In 2023, Tacoma's Landlord Fairness Code established strict guidelines on when landlords can evict tenants. Now, affordable housing providers say that policy is hurting them. NWPB’s Lauren Gallup spoke with people impacted and joined host Phineas Pope to discuss.
Phineas Pope: In Tacoma, what are the guidelines around when a landlord can evict a tenant? How did those restrictions become city code?
Lauren Gallup: The Landlord Fairness Code was a citizen-led initiative that made it to the ballot here in November of 2023, after a group called Tacoma for All gathered enough signatures through essentially a grassroots campaign within the city.
Tacoma for All is this tenant advocacy organization. And what they wanted to do was put these better protections — that's what they saw them as — to help tenants, into Tacoma City Code. And part of that were these moratoriums on when landlords can evict a tenant solely for not paying rent.
The whole package passed in 2023. It's been in place since December of that year. And right now, the code restricts a landlord from evicting a tenant for not paying rent between what they call the cold weather months of November through April. And then if you have school-aged children in your house, that protection actually increases through the whole school year, so about September through the end of June for us in Tacoma.
Pope: And you've spoken with nonprofits like YWCA Pierce County. How has this law affected them?
Gallup: Yeah, so the YWCA Pierce County owns one apartment building that provides affordable housing in Tacoma.
Now, it's important here to note that nonprofit is not solely a housing provider. They serve domestic violence survivors; that's their main priority. But they had this goal a handful of years ago to provide some housing, both to survivors of domestic violence, and then people that were experiencing homelessness.
They have a unit here in Tacoma, and since the code went into effect, they've been set back about $150,000 just in unpaid rent, because what they're seeing is tenants at that building are not paying rent during these times of the year, but the organization can't evict them for that.
And so tenants are, you know, maybe still in a unit that they can't afford, for a variety of reasons. And the YWCA maybe has been working with some of those tenants to back pay rent, but others are just kind of accruing debt
Pope: And there's a push from these housing providers to exempt them from the code. How do tenant groups feel about that?
Gallup: The city council held essentially a special meeting, a committee meeting, to discuss some changes to the code. They're still working on what exactly that might look like, but this was earlier in November.
And at that meeting time, Ty Moore, who's with Tacoma for All, spoke during public comment. The committee is called the Community Vitality and Safety Committee. And Moore says that his group has been trying to get city council to meet with tenants before changing the code — before introducing any ordinance or the like. The group says they're actually in favor of exempting nonprofit housing providers from the eviction moratorium, but:
Ty Moore, Tacoma for All: We replied … urging you to separate out and pass exemptions for nonprofit and public house landlords [that] we've heard tonight, and we accept that that's necessary.
Gallup: Tacoma for All just doesn't want to see private owners of affordable housing get these same breaks. And so what Moore is asking here is to not have the ordinance, or any changes apply to anyone that's not a nonprofit or public housing provider.
Ty Moore, Tacoma for All: We do not agree with your proposal to exempt out-of-town, corporate landlords who get big tax breaks for so-called affordable housing.
Gallup: City Council member Sarah Rumbaugh has been working on possible changes to the code and taking them to her committee. And one of those changes would be exempting any affordable housing provider. There's some very specific language around that, but it wouldn't just be a nonprofit or public entity.
She has also proposed some other changes, including doing away with multiple rent increase notices that are required by the landlord fairness code, and then trying to align it with the city's rental housing code, which has a lot of restrictions about how tenants and landlords can function and work with each other in the city.
Pope: So there are council members who are looking to change it. Does it seem likely that the city of Tacoma will amend the code? When could people see those changes?
Gallup: I hesitate to say how the council will vote if this does come to that. But I will say that the way that the city charter is written, what the council can do is begin making amendments to these citizen-approved initiatives like the Landlord Fairness Code two years after it's implemented — that would be this December. Rumbaugh has said that she would like to make these changes by the end of the year.
Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.
