Tacoma voters will decide this election whether to pass the Safe Homes For All initiative Measure 1, which would strengthen enforcement of renter protections, increase penalties for noncompliant landlords and require landlords to bargain with tenant unions.
The proposal has generated fierce debate, and is the latest in a years-long battle over rental housing rules in the city.
Tacoma’s tenant protections are already some of the strongest in Washington. In 2023, voters there passed the Tenant Bill of Rights, which added a suite of new protections, including restrictions on winter evictions, extended rent increase notice periods and mandatory relocation assistance if a renter has to move because of a significant rent hike.
But the law did not require the city to enforce it. Since the Tenant Bill of Rights passed, the city has not cited any landlords for violating it.
“Many landlords know they can break the law with impunity because there is no enforcement in any meaningful sense in this city,” said Tyron Moore, the executive director of Tacoma For All, the group behind both initiatives.
The new Safe Homes For All initiative seeks to address that. If passed, the city would be required to investigate complaints about landlords breaking the law. If the city determines that a violation has taken place, the landlord would have to pay the tenant a minimum of $500. More serious violations could be higher — up to five times the monthly rent.
The city’s enforcement would be funded with money from a new rental licensing fee, set by the city, for each unit a landlord operates. The initiative would also create a public landlord information database and require education and outreach for landlords and tenants.
The proposal has been met with significant pushback from landlord groups that argue the new regulations and fees would drive up rents by forcing small landlords out of Tacoma. They have also raised concerns about what it would cost the city to stand up a new regulatory rental bureaucracy.
“Nobody is going to want to be a small, community-based rental housing provider anymore,” said Kevin Schilling, the government affairs director for the Rental Housing Association, a large landlord group.
Landlord and real estate groups have raised over $569,000 to defeat the measure — breaking the record for opposition spending in a Tacoma election that was previously set by spending against the 2023 renter protection initiative, according to Tacoma For All.
As Election Day nears, both sides have ramped up their campaigns and are spending heavily to sell their argument to voters. The stakes are high: The 2023 Tenants Bill of Rights passed with a margin of less than 400 votes.
Supporters and opponents of the new initiative say they expect a tough fight this time around, too.
Money problems
Among the most significant questions surrounding Measure 1 is how much it would cost the city.
The activists with Tacoma For All say the city’s enforcement operations would cost about $1 million to $2 million a year, entirely funded by the new per-unit licensing fees.
But during a meeting this summer, Tacoma City Manager Hyun Kim told council members that city officials believe enforcement would cost $8 million to $10 million per year to cover “personnel, training, equipment, basically the costs of doing business for the stand-up of a new department.”
Tacoma is already struggling with a $40 million general fund budget deficit this year, and when asked by council members where the city would come up with the money for enforcement of the initiative, Kim said painful cuts to city operations may be necessary.
“I would look towards the general fund to finance these efforts, and the biggest costs in the general fund come from police, fire and libraries,” Kim said. “So I’d have to make potential offsets and cuts within these departments to support this effort.”
Moore, with Tacoma For All, disputes the city’s reasoning. He said his $1 million to $2 million figure is based on an analysis of other cities’ enforcement operations. Because the initiative would create a complaint-based inspection system in Tacoma — not a proactive one — Moore said the city would only need to hire a handful of additional staff.
In an email, City of Tacoma spokesperson Maria Lee said the city’s $8 million to $10 million figure was calculated through a “preliminary cross-departmental review.” She provided a spreadsheet showing the city’s analysis includes 43 staff positions and $4 million in legal costs.
The city is waiting to see if the initiative passes before dedicating additional resources to analyzing its impact, Lee added.
Courts and enforcement
Schilling, with the Rental Housing Association, argues that the lack of citations issued by the city in recent years is a good thing: He thinks it means landlords are already following the law.
“When you don’t have enforcements, that means people are being good actors,” Schilling said, adding that “bad actors are already held accountable through the court system.”
Moore disagrees: Bad behavior happens all the time, he said, but the city is not doing anything about it.
“A story we hear time and time again, especially in some of these out-of-town corporate complexes, is that tenants are routinely faced with illegal rent hikes, illegal fees, lack of proper notice for rent increase, and unsafe conditions, black mold, leaky windows, heat that doesn’t work, flooding that goes unabated,” Moore said.
In general, under the current system, the only recourse for a tenant who feels their landlord has violated the law is the court system, an option that is out of reach for most tenants. But there have been a couple recent exceptions. In September, Melody Frazier, a renter at a local Tacoma apartment complex, filed a lawsuit alleging that her landlord had violated numerous aspects of the Tenant Bill of Rights. She found a local law firm, Nexus Legal Counsel, willing to represent her on contingency.
