AN ORDINANCE relating to housing and displacement mitigation; expanding the information required for submission under the Rental Registration Inspection Ordinance for rental housing units; requiring submission of rental housing-related information; and amending Chapter 22.214 of the Seattle Municipal Code.
Reported the Sustainability and Interest Rates Committee Agenda Ember one Council 120 325 relating to housing and displacement mitigation. Expanding the information required for submission to the Rental Registration Inspection Ordinance for rental housing units required and submission of rental housing related information and amending Chapter 22.2 14 of the Code. The committee recommends that the bill pass with a divided vote, with councilmembers Lewis and Allison Faber and Councilmembers Nelson and Suarez opposed. Before we move on, I need to recognize that Councilmember Lewis has joined us with that council members to want. Thank you. Going to prison warriors. Councilmember Peterson is the prime sponsor of this legislation. I will turn the floor over to him to use it. I do have some comments, but I will wait until he has had a chance to introduce his bill. Let's hear. So what do you want to speak after Councilmember Peterson and then we'll go into. Okay. Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead. Customer Peterson. Thank you. Council President. Thank you. Chair Salon's Council President. May I move the bill? Yes. Okay, colleagues, I'd like to move passage of Council Bill 120325 on our agenda. Second. Thank you, chelsea. President suarez. I'll go ahead and speak to announce that. Thank you again. Thank you. President Juarez. Thank you. Salon two colleagues. Council Bill 120325 will efficiently fill a longstanding gap in data collection and analysis for Seattle's rental housing inventory, which will generate several benefits, including key data needed to measure and prevent economic displacement of existing residents from a dynamic and growing city. Seattle's Rental, Housing, Registration and Inspection Ordinance, our i o adopted several years ago, already requires landlords to submit a list of the rental units, and this bill would simply have property owners include that list along with rental rates, occupancy status and square footage of each unit to a research university to compile and analyze this important data. No personal information of the tenants would be provided. For the past several years, our city government has lacked the level of detail needed to understand many details about Seattle's housing inventory, including the extent of affordