‘We can afford a tent’: Tenants pray for relief as housing industry pushes back on rent limits

Each night Dora Poqui, 60, sleeps on the living room floor of her tiny apartment in Lakewood. There’s relentless mold in the unit’s only bedroom.

“I put the air mattress and just be grateful that I have the roof,” she said.

The old windows rattle day and night, as aircraft from a nearby military base fly overhead.

“That’s the price you pay to live somewhere cheap – and sometimes they’re real low right in here,” she said, pointing out the window at the sky.

Poqui, a caregiver, has moved four times since 2020. Two of those places raised her rent unexpectedly, months after she moved in, she said. She’s lived in her current apartment for less than a year.

Poqui’s story is one of many at the center of the ongoing debate about rent limits in Washington. When it comes to housing, just about everyone in the state agrees that rents are too high for working people to afford. Cities across the state have passed policies to help renters, like advance notice requirements and tools to help people move if they can’t afford an upcoming rent hike.

The effort to slow rising rents is tricky. Supporters say controlling rent growth in policy is the best option to help renters quickly, and there’s research to back this up. But studies also show that those types of policies can lead to negative effects on the housing market and stifle efforts to boost the supply of available rental units.

Debate in the Legislature about how to tackle the problem has been ongoing for years. In 2024, a bill stalled that would have put limits on how much landlords can raise rent. This year, that debate is roaring back to life at the capitol in Olympia, as lawmakers once again consider restricting rent increases.

A bill in the House of Representatives, HB 1217, would put an annual cap of 7% on rent hikes. The most a landlord could raise rent for a tenant living in a unit priced at $2,000 a month, would be about $140 more per month.

The measure bans increases in rent for a tenant’s first 12 months living in a home, and requires 6 months of advance notice for rent hikes above 3%. It would also limit fees for late rental payments.

The bill nods to concerns that landlords have about such restrictions by allowing them to set rent at whatever they want in between tenants. It also requires the state to create an online support center resource for landlords and provide landlords a model lease template to help them comply with the law.

Seattle landlord Gordon Haggerty, who visited the capitol ahead of one of the bill’s hearings earlier this session, said he opposes HB 1217’s concept at its core. Rent limits, Haggerty said, could spur landlords to raise the rent as much as possible every year, so they aren’t caught flat-footed if they encounter unexpected costs for their properties for things like maintenance, or from rising taxes and insurance costs.

“Having a rent cap would tend to build in some automatic annual rent increases, because it poses it as a use it or lose it, barring changeovers in tenancy,” he said.

HB 1217 tries to address some concerns voiced by the housing industry, by exempting newly constructed housing units from the rent caps for 10 years after they’re finished being built.

But that’s brought little comfort to industry opponents who say rent caps are a flawed, “bandaid” solution to a deeply complex issue. They point to negative side effects on the housing market in places like St. Paul, Minnesota, and San Francisco, California, two cities that have rent-cap policies of their own. In St. Paul, construction projects stalled in the wake of rent limits, and in San Francisco, a 2018 economic analysis from the Brookings Institute concluded rent control there contributed to gentrification.

Those negative trends are also reflected in research that measures the impacts of rent-limiting policies in the U.S. and elsewhere. Generally, studies reveal those less-desired side effects – like slower construction rates, poorer upkeep in some rentals, and higher prices for uncontrolled units – are common.

But the data is mixed overall. Studies also show that policies restricting rent growth do help tenants stay in their homes. Many experts acknowledge that capturing the full impact of rent policies can be difficult, because of other housing regulations at play.

Meanwhile, housing advocates who back Washington’s rent cap bill also point to data that connects rent increases with homelessness. They also say it’s impossible to compare Washington’s rent limit proposal to what’s happened elsewhere. In St. Paul, for example, rent hikes there were capped at 3% – much lower than the 7% limit in HB 1217.

“No other place in the country has simultaneously passed rent stabilization that is this generous to builders and landlords, while simultaneously doing so much on supply like our Legislature has done over the past two years” Michele Thomas, the low-income housing alliance’s policy and advocacy director, said of Washington’s proposal.

There are at least some landlords who support the rent cap bill. They say a 7% limit on increases is more than enough for them to keep making money from their properties, even if they experience unexpected expenses.

Still, critics like Sean Flynn with the Rental Housing Association, say the proposed rent cap policy would create more problems than it solves. Flynn and others are particularly concerned that rent caps would undermine state efforts to boost housing supply – a key factor everyone agrees is driving the housing crisis – by driving away investors who play a critical role in building the new housing the state desperately needs.

Flynn and others say the state’s focus should be on boosting supply and easing regulations on builders and property owners, not adding to them.

“We need to move towards direct rental assistance and not destroy the rental market,” he said, adding that the policy could drive owners to sell their units, further diminishing the availability of rental homes.

Instead, Flynn and others opposed to the caps say the state should work on creating more anti-price gouging policies that empower tenants to challenge predatory increases, and offer more direct payments to people who need rent help.

But asking lawmakers to set aside more funding to help tenants cover rent increases could be a losing battle, in a year where officials are looking for budget cuts to close a multibillion dollar spending gap.

Ultimately, regardless of where people stand on the rent limits proposal, there is some agreement on each side: Officials are not moving fast enough to fix the state’s housing crisis.

Especially for renters like Poqui, who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads.

“We can afford a tent, at least … Never did I think I was going to be at this point, at my age,” she said. “I like my job. I love helping elders, the disabled. But what do I have for it?”