At a news conference outside Tacoma Superior Court, Frazier spoke of allegations of mold, hazardous conditions, damage to her own health and threats of retaliation. She was joined by organizers with Tacoma For All and members of the city’s growing tenant union movement.
“This is why we need to pass the Safe Homes For All initiative, because everyone deserves a home that is safe, healthy and maintained, regardless of how much money they make or what kind of housing they live in,” Frazier said.
Affordable housing
Amanda DeShazo, the executive director of the Tacoma Pierce County Affordable Housing Consortium, agrees on the importance of tenant protections and accountability for bad landlords. But she and the affordable housing providers in her group have major concerns about the initiative.
Affordable housing providers generally have caps on how much they can raise rents. They would not be able to raise rents to absorb costs for added fees in the same way private landlords could, she said.
“We’re already working with a really limited revenue source, and we’re pretty financially strapped,” DeShazo said.
The initiative says nonprofit housing providers and small landlords with fewer than 25 units are exempt from additional fees for repeated violations. It also directs the city to create a “distinct fee” structure for nonprofit housing providers. But DeShazo said the “distinct fee” structure language is ambiguous, written in a way that may exclude many of Tacoma’s affordable housing providers not owned by nonprofits.
“It’s forcing a policy that we aren’t sure is going to work for everybody,” DeShazo said.
The right to unionize
Since January, at least six apartment complexes in Tacoma have voted to form tenant unions. The renters want to bargain with their landlords for better leases, but the landlords have refused to negotiate.
This has caused the renters to get creative about how they apply pressure. Over the summer, renters from unionized apartment complexes put on what they called a “slumlord art gallery” in downtown Tacoma. In the windows of a church facing a sidewalk, they plastered large photos of mold, holes in ceilings, broken appliances and other issues they say their landlords have failed to address.
The gallery, Gaffney said, is just one of the many escalations the renters have planned to pressure their landlords to meet with them.
“If they would just come negotiate with us, we wouldn't have to put on a slumlord art show,” Gaffney said.
If the Safe Homes For All initiative passes, landlords would be required by law to come to “engage in good faith bargaining with the tenant union regarding matters of common concern.” Tenant unions would be officially recognized if they obtain support from at least 50% of occupied units in a building, and every landlord would be required to post notice in common areas stating: “YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO FORM A TENANT UNION. CITY LAW PROTECTS YOUR RIGHT TO ORGANIZE WITHOUT RETALIATION.”
The tenant union bargaining rules would be a new frontier for the state: no other Washington city has similar requirements.
Even though they are still fighting to get their landlords to negotiate, Gaffney said organizing with her neighbors has resulted in other big wins. Her union has organized several “maintenance blitzes” — a coordinated volley of maintenance requests — that she said resulted in faster response times.
“A lot of the issues that I’ve put in maintenance requests for I don’t think would be addressed without the pressure from my union,” Gaffney said.
Schilling, with the Rental Housing Association, thinks unions do not make sense for the rental market.
“You should be able to work with your landlord to determine what is the best situation for you as an individual,” Schilling said. “This is directly an attempt to ensure that private property must listen to a third-party interest group to determine what they can and cannot do on their property.
Campaign cash
As of late October, the Rental Housing Association of Washington has raised over $291,000 in opposition to the initiative. A large chunk of that came from an LLC associated with Goodman Real Estate, which contributed $175,000 earlier this summer.
In response to the large contribution, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson joined Tacoma tenant leaders and progressive groups for a “solidarity fundraiser” in Seattle to support the initiative. During a speech, she praised the “inspiring grassroots movement” tenant leaders have built in Tacoma.
Another political action committee associated with the Washington Multifamily Housing Association has raised $277,899 in opposition to the initiative. Tacoma For All has raised over $254,700 to support the initiative.
Regardless of whether or not the initiative passes, tenant advocates in Tacoma say they plan to keep organizing.
For months, members of Tacoma’s tenant unions have suggested they might be forced to strike if their landlords don’t meet to discuss terms. On Friday, renters at the McIlvaine apartment complex became the first tenant union to cross that bridge.
In a news release, the tenants there said they were launching a first-of-its-kind utility payment strike, and planned to withhold utility payments until their landlords work with them to reach a new agreement on utility billing practices.
“None of us want a strike, and I’m sure they don’t either,” McIlvaine Tenant Union leader Daphne Jaesler said, adding that the simplest way to call off the strike is for the landlords to come to the table and negotiate.
