Twenty days’ notice to vacate a rental for no reason in particular — except that the landlord wants you to leave — seems like “cruel and unusual punishment,” Vancouver City Councilman Larry Smith said Monday afternoon. “It’s very harsh. It bugs the daylight out of me.”
Smith summed up what the whole council seemed to be thinking at the end of an hour-long presentation and conversation about affordable housing. The workshop drew a standing-room-only crowd to the council chambers.
While strategies to encourage private developers to build more affordable housing may take months to develop and deploy, the council appeared to be entirely on board when it comes to protecting low-income renters from displacement with minimal notice.
Twenty-day “no cause” notices to vacate are legal throughout Washington, unless pre-empted by local ordinance. The council directed city staff to start looking at what a longer minimum notice might do for vulnerable tenants — and what landlords and property owners might have to say about it, too.
The council also directed staff to research existing tenant protections in other jurisdictions for possible implementation here. In Seattle, for example, any landlord who wants to displace renters in order to renovate a property has to get a Tenant Relocation Assistance license. In addition to payments of $3,255 in relocation assistance to low-income tenants who qualify, the ordinance requires a specific schedule of multiple advance notices to all tenants. The whole process can take 90 days or longer before anybody has to leave.
Another Seattle ordinance requires landlords to give “good cause” in writing for ending a month-to-month tenancy — and it specifies 18 reasons that are allowed. These mostly have to do with tenant misbehavior, not the landlord’s wish to raise the rent.
Yet another Seattle ordinance says any landlord who intends to hike the rent 10 percent or more must give tenants 60 days’ written notice.
Any or all of these measures could have protected the tenants at Courtyard Village Apartments, a 151-unit apartment complex in the Rose Village neighborhood that’s seeing multiple waves of displacement right now. It’s all because a new owner purchased the apartments last fall and has begun renovations. Rents are rising and dozens of households in the complex have received 20-day, “no cause” notices to vacate. Within the next few months it’s expected that the entire population of Courtyard Village will have received notices to go.
Councilor Alishia Topper said there’s no doubt that the dilapidated complex has long been “substandard” and in need of renovations — but the short notice for tenants to move and the new landlord’s insistence that people who want to stay start paying higher rents immediately have been “heartless and cold,” she said.
“If it’s ‘no cause’ and there are mass amounts of units being vacated,” Toppper said, that becomes a serious burden on the community and the social service providers — such as the local Council for the Homeless — that are trying to find new units for the displaced.
The apartment vacancy rate in Vancouver is less than 2 percent, according to community development program manager Peggy Sheehan. That makes it a very competitive market for anybody hunting for an apartment. And Topper pointed out that 20 days is such short notice that people may wind up evicted if they can’t find a place to go.
“Eviction becomes a permanent stain” on their records, she said, making it that much harder for them to find a new unit going forward.
Roy Johnson, executive director of the Vancouver Housing Authority, said his agency has only a small piece of the affordable housing picture — with federal and state regulations driving its costs as much as 30 percent higher than what private developers have to pay.
“We are in a difficult position that’s only going to get worse,” Johnson said.
Demand for affordable housing is increasing quickly, he said, while resources are diminishing. The state housing trust fund has gone nearly dry in recent years, he said, and Vancouver’s rising population has not been matched by rising housing subsidies from the federal government.
Federal and state support for affordable housing have almost come “to a screeching halt,” Johnson said.
Johnson said the city council would be well advised to consider incentives for private developers to build more affordable housing. Those could be anything from a local housing trust fund fed by a new tax levy to tax abatements for multifamily projects that target lower-income tenants.
“There’s a whole lot more homework that we need to do,” said City Manager Eric Holmes. The council also recommended convening an affordable housing task force — drawn from a wide variety of community players, from housing advocates to landlords, and steered by the city Planning Commission — to consider those longer-term policies.
Another workshop will be scheduled.
