for their landlords, too.

But it's this ongoing problem, and it costs a lot of money in the interim.

If your heat isn't working and your landlord's saying, oh, I'll get to it soon.

A lot of people, they'll buy a heater.

If their stove isn't working, they'll buy a toaster oven.

These unexpected costs really add up.

And then it's an additional cost to take time off work to let an inspector in.

And there's no real restitution for living in poor conditions or even just worse conditions than what your lease states that you should be living in.

So renters often don't report the code violations until they've kind of reached their breaking point.

And then with the average of 42.3 days from the date of report to date of inspection, that's a really long time to live without hot water or without heat or with faulty electricity.

And so I know SDCI views like they have 100% rate of solving these issues, which is fantastic.

But I think it's not really fair for renters who are dealing with these issues for so long before they have to get SDCI involved.

And then SDCI doesn't have a lot of power as far as enforcing fines.

which we saw there were five fines in 2021, but 3,285 complaints.

That's a lot of people that are suffering with really bad conditions and didn't receive any kind of restitution other than it was done.

And they could bring them to small claims court, but again, that's time out of their day, that's money, that's complicated.

Most tenants are not going to wanna go through that.

And landlords aren't really, afraid of code violations like I know if I parked in front of a fire hydrant every day and the person who lived outside of a fire hydrant called and reported me and it took parking enforcement over a month to come out and then they just like warned me and then I had another month or whatever to move my car, that's just not how it works in other areas with code enforcement.

And that's nothing to say about SDCI's policies other than they need more funding for inspectors and they need to be able to issue some of these fines.

I mean, without the landlords having any fear of them being fined, there's not really a lot of incentive for them to follow the law, to hurry up and get the inspections done in the required amount of time and to keep their units nice.

They're only getting inspected every few years anyway, every five to 10. That's a long time.

A lot of stuff can go wrong.

And so I think furthering these protections and furthering the enforcement of these is so important to balance the power a little bit.

And I know the SDCI tries very hard to be impartial, but there's already this power imbalance between renters and landlords as landlords are the ones responsible for maintaining a property that's up to certain code standards.

And so the landlords who seem to be opposed to this and they're saying that they're not getting a voice or that not all stakeholders are being invited to the table.

I disagree because I feel like you knew what you signed up for when you became a landlord.

The city puts out very clear expectations of how the unit needs to be maintained.

And so you know the laws, and if you don't, there's tons of resources.

And for the tenant to have to be the one to initiate the complaint process and still receive nothing in return, and the landlord to not receive really a punishment for violating the code violation is very frustrating.

Thank you, Kate.

And I just wanted to highlight one thing that you mentioned, that in 2021, as the SDCI shared in their presentation, There were 3285 renters rights complaints.

And as you correctly said, that's a lot of renters who are facing dilapidated conditions or a lack of heat or whatever, you know, all those things.

And then on top of that, take that into consideration.

in the context of the fact that probably the majority of renters don't send these complaints in either because they don't know that it'll work, they're demoralized, or because, as Tram said, they don't even know that this can be done.

And so the real number of renters who faced some sort of problem of this kind last year is probably far more than that number.

So it really highlights the scale of the problem.

So now our speaker is Violet Levati.

Go ahead, Violet.

I think it looks like we've lost Violet.

She was logged on before.

Let me check the chat.

That seems to be to have become disconnected.

Okay, so I just wanted to quickly say a few things I know we have one other agenda item, which we want to, which we need to finish, but going back to Jesse.

The again, we've unfortunately all the stories we've heard are egregious to various degrees.

And so, Jesse you mentioned the settlement agreement that our office also looked at that the landlord tried to get the tenants to sign.

On to and the settlement agreement I believe we attached to the agenda today.

It says the renter gets a security deposit back which is not like some favor that the landlord is doing that is 100% legally required.

Anyway, for the landlord to do.

It also says the rent, this is the look at how.

The settlement agreement is that it says the renter cannot sue for anything.

The renter agrees to end the lease the day before the fire.

The renter is essentially waiving their right to relocation assistance and any other damages that they're otherwise legally entitled to.

The renter may not talk about what happened or post about it on social media.

And if they do, the landlord can sue the renter.

The landlord can not try to get renters to sign this essentially by lying to them and saying that they needed to sign in order to get their security deposit back.

And I think, as Jesse explained, it is really important that all the tenants of this building, including Jesse, they got together, they understood that this is absolutely the landlord absolutely has no right to do this, and that they refuse to sign this document this is a very important example of how when tenants can, you know, come together and push back collectively that it can, it can work.

I also think though that all of this that the landlord attempted to do should be illegal and I don't know if Tram wanted to weigh in on this but I believe that in commercial contracts such deceptive practices are illegal but it's not clear to me whether the in residential landlord tenant agreements that what the law is but maybe if you wanted to weigh in on on that also and if jesse if you wanted to say anything more about what happened with you and your fellow tenants well um yeah so

It was, as you said, crazy that they had us try and sign these documents, especially in the midst of trying to figure out moving, getting my stuff out, and cleaning my place in general.

I was just, like I said, so much neglect.

And the worst part was, how there was a lack there was no security in a vacated building the next day uh...

like i said they just literally kicked open the doors we have not like we have locks uh...

but there their keypads but i mean obviously that stopped the looters uh...

and it wasn't even then that the security was put up the next day there were uh...

them They boarded up the building, but the looters just took those off and kicked the doors open again.

So my place was robbed twice as far as I'm aware, but others more than that.

And then in the meantime, trying to figure out, I was one of the few that actually had renter's insurance, thank goodness.

But to have my insurance come do an adjust, or yeah, get a claim, do the adjustment, and get a quote.

In the meantime, still getting robbed.

I literally couldn't figure out if I should get my stuff out before these people come.

because I just kept losing things or if I had to wait.

I don't remember specifically.

I think it was like four days, four or five days after they finally had someone on the premises, allegedly 24 hours though in our group.

There have been many of us that have been visiting and discussing whether that person's been there or not, which sometimes they are, sometimes they're not.

Then they also have fences up, but we've seen those fences down.

We have documented evidence on that and even those looters they they're they're squatters now Let's see what else and then just like the no Then there was no alarms the whole time.

I was utterly shocked something I didn't think about in the middle of it all but then once I was outside watching the fire I was utterly just Could have died Literally could have died.

And there's still soot on all my stuff.

It's hard to sleep, but it's getting better every day.

Anyway, it's still pretty traumatic for me.

So yeah, thank you.

Thank you, Jesse.

Yes, I can imagine how traumatic that is.

And I think you made one of the important points you made is that there were no alarms for the fire.

That is extremely concerning.

This is clearly directly related to the question of housing code compliance.

And so we should I mean, obviously, this has already happened, but it's something that we should look into.

Did they have that or not?

And we should It also illustrates why we need legally to strengthen Seattle's municipal code in order to make sure that after the fact also landlords can be held liable.

Ted, did you want to make a point?

Sorry, I saw your hand up.

Yeah, just talking to, I had the opportunity to speak with some of Jesse's neighbors.

And he mentioned that he had renter's insurance, which was very helpful.

And from talking to his neighbors, it sounds like four of the people living in that building did have renter's insurance.

For people that didn't, when the fire happened suddenly they needed to find somewhere to somewhere to stay and so four people had renters insurance and were able to use that to find somewhere to stay the The majority of people did not stayed with friends family co-workers one person wound up living in their car meanwhile The property owner is holding on to the security deposits, which they have 20 legally.

The property owner has 21 days to return that security deposit.

For the renters trying to find, for the people who are displaced, trying to find a place to live, even if it's legal to hold that security deposit for 21 days, it's totally immoral to do that, especially since it'll need to be legally released anyway.

People are trying to find somewhere to live.

They need that money.

But then that ties back into the using that as some sort of bargaining chip to try and get renters to sign away their rights is something that several renters mentioned.

Right.

Thanks.

Thanks so much dead and obviously there's a lot to follow up on we won't be able to do all of that today.

So I wanted to thank both the STC I who just presented, but and also especially the renters and renters advocates who spoke today.

Some of you have some of you rental advocates have been here.

Before on the committee and my office continues to greatly appreciate your participation in these committee meetings because your input is extremely important, even if you're even if you've been here before your, you know, your subsequent input is always extremely important to appreciate you coming here.

when we request you to, and also for all the work that you have been doing, Tenants Union v. Seattle and Housing Justice Project, in advocating for renters, making my office aware of what improvements need to be made for renters' rights, and also making us aware of specific situations where tenants want to fight back, and they want to get organized, and that there is somewhere we can provide some political and other assistance.

So I appreciate all of that.

And I just wanted, in closing, I wanted to say one on the case that Ellen Anderson described for their roommates and themselves, that there are many instances of landlords both increasing their rent and still not fixing bad conditions, as the case that was described with the no water for two years.

But also in Ellen and their roommates case I just want to say renters should not have to accept bad conditions just because their rents are going up either.

And so, either way we do need to really push for increased ability for tenants to fight against bad conditions whether their rents are going up or not.

And I would just close on the note that Kate Rubin made, which is landlords aren't really afraid of court violations.

What they will be afraid of is if renters throughout the city got organized, demanded to win progressive change like represented by this legislation that we're discussing, and also the victories that we won last year.

and ultimately you know what we really need is rent control citywide strong rent control and we need a massive expansion of publicly owned social housing where you won't have private profit making landlords but it will be something that will belong to everyone and it will be administered by the city council and that doesn't mean that problems will all automatically go away but you will be able to hold a city accountable for all of that.

And that is going to be extremely important as well.

For our third item, I wanted to invite Council Member Peterson to introduce this point.

And then of course, we will talk about the process.

Thank you so much Council Member Peterson, welcome.

Thank you for inviting me to attend today's meeting as a sponsor of this proposal, council bill 120284, and for making time and space to refine this proposal in committee at a later date.

Colleagues, this bill is needed to fill a gaping hole in the data our city has had for the past several years with our rental housing inventory.

Finally, filling that gap can provide several benefits, which include having the data needed to assess and prevent displacement of existing residents from our rapidly growing city, especially as our city's executive departments continue their comprehensive planning process as required by state law.

In addition to the draft bill 120284, which is available Today on the online agenda, there is an informative summary and fiscal note, as well as an excellent memo from our city council central staff.

and I hope we hear from her as well today.

This bill is not ready to be voted on today, but the information in those documents will be helpful to the general public as we consider amendments.

Thanks to everybody who took time to call in today.

I hear you.

For the smaller landlords, thank you for the housing you provide in my district and throughout the city.

I hope you know, I have in the past worked hard to try to amend recent legislation to recognize your unique administrative burdens as well as the benefits of the housing you provide, which based on anecdotal data is often at below market rents.

That said, I also heard many comments today about the importance of detailed data.

As long as we can move quickly, I am open to amendments to improve implementation of getting detailed data, though allow me to start today with the rationale for this data collection bill.

When I had met with a previous director of a city government department that relies on housing data, I mentioned the naturally occurring affordable housing in the university district that would be at risk of demolition and replacement with more expensive housing if additional land use changes were pursued without first putting into effect displacement prevention laws.

Now, while recognizing the benefits of the naturally occurring affordable housing, that previous director was not aware of those low income apartment buildings.

For example, they were not aware of the Pacific Apartments, a 34-unit building, University Avenue on the Ave, 5200 block, and several other naturally occurring affordable below-market rental housing on the Ave and throughout our city.

And that's simply because our departments had been relying on a firm called Dupre and Scott, which is great.

They had lots of detailed data.

They closed their offices at the end of 2017. And since then, our departments have been relying mainly on census track data that is too high level and too infrequent.

We need block by block data on existing contract rents that are in place So we know what tenants are paying now and which buildings are naturally occurring affordable housing of this.

To clarify, this bill would not collect any personally identifiable information.

Now the council adopted in.

in November 2020, a statement of legislative intent, OPCD 004A-001, that asked the executive to prepare a plan to fill the data gap.

Unfortunately, the department's response, there were several departments that tried to work together.

Nearly a year later, they came back with a response that did not have a handy ideal solution to this problem.

and to use the Rental Housing Registration Inspection Ordinance, RRIO, that would require that it be amended, hence this bill.

It's unfortunate the rental survey firm, DuPree and Scott, closed, but even that firm had gas and information, and it shows that we can't rely on a private survey firm.

We're a big, growing city.

We should have our own data.

So while crafting the original Rental Housing Registration and Inspection Ordinance was challenging at the time several years ago.

It has been in place for several years.

Landlords are already submitting a list of their units.

I want to thank the landlords of over 30,000 properties already registered with RRIO.

Those properties contain about 150,000 units.

They are already complying by providing this list of units, and they already produce their own list of rental units just for their own bookkeeping, which include rents, type, you know, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, in some cases square footage, and the vacancy status.

So in other words, RRIO as a vehicle can be an efficient way to have landlords submit their rental rate and occupancy data.

We have, however, received a lot of feedback and concerns about this new bill.

I'm open to reasonable amendments as long as there is an undue delay, but it was really helpful to have this bill sort of aired today just to get that input.

I'm interested in getting complete and accurate housing details before the city council makes major decisions during our comprehensive planning process next year.

While we don't yet know which research university the city department would choose to receive and assess this data, my office has conferred with the University of Washington's Washington Center for Real Estate Research.

They've offered to assemble a brief working group with housing providers to discuss the practical mechanics of posed data collection.

I'd be open to that, but I also want to have tenant groups at the table, city department representatives at the table.

So we'll need a few weeks to work out the implementation hurdles.

and to craft any amendments, get those approved by the city attorney's office.

So I know we were hoping to do something on April 1st.

April 15th, that might be too soon.

April 15th is Passover, so May 6th is when I would ask if the chair would make some more time available for us to come back.

And I know it would be helpful if my colleagues have questions.

Asha is here from central staff to present her memo.

She might end up answering those questions.

So Chair, I defer you on what to do next.

Sorry, I was assuming Asha would come in to make comments, but thank you Council Member Peterson for that excellent description.

And as I've mentioned before, I definitely support this.

Asha, did you want to add something?

Yes, thank you.

Asha Venkatraman, your Council Central staff.

If it works for you all, I can go through and do a summary of the bill itself, then some of the issues to consider, for the committee to consider, and then some potential amendments that might come up in our next committee discussion.

So as Councilor Peterson mentioned, Council Bill 120284 would require property owners to submit specific rent and residential housing information to a research university twice a year.

And its relationship to Rio would be that they would have to submit a certification to the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections under the Rio program that they had submitted that data to a research university.

The idea would be for a department, either the Office of Planning and Community Development or the Seattle Department of Construction Inspections, maybe even the Office of Housing, to hold a contract with that research university that would detail all of the scope of information that the city is requesting for analysis using the data that the property owners would submit to the university.

As the bill is currently drafted, the intent is for a property owner to submit information about February of every year to the university by March 31st of that year.

And again, information about the month of July to the university by August 31st.

And as Council Member Peterson indicated, the intent is not for any personally identifiable personally identifiable information to be submitted to the university.

So specifically, property owners would be asked to submit a list of all the rental housing units on a property, whether the unit was vacant or it was occupied, what net rentable square footage is for that unit, for those units, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, information that reflects the net monthly residential rent, and if utilities are included in rent, what that amount is, and the length of a rental agreement.

So as council member indicated, this information would all be used by the research university to provide information to the city to help inform housing policy, displacement indicators, work to help the city make its updates to the comprehensive plan.

If there are no questions about the mechanics of the bill itself, I can move into some potential issues for the committee to consider.

So first, as, excuse me, as I mentioned, either OPCD or another executive department would need to contract with the research university.

And we've been in conversation with both OPCD and SDCI about which department would be appropriate to hold that contract.

In general, they would coordinate between themselves and with the Office of Housing to scope out what a contract might look like.

And so I think either OBCD or SDCI would be appropriate to hold it.

So depending on what council members' preferences are and if the executive continues to provide information about which would be the appropriate department, it may be worth amending the legislation to reflect which department is going to hold the contract.

As it is currently drafted, the legislation refers to OPCD or another executive department, so an amendment could clarify the issue.

Next issue is one surrounding timing.

