Let’s face it: If you’ve ever lived in Seattle, you’ve noticed it’s expensive here. Like really damn expensive.
Buying a latte downtown will cost you a minimum of $7 after tax and tip, while the ability to track down a good deal on gas and groceries should earn you a certification. However, one cost looms over the rest: housing. If you don’t make six figures, it is really difficult to find an affordable place to live in the city (and increasingly, the whole country). The Department of Housing and Urban Development ranks the Seattle metropolitan area’s housing market as the sixth most expensive in the nation.
This wasn’t always the case. At the start of the 2010s, rents and home prices were higher than the national average but not overbearingly so. According to the Zillow Home Value Index, the January price of a standard detached home in Seattle more than doubled between 2010 and 2024, from $444,000 to $926,000. Over that same time span, monthly fair market rents for a two-bedroom home in King and Snohomish counties rose by more than 150%. In March 2024, Zillow reported the median rent for an apartment in the city was listed at $1,995 a month.
So how did we get here? And what can be done to address the profound housing crisis?
The consequences of high rent
Real Change Vendor Darrell Wrenn (badge #13604) likens Seattle’s housing market to something of a science experiment to see what happens if you nearly double rents in a decade.
“This city is almost unlivable,” Wrenn said. “It’s a beautiful city, a beautiful region, [but it] is almost unlivable to live in, even if you got the money. … And there is no end in sight. They don’t want there to be an end in sight; the people who are making the money want to keep making it. But my thing is to make it balanced. There’s enough resources for everyone to even live with.”
As the Pew Housing Policy Initiative wrote in 2023, a growing body of research shows increases in homelessness correlate with sharp rises in housing costs. This seems to have borne out in the Seattle area as well.
In 2010, the Point-In-Time (PIT) count found 8,978 people who were experiencing homelessness in King County. The same survey in 2022, conducted with a different methodology, counted 13,368 people. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority is currently running the 2024 PIT. According to the Washington Department of Commerce, the total number of homeless or unstably housed people in King County rose by nearly 8,000 between 2016 and 2023. Regardless of which estimate or methodology, it is clear homelessness has significantly increased alongside rents.
Housing Justice Project (HJP) senior managing attorney Edmund Witter says this growth of homelessness tracks alongside a record level of economic evictions.
“Frankly, a lot of families are struggling to get by,” Witter said. “Even though we have really low unemployment across this country, we actually have some of the highest eviction rates right now. It’s pretty clear that a lot of households, despite the fact they have employment, are not able to afford rent.”
HJP receives money from the state of Washington to represent tenants in disputes with their landlords in King County Superior Court. In about 90% of cases, the cause of eviction boils down to unpaid rent; though HJP is sometimes able to prevent evictions, most of the time the landlord prevails.
Witter said these evictions uniformly affect poor and working class people. In almost all cases, tenants are unable to find similar accommodations.
“Surveys of our clients have shown that basically only about 10% of people can actually find alternative permanent housing,” Witter said. “About a third of them end up completely unsheltered [and] another third end up living in the shelter system, so some type of overnight shelter/transitional housing. And another third go to live with family or friends.”
Witter added that the consequences of evictions can be deadly.
“A number of people end up on the list of homelessness deaths of the medical examiner,” Witter said. “Every year, we see a good number of people that we used to work with.”
Even nonprofit and government affordable housing is becoming less affordable, particularly for people who are unemployed or can’t work due to being disabled or retired. Real Change Vendor Cliff Tymony (badge #9685) is on a fixed Social Security income; he sells the paper to be able to buy groceries. Until recently, Tymony paid about $228 a month in rent. That amount went up by $70 because he had to enter a payment program to pay off back rent. Before he got his apartment, Tymony said he was homeless for two years.
“This is something that I’m unhappy with; however, I’m going to go along with the program to keep me from being evicted,” he said.
The housing crisis is not isolated to just the cities. People displaced from major urban centers have moved to rural towns and villages, driving up rents and housing costs there. One of the most popular options for a low-income family is buying a mobile home. A sort of hybrid housing in which residents buy their own homes but rent the land they sit atop of, mobile homes promise the allure of inexpensive homeownership.
However, Yakima-based Northwest Justice Project managing attorney Meredith Bruch says the arrangements between mobile homeowners and their landlords can become hyper exploitative, with tenants paying for aging utilities and park facilities that seldom get maintained.
“Many mobile home parks have been bought up by investors,” Bruch said. “They buy them because they generate a lot of revenue on an annual basis, and they are able to defer maintenance and raise rents. That then has posed a large problem for people who are on fixed incomes in those mobile home parks. One, because the park may not be taken care of as they expected, so the value of their home may be going down because of lack of park maintenance. But the other is because the park owners have been continuing to raise rents, and there are no limits on that in Washington state.”
Planning for the past
How did Seattle find itself with such an acute housing crisis? Michael Eliason, architect and founder of the land use think tank Larch Lab, says the answer lies in city leaders’ inability to plan for Seattle’s massive tech boom.
According to a report by GeekWire, between 2016 and 2020, the Seattle region added 48,300 new tech jobs, driven in part by the success of local megacorporations like Amazon. These highly paid employees could afford to pay a premium in rents, displacing less competitive, working class tenants. Seattle’s population boomed alongside this increase: The city had 610,000 residents in the 2010 census; by 2023, the Washington Office of Financial Management estimated the city’s population to be 779,000.
To meet the demand of this population growth, developers have seen their own industry boom — between 2016 and 2018, Seattle was known as the nation’s “crane capital.” However, Eliason argues the rate of construction has never matched increased need, largely due to the city’s backward zoning policies.
