Piecemeal local rental housing policies have unintended consequences | Opinion

In an effort to address the housing “crisis,” regulations negotiated between tenant advocates and housing providers at the state level are being superseded with more restrictive and often confusing rules at the local level. As a result, a complex layer of constantly changing state, county and city regulations present a confusing mishmash of rules, making it especially hard for local housing providers, tenants, court systems, and even enforcement agencies to navigate.

In many cases, these local ordinances do not identify specific problems based on quantitative data, so it is not clear what problem they will solve, nor how we will know whether they are effective. In some cases, it is unclear if the problem as identified even exists.

Often, when “evidence” of a need for action is cited, policy makers rely on either anecdotes or surveys that ask people about their “feelings” rather than quantitative data.

For instance, the recent passage of the City of Olympia’s Rental Registry program was supported in part by the sharing of selected results from a pre-COVID survey of tenants that indicated that 60% “felt concerned” about high heating costs, 48% about mold and 45% about high cooling costs.

These feelings of concern are not evidence of an actual problem, nor evidence that another expensive bureaucratic program is needed. Statewide measures already exist to address unsafe or unhealthy conditions, code violations, and retaliation by a housing provider against a tenant for reporting such conditions. Why layer in another program?

Most concerning is the trend toward increasing the burden of risks and costs to individual housing providers by limiting refundable deposits, requiring multiple and complex timelines for formal notices, limiting the reasons for and proof needed to ask a tenant to leave a property — and now, in some localities, forbidding the use of eviction during “cold weather” months, or for certain classes of people regardless of their actions.

These may be well-intended ordinances, but the unintended consequence is to harm the very people they are trying to help. As the risks, costs, and management burdens of being a housing provider have increased, more small and- local housing providers are hiring professional managers who have less flexibility in tenant relations. or worse yet, some are selling their properties, thereby removing them entirely from the rental market. This also helps to accelerate the trend of large corporate investment in housing, as corporate landlords can better mitigate local risks and have resources to manage complex regulations but are rarely involved in the fabric of the local community.

In all cases, housing becomes increasingly depersonalized, more expensive and less available. It is time to look at new ways of addressing this issue.

Several years ago, the term “missing middle” was coined to refer to the relative absence of small multi-family and auxiliary dwelling units within existing single-family neighborhoods. I would suggest this term should instead refer to something else entirely.

What happened to the middle of our political spectrum that is willing and able to listen, move beyond individual bias, entertain compromise, and creatively develop solutions to serious issues? This is the “missing middle” that we should re-establish. Let’s invite all potential problem solvers to the table, leave preconceived assumptions aside, and collect hard data to define problems. A spirit of cooperation and goodwill, rather than vilification and mistrust, would go much farther in meeting the current challenges.

There is plenty of ground for agreement and progress. We can all agree that the plethora of programs to help the unhoused and those at risk of homelessness need to be simpler, faster and easier to navigate. We can all agree that local governments alone lack the resources to address these problems without major state and federal financing. And we can all agree that creating relationships between tenants and housing providers that are fair, predictable, and functional to all concerned is essential to helping control rental housing costs by encouraging more, not less, local investment.

After 24 years in the nonprofit world, Todd Monohon moved to owning and managing rentals in 1988. In 2005 he started Olympic Rentals, a local, single family residential property management company serving Thurston and south Pierce Counties.