So at this point, there are a couple different issues that would need to be worked out in terms of getting the information to the university and then getting an analysis back.

The first is that it takes time to negotiate a contract and to execute it.

And so depending on, Excuse me, I'm sorry.

Depending on the amount of the contract, which could be anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 in an initial analysis, it sounds like that's how much it would be.

There is the potential for discussion around whether whether the department could directly contract with an entity like the University of Washington, or if it would need to go through a competitive bidding process and issue an RFP, a request for proposals, and do that level of work.

And so it's possible that that contract negotiating and execution could take some time.

And so it may be worth the committee considering at what point property owners should be required to submit their information to a university.

Given the way the bill is currently drafted, if property owners would have to submit information about the month of July by August 31st, that would mean that the contract with whichever university is going to be analyzing this data would have to be completed by August 31st so that property owners would know which university they were submitting information to.

And so depending on and pending further conversations with the departments about what a timeline might look like, it may be worth adjusting some of the timelines around when that information should be submitted.

The other issue that comes up is the funding for the contract as well as potential funding for enforcement.

Given that this legislation is coming up after budget decisions for 2022 have already been made, there needs to be some continuing discussion about whether there are funds available to reprioritize for this purpose, assuming that a contract would be executed in 2022. It's not clear that either of the departments have funding that they would be able to reprioritize for this.

I don't believe that there is existing extra funding, especially given the current conversations about general fund challenges moving into 2023. The other issue, other than the contract cost itself, would be any funding that's necessary for SDCI to monitor compliance.

The staffing and resource, as well as IT issues, could be minimal if all SDCI is doing is tracking whether a certification has been submitted to them.

However, if the intent of the council is for a more robust set of enforcement, which would look at if the information submitted to the university itself was accurate, that could take a lot more time and resources.

And so it may be worth further conversations both with the department and in committee about what the scope of enforcement on this piece of legislation might look like.

The last piece of the funding conversation is that even if a funding were found, excuse me, sorry.

Even if funding were found to support the contract and enforcement in 2022, there will need to be conversations during the budget discussions for 2023 that would provide ongoing funds for a contract with a research university.

So it's both a conversation about how to implement this legislation in 22, and then assuming that that is not ongoing funding, what that looks like in 2023 and beyond.

I'll move into what potential amendments might look like.

As Councilmember Peterson mentioned, if this moves forward on May 6, there is some time between now and that time for Councilmembers to discuss more amendments.

Councilmember Peterson is considering some amendments already for potential discussion.

The first would just ensure that nobody's contact information, personally identifiable information, would be submitted to a university.

Right now, the legislation refers to a tenant's information not being reported, and so a potential amendment would add that the property owner's information would also not be included in the information required for submission to the university.

The second would be to adjust the scope of the work to be done by the university.

Right now, the legislation mentions reporting about displacement.

And so a potential amendment broader, excuse me, broaden that scope to say, information about the rental housing market conditions in general, just so that it could account for, you know, both displacement as well as the water market conditions.

And lastly, and this goes to one of the issues that I mentioned for the committee's consideration, adjusting the dates that a property owner would submit information about their rent and residential units.

So instead of submitting information about February by March 31st, the potential amendment would revise those dates for submission by April 15th for March information, and then instead of.

August 31st for July information, move that to be reporting by October 15th for September information.

As far as implications in 2022, it would allow the departments more time to negotiate and execute contracts for a first round of information to come in later in the year.

So instead of having to submit by August 31st, they'd be looking at October 15th, which provides about an additional month and a half, if that does allow the department sufficient time to be able to negotiate and execute contracts.

I will leave it at that, and I'm happy to answer any questions that any council members might have.

Thank you, Asha.

I don't see any hands up yet.

Council Member Peterson, did you want to come in again?

I can close it out, though.

I think Council Member Nelson just, yeah.

Council Member Nelson, go ahead.

Thank you very much.

Council Member Peterson, I share your desire to get a sense of the displacement of naturally affordable housing.

We need to know that for many reasons.

I'm because the SDCI rental registration and inspection ordinance annual report that council received on August 5th, but was about, it was reporting on 2020 notes that by the end of the year, total registrations decreased in registrations into the program decreased by 14.4% from 2019. So that's over the course of a year.

