Seattle’s housing market is booming.
But as rent continues its too-often breathtaking ascent, and, concomitantly, the inventory of housing that ordinary human beings can afford to live in keeps shrinking, tenant protection issues such as income discrimination are starting to crop up in South King County.
Leaving too many people behind.
It’s for this reason that the City of Auburn is so keen about the affordable housing initiative it intends to bring forward.
Sean Martin of the Rental Housing Association of Washington (RJAW) – its 5,100 members in the Puget Sound region being mostly smaller, independent owners and landlords of 10-or-fewer units – on Monday brought the Auburn City Council up to date on the issue.
To understand the problem, he said, it’s vital first to distinguish between the Section 8 Housing Voucher program and source of income.
Whereas Section 8 is a voluntary, federally-funded program that gives tenants a voucher for their rent every month, typically paying 80 percent or more of it, source of income gets into other sources of revenue, such as Social Security, unemployment, child support and other legal sources of income.
A recent incident in the city of Renton illustrates what has been happening with Section 8 vouchers.
Several apartments in that city were recently sold to a management group with a corporate policy at the national level that said, in effect: “Section 8 is federal-voluntary and federally funded, and we don’t want to participate in it.”
The upshot was the management group told a number of families, headed mostly by single mothers, that they would have to vacate by the end of November.
The City of Renton responded as other cities in similar situations have done: declared it would make Section 8 voucher holders a protected class, giving them the same opportunities to apply, subjecting them to the same standards any other renter would have to face, so they could not be denied on the basis of having that particular voucher.
Martin said RHAW has since tried to reach out to the management group but has been rebuffed.
“We have worked with other organizations to get the landlords to hold off on the determination, but in the long run (the tenants) are still going to have to vacate,” Martin said.
For owners, particularly smaller owners, Martin conceded, aspects of the Section 8 program can be onerous, and they may not jibe with some business models.
For example, an inspection component that can take two- to-three weeks to complete, resulting in lost rental income.
Or this rule:
“If you have a multi-unit property, and you are keeping rent low for someone who has, let’s say, been there for 10 years, is retired, is living on a fixed income, you know they are going to take care of the place and you keep their rent lower than the market rate,” Martin said. “What Section 8 asks is that when you are looking at setting your rent for someone who is coming with a voucher program, or increasing rent in the future, they will look at all rents in the building, Let’s say this one is a lot lower, so you either have to bring that one there up to make it fair for everyone or you have to offer our client that lower rent amount.”
Here are some ideas RHAW is pursuing:
• The landlord-liaison project, presently run through the YWCA: backs tenants with a large damage deposit guarantee of up to $3,400 to “incentivize” apprehensive landlords to rent to people with unstable or insufficient incomes that could create problems.
• Landlord mitigation fund at the state level: RHAW intends to pursue this idea in the upcoming legislative session. Related to housing trust-fund money and document recording fees that are paid on real estate transactions, at present it is a $125,000 fund that landlords may use one time to recoup losses should they rent to Section 8 tenants who ultimately cause damages.
“Also, some of the larger housing authorities, like King County or the Seattle Housing Authority, have a little flexibility under some federal rules to streamline their processes, to change things to make it easier to get people to rent into the program,” Martin said.
Protections
Martin said that the cities of Seattle and Vancouver, Wash., are two areas that have full, source-of-income protections at this time.
“The problem that we have seen become involved with this is that a few of these sources of income are not garnishable. They are also not verifiable to an unknown third party. What this means is that with Section 8, I know the federal government is going to pay that voucher, I don’t have to worry about their source of income. But when you get into things like child support, child support, a deadbeat dad living across the state line, there is no way to verify that that money is good, or that they are going to be able to continue to pay it for the long run.”
Another concern landlords have with this broader source of income is short-term vouchers. For example, the two-to-three-month vouchers that non-profit or church organizations provide to get someone back on their feet and into an apartment.
“The problem is after two to three months, that money runs out, and more likely than not those people will be evicted, and now they are in an even worse situation because it’s even harder to get into the next unit,” Martin said. “Seattle’s law actually mandates that you accept the short-term voucher, and due to discrimination laws, you can’t change your offer; as a landlord, you have to offer the same terms to anyone who comes to you. So, if I’m advertising that as a one-year agreement, and someone comes to me with a three-month, temporary voucher, I have to sign that three-month agreement, cross my fingers and hope that it works out.”