Since the 1990s, Seattle has used an “urban village” model of development in which housing is concentrated in areas that already had density. Sparsely populated neighborhoods — which also happen to be historically racially exclusive — have been spared most of the new construction.
One notable example is the difference between Magnolia and Lower Queen Anne. While both neighborhoods are close to downtown, Magnolia has remained predominantly populated by single family housing while Lower Queen Anne contains numerous multifamily apartments. This policy inflates land prices and makes new development harder to introduce.
The current draft of Seattle’s 2024 comprehensive plan preserves this urban village model with some minor expansions, such as adding an urban center around the new light rail station at Northeast 130th Street. Eliason said the plan only tinkers around the edges of existing urban villages and is not bold enough to address the scale of the need for more housing.
“With how broad and deep our housing crisis [and] the homelessness crisis [are], it felt like a complete miss,” he said. “It was really disappointing to see we have this opportunity to re-pivot and start to focus on these things, prioritize climate, and we’re not really doing any of that.”
Eliason added that if the comprehensive plan is implemented as drafted, developers will continue to compete for the small number of parcels of land zoned for dense housing, driving up costs that are ultimately passed onto renters.
The AI factor
While high demand and low supply have already created a power imbalance between landlords and renters, AI tools may further widen the gap. New software that analyzes tens of millions of properties to calculate demand and supply could help landlords optimize rent prices to maximize profits.
In October 2022, the investigative news outlet ProPublica reported that in a ZIP code in Belltown, more than 70% of units were managed by companies using AI tools, including one called RealPage. During its investigation, ProPublica found a downtown Seattle apartment managed with RealPage saw a 25% rent increase, while another that didn’t use the tool had its rent grow less than 4%.
The expanding presence of rent-deciding algorithms has elicited pushback. In November 2022, a group of renters filed a class-action lawsuit with the firm Hagens Berman against RealPage and several corporate landlords, alleging the technology violates federal antitrust laws. In an October 2023 interview with Real Change, Hagens Berman associate attorney Breanna Van Engelen said the software allows landlords to cooperate and share information with each other.
“We think the evidence is going to show that they were exchanging their prices and allowing an algorithm to determine the prices,” Van Engelen said. “And if they deviated from that price, they had to explain why in comments [on the RealPage platform]. And we think that this is anti-competitive.”
Van Engelen compared RealPage to oligopolists of the late 19th century and said it was easier than ever for landlords to coordinate and fix prices. One of the key ways this asymmetry shows up is regarding access to information.
“They’re sharing their information among each other, but they’re not sharing it with the consumer — the buyer or the leaser of the product,” Van Engelen said. “Suddenly, we’re all negotiating as consumers against a group of individuals that has far more information about what is happening in the market than we do. We don’t know if they’re telling us the truth about rents going up … or supply being as low as it is, because we don’t have access to the same information that they do.”
Multiple lawsuits against RealPage have been compiled together and are now under U.S. Middle District of Tennessee Chief Judge Waverly Crenshaw’s purview, with Hagens Berman as lead counsel for the plaintiffs. Van Engelen and her colleagues are asking Crenshaw to grant an injunction barring RealPage from sharing proprietary commercial data to landlords.
Another way landlords could be using AI to strengthen their positions is by tracking individual renters in a database. Witter, the attorney from HJP, said he’s heard of cases where rental history, such as instances of late or nonpayment, resulted in renters being unable to lease a new home. He warned that this could constitute illegal credit reporting.
“I’ll get calls from someone who lives in Georgia now, and [they say], ‘I can’t rent a place anymore because data that’s reported from my landlord in Seattle five years ago is showing up in the system here,’” Witter said. “We’re starting to see a national database collection of individual renter data.”
What is to be done?
By this point you might be feeling pretty bad — and, yes, Seattle’s housing crisis is indeed very bleak. However, housing advocates say taking collective action to decommodify housing can lead to reduced rents and less homelessness.
For Eliason of Larch Lab, Seattle needs both zoning reform and more social housing to alleviate the housing crisis and prevent further displacement of low-income residents.
“We’re not going to push the needle much on affordable housing by just building more and more housing, right?” Eliason said. “There’s no physical way that we could build enough housing to drop rents down enough for people who aren’t well off to be able to afford an apartment. And so that’s really where both affordable housing and social housing come in and fill this gap.”
Eliason serves on the board of the new Seattle Social Housing Developer. In February, community organizers launched Initiative 137, a campaign to pass a tax on the wealthy that could raise as much as $50 million a year for social housing.
Another model for collective ownership is resident-owned mobile home parks. Bruch said even though high land costs can be a big barrier, mobile home residents purchasing parks from their landlords can increase stability.
“We do see more communities attempting to organize, either to fight closure or to try to purchase,” Bruch said. “I know folks are working really hard at it, and they’ve had some success stories, but it’s pretty challenging.”
This year, House Bill 2114, a bill aimed at capping annual rent increases at 7%, was introduced in the Washington Legislature. Although it didn’t pass, the bill made it farther than any previous rent stabilization legislation.
Real Change Vendor Wrenn said that ultimately, the housing crisis — and the consequence of more visible homelessness and drug use on the street — is impacting everyone, even if they are financially benefiting as landlords or investors.
“We gotta come together,” Wrenn said. “The status quo, the business as usual, that’s outdated; that’s gone. Because now we’re all impacted — even the rich, even the suburbs, even the people that are on the other side of the tracks, they are being impacted.”
Guy Oron is the staff reporter for Real Change. He handles coverage of our weekly news stories. Find them on Twitter, @GuyOron.
Read more of the April 3–9, 2024 issue.