But the total number of units stayed relatively stable with only a 0.65% decrease.

So the difference between units and actual renewals of properties indicates that the apartments or the units that were already built stayed in the system and were counted.

They did not decrease.

But the fact that the actual properties that we're talking about, the renewals in the program, indicates to me that it's the small mom-and-pop landlords that are basically not, they're taking their properties off the market.

And I looked at the 2018 University of Washington study.

It was the Seattle Rental Housing Study final report published in June of 2018. There's surveys, landlords, and one line caught my attention, which is basically that, let's see, it notes small mom and, well, landlords' frustration with the first in time and other laws that council had passed.

And it basically says about 40% of landlords have sold or planned to sell property in response to city ordinances governing the housing market.

And that was brief, that was so in three years have passed since then and there have been.

more recent regulations.

And so I think that we do need to document this.

And my interest is in making sure that we aren't driving small landlords out of the market.

Because when they take their properties off the market or they sell their property there, it's redeveloped for market rate rent oftentimes, or just for owner occupancy.

And I understand that your timeline is based around upcoming zoning decisions that are gonna be made.

My whole point is that, is it possible to in, I don't know, maybe we should talk about this offline, but get a point in time study, because it seems as though the trend data that you're looking for over time by this ongoing reporting might not, you know, that's ongoing, but you need this information, you know, in 2024 or so.

So I'm just wondering if you've considered a point in time study instead of an ongoing reporting, you know, function and and also maybe pushing it to 2023. And then I happen to know one last thing.

When I was reading this report, it mentioned, I know that Dupree and Scott closing their office has been a big detriment to us getting this information.

We're all on the same page about that.

But it mentions the Rundstadt Center.

Rundstadt Center for Real Estate is also a potential source of research information.

So that's it.

Thank you, Council Member Nelson.

We don't know which university would do it.

And even within the same university could be a different department that could do it.

And in terms of whether to do it one time, point in time versus ongoing, I mean, I definitely see the benefits of having it ongoing.

So we know what the trends are and we're going to have to do a comp plan again in the future.

And so it'd be nice to be more ready this time, at least with that piece of rental housing data.

The other thing is that I think we're so far behind on this in a way because There are other policy documents that the city has approved stating that we want to prevent displacement, that one of the ways of doing that is having better data, having this granular data.

And nobody has that right now.

So we'd have to do something now to get that level of specificity block by block on where the naturally occurring affordable housing is.

So we don't, so we go in with eyes wide open on how we're gonna, if we're gonna change land use or anything else around where those properties are located.

So, I mean, it could be where we set it up to be ongoing and then, Maybe we realize we don't need it or make a change later.

I don't, I'm not.

But I know my colleagues also are interested in having this ongoing.

So we can talk about that further.

Thanks for putting that on the table as an idea.

Sure.

And I'm not super invested in the outcome of that discussion.

I do want to, just while I have you, whatever, I know that didn't council allocate money for another rental housing study last budget cycle?

What's up with that?

I could be completely wrong.

I don't, I don't know.

I don't know if it was this level of specificity.

One of the problems is what's readily available is census track information from the American Community Survey, but it doesn't give us the block-to-block information.

Sometimes rental studies are based also on what What would they be charging for a vacant unit today if you wanted to rent it today?

But we're interested also in what are they paying right now?

There are tenants there right now paying potentially below market, unregulated below market rents, which are great, that actually occur in affordable housing.

We just don't know where that is right now.

And I completely agree with the value of needing to know that.

So thank you.

Just, I just had a few points about this legislation and most proposed legislation and Peter's come from a predestined you will close this item out and then we will adjourn, but just very quickly.

The, yeah, I mean, I mean, just to be clear, the, this is just collecting data.

This is not putting any monetary burden on landlords of any kind.

And I just wanted to echo Kate Rubin's point that, you know, when you become a landlord, you are signing up for doing the paperwork, just like tenants have to do paperwork in order to be able to rent a particular, you know, unit.

And also, Just on the point-in-time data, I mean, I'm, you know, as an economist, I'm all for data.

