Dr. Harper,
I’m writing you in response to your thoughtful and touching open letter that was published in last week’s Seattle Weekly (“Dear Landlord,” March 25, 2015). In your letter you spoke on behalf of tenants in this city and encouraged your property owner, and property owners in general, to “Ask about our lives, how long we’ve lived in our homes you now own, and what our options are.” I wanted to take some time to address that request and share my perspective as a landlord in this quickly changing city.
It is my belief that the majority of my tenants prefer respect for their privacy and space. Whether they rent or own, most people value the sense that their home is theirs alone, and landlords are rightly cautious about intrusion of any kind into their personal lives.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t treat people well. Showing appreciation for long-term customers adds to the sense of community in a building or neighborhood, and it even makes good business sense to keep the tenants that we have, deferring turnover expenses and improvement costs that can be recouped only by raising rents further. However, any type of tenure-based discount should be offered to any tenant who qualifies, equally and without consideration of their personal life story.
Likewise, I disagree with the idea that landlords are the right people to assess the needs of our tenants. And I do not believe we are the proper people to meet those needs.
Your letter told the story of a neighbor of yours who was in need. Bill, you wrote, was a disabled man in his 60s who had been living in your building, in large part thanks to the generosity of your former landlords, paying little or no rent after living in the same apartment for 25 years. You told of his distress at learning that the building would soon be sold and that his arrangement would soon come to an end. And you wrote about his subsequent suicide, an undeniable tragedy.
Unfortunately, Bill isn’t alone.
About two years ago I was forced to confront the reality that a long-term resident of our buildings, who I will call John, was going to be evicted into potential homelessness. We had made numerous attempts to salvage his tenancy, but none worked. It didn’t matter how much back rent we waived or the type of payment plan we offered, he just fell further and further behind. Eventually he stopped responding altogether.
I got to know John a couple of weeks after we began the actual process of eviction. I had received a report from one of my maintenance workers that John was drunk, belligerent, and had brandished a baseball bat, threatening to kill me if I showed my face on the property.
I chose not to call the police. Instead I took the time to meet with John. After stressing that further threats would be met with police intervention, I asked him a lot of questions about his situation. Over the next four days we spoke frequently, sitting on his front porch sharing stories.
I learned that he had been raised in that very building by parents who were tenants long before I owned it. As an adult, he had moved to Alaska, where he lived a normal life working as a tradesman in the fishing industry before choosing to return to the city and the building of his childhood. As an adult he lived in our building for another 20 or so years, working steadily in support of the local fishing fleet before being laid off around 2007. Unable to afford rent any longer, he felt defeated. He found refuge in alcohol, to which he freely admitted being addicted.
John and I shared stories about our lives and families. He had a couple of relatives who were probably capable of taking care of him, but they had long since grown tired of throwing money at his ever-growing problems, and cut off aid. The alcohol had made him unemployable, and his overall mental and physical condition made even an entry-level job virtually impossible. There was no doubt that if I evicted John, he would have no option beyond homelessness.
I put together a big package for John in his final days as my tenant, including information about nonprofit providers, phone numbers for shelters, and applications for public aid. I even printed up manuals I found online that provided advice on how to enter homelessness. These manuals suggested steps he should take, such as carefully choosing the limited belongings he could carry with him, pre-applying for aid, and making arrangements for communication to ensure that he retained the ability to search for shelter and employment.
When I gave John this information, he told me how much he appreciated that I had treated him like a human being. He expressed optimism that maybe this could be a fresh start, and promised to fill out the aid applications in hope that he could get back on his feet. A couple of days later, after a long goodbye hug, he offered me a farewell gift. He had two fishing poles, he said, and could only carry one. It would make him feel better knowing that I was using the other to fish with my son, like he had fished with his dad while growing up in our building. I left that afternoon feeling good about myself, like I had done the best I could to show kindness in a really terrible and gut-wrenching situation.
Later that night I received a call from the police. John had broken into his unit and unsuccessfully attempted to hang himself while simultaneously attempting to light the building on fire. The next day we learned that he had been giving away possessions throughout the week, an obvious indicator of suicidal intentions.
Later in the week we entered John’s apartment and saw firsthand the depth of his problems. He had lived in squalor, surrounded by trash, hundreds of empty alcohol bottles, pornography, and tools of self-harm. The unit had been destroyed. Walls were kicked in and multiple small fires had been started. We also learned from police that John, a man in his late 40s, was so lonely that he had been offering alcohol to underage students of a nearby high school in order to coax them into providing him company in his apartment. The aid applications I had provided were there also, seemingly untouched.
Maybe I’m telling myself what you described as a “comforting lie,” but I think it is an oversimplification of John’s life story to imply that my rent increases and his subsequent eviction make me accountable for his suicide attempt. I don’t know whether John could have avoided his fall by taking a lesser-paying job back in 2007, or if perhaps his parents could have been convinced to provide the help he needed. In the end, none of that really mattered. What I am certain of is that I was in no way qualified to deal with the underlying problems of mental illness, addiction, and societal inequality that first led him to fall behind on his rent and later to attempt suicide.
John’s attempted suicide was devastating for me and my employees. Not only did I feel betrayed by John’s actions, but I really had to recognize how unprepared I was to deal with the magnitude of problems I would encounter as a property owner. What if that fire had spread? What if somebody had died because I had underestimated the extent of John’s problems? I realized that in trying to accommodate this one person’s needs, I had put all the other building tenants at significant risk.
So I can say with honesty that I have tried it the way you suggest, and despite good intentions, the results are not always what we would hope for. Instead I learned that sometimes a situation with a tenant goes beyond my ability to help.
My experience with John also made me less likely to get personally involved with my tenants and more reliant on a strict set of rules that sometimes seem harsh but are in fact fair, consistent, and impartially applied. It is important for property owners and their employees to be very careful to avoid forming opinions and assumptions about residents that may lead to inequitable treatment. The last thing anybody should want is for me or my staff to be making judgements based on limited interaction and treating people differently as a result. That type of subjective treatment—offering special deals and services to those tenants you view sympathetically, while not making them available to others—is both unethical and goes against the spirit of our fair-housing law.
I hope that your former landlords, Charles and Eve, do not feel responsible for Bill’s death, which was no more their fault than it was the incoming landlord’s. The entire region failed Bill and John, and we should all accept accountability for the lack of options that were available to help them.
We should be asking ourselves why it is that Bill and John had nowhere to go for help.
Local housing-assistance voucher programs are so woefully underfunded that people in need are put on a two-year waiting list, left to fend for themselves while waiting for support they desperately need immediately. Without any options for housing assistance, property owners like Eve and Charles, who gave Bill such a substantial discount for all those years, face the difficult choice of either subsidizing tenants indefinitely, evicting them into homelessness, or simply selling the building and passing the responsibility to the next investor.
A system that relies on forcing tenants to beg for disparate charity from landlords is not working for anybody. Instead our entire community should be demanding, and sharing the cost of, a significant increase in funding for local housing-assistance programs to help low- and fixed-income individuals pay regular rent. Benefits from this type of program would be distributed based on a standardized needs assessment and administered by people who understand social services. The funding would empower organizations like The Committee to End Homelessness, which recognize that it is more cost-effective to keep people in their homes than it is to deal with the long-term impacts of homelessness.
It is also essential that we provide a network of social services capable of preparing tenants to deal with issues such as mental illness and other root problems that contribute to homelessness or near-homelessness. These services could be coordinated by existing organizations like Wellspring Family Services, which specializes in evaluating all the complex factors that lead people to homelessness, and helps direct those at risk to a network of comprehensive support.
Extreme stories like Bill and John’s make up only a small part of our housing-affordability problem. Thousands of other renters who are not homeless or suicidal are finding themselves unable to keep up with the increasing cost of housing. They are forced to work second jobs, take in roommates, downsize their accommodations, or make other sacrifices to their quality of life that should not be necessary in a region as prosperous as ours. Many find themselves in situations like yours, where a building is sold and rents suddenly adjusted up to market value.
All of this is only going to get worse as wages continue to climb in the city. People will be able to pay more for apartments, outbidding each other and driving prices up. This will be true at both ends of the rent scale as minimum wages see a sharp increase and more high-salary tech jobs are created.
While there is no single solution to this problem, there are some steps being taken to help. Legislation that will eliminate a loophole allowing developers to use large rent increases to avoid compliance with the Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance is currently in the works. In addition, I support requiring longer notices on excessive rent increases, with the understanding that price increases of 50 percent or greater should never be required during the normal course of business.
More and more we are hearing cries for rent control as a solution to this problem. While well-intentioned, the policies of rent control in other cities have proven to worsen the shortage of housing supply. They keep the rents low for the longest-term residents, but drive prices up for all others. In addition, it is challenging to find policy solutions and funding sources for these programs that do not discourage new construction. And new construction is crucial, since adding new housing and the necessary infrastructure to sustain it are essential components to any solution.
In the last year, 65,000 out-of-state residents moved into King County, and each of these newcomers is just as entitled to fair and affordable housing as the people who were here before them. To accommodate this growth and slow the increases of housing costs, Mayor Ed Murray has called for the construction of 50,000 new housing units over the next 10 years. In existing neighborhoods, this will require communities to be bigger and denser than people are used to. New development will have to be encouraged along existing transit corridors, and substantial investment made to increase those transportation options citywide.
If we want this growth to happen, tenants citywide should consider taking a stand against Seattle’s vocal and entrenched constituency of neighborhood preservationists. Many of these groups oppose growth and increased density because it changes the experience and character of neighborhoods for existing residents. Our housing shortage is too severe to be constrained by nostalgia. We need to ask existing residents of the city to do their part by accommodating minor inconveniences like parking, new crowds, or unfamiliar construction on their streets in order to have enough housing to accommodate everybody.
I share your anger over the lack of options for people like Bill, and hope that this reply serves as a good starting point for further conversation about how to deal with this issue that impacts my city and my industry.
Please accept my most sincere condolences for the loss of your friend.
Regards,
Brian E. Robinson
President, Jet City Property Management