And so if we get a point-in-time data, that's also great.

But just to clarify that a point-in-time data will not actually give you any information on trends.

So if the goal is to look at trends, and I agree with that goal, which is why I'm supporting this legislation, then you will have to have it ongoing.

Otherwise, it's just, by definition, it's not gonna give you that information.

I also wanted to say that Council Member Nelson is, saying that, you know, is basically reiterating the landlord assertion, which we've heard many times that supposedly renters rights being strengthened in the city is driving small landlords out of the market.

That is just not, I mean, there's that is just total speculation.

There's no, there's no that that's a claim by landlords.

Nobody else is claiming that the reality is that property values are skyrocketing.

Our landlord selling because they do not want to comply with the first in time law or are they selling because property values have gone through the roof.

that they can cash in on their property like never before.

I mean, it's totally their right.

And if they are selling their property, that's their decision.

But connecting it to increased renters' rights is not appropriate.

I have no doubt that there are many landlords who don't like the increased renters' rights, but this is not about what they like or don't like.

It is about having a city that actually has a bare minimum standard, let alone anything better, but bare minimum standards for how renters are treated and we're not there yet.

I mean, I don't think anybody can claim that Seattle has too much of renters rights other than landlords.

As I said, I've never heard anybody claiming that.

I also wanted to add that the data that landlords are referencing, landlords who don't want even this kind of reporting, are referencing is the number of LLCs.

The property owner of the Wallingford building that was gutted by fire that we just had testimony on from one of the tenants, Jesse Seidl, owns a dozen LLCs and each building is its own company.

So, you know, we have to keep that in mind as well.

And that's a very That's a very common thing for big corporations to do, for big landlords to do.

And this, lastly, I just wanted to clarify that this term, naturally occurring affordable housing, often comes up.

It is an economist's jargon.

I've heard that when I was in graduate school.

It just basically means that it's housing that's generally at or below 30% of a potential tenant's income, because that is the rule of thumb for affordability.

But it's not naturally occurring in the sense that it's not like it's just exists by itself in the world.

It's what it's referring to is housing that's affordable by that rule of thumb definition.

from the for-profit market as opposed to being social housing, publicly owned affordable housing.

So nobody ever calls publicly owned affordable housing naturally occurring housing, but neither of them is naturally occurring.

It's how much social housing there is and how much privately owned for-profit housing there is.

It's entirely a question of the political balance of forces and tenants need to fight for increased social housing.

And just given what Councilmember Peterson and Arsha Venkatraman have said about their timeline for technical amendments, we will let committee members and members of the public, and of course, starting with Councilmember Peterson, we'll be talking to his office, know when the legislation will be scheduled for.

amendment and vote.

And in addition to supporting the legislation, I would be happy to co-sponsor it as well, Council Member Peterson.

And also wanted to let you know that Council Member Morales, who had to leave, indicated to me that she wanted to co-sponsor as well.

So please close it out.

Thank you, Chair Swan, and thank you for the comments.

And thanks for the questions, Council Member Nelson.

And Asha, really appreciate your hard work on this.

And I want to thank my staff as well for their hard work and the For the people, again, who called in today, I know we'll be talking more as we craft amendments.

I really hope that the executive departments embrace this as an opportunity to finally get the data that they haven't had for the last four years, and so that we can comply with Executive Order 2019-02, Resolution 31870, and following up on the Statements of Legislative Intent that our Council passed, and this is a way to get us there.

The details still need to be worked out on the mechanics of getting the accurate, complete data in a collaborative way, so I look forward to working on that.

Thank you.

Thank you, council member Peterson.

And I appreciate everybody's patience.

It was kind of a long committee.

Appreciate council members and all our speakers for staying back for the, for us to complete all the items.

I think it was maybe two or three committee agenda items rolled into one.

So it was a bit long.

I also appreciate Faith, Jeff, and Michelle from Is DCI also sticking around?

And also, Tram, Kate, thank you for staying back as well.

Appreciate everybody's cooperation.

And having said that, if there are no further comments or questions, the meeting will be adjourned.

Thank you, Asha Venkatraman and central staff as well.

Bye-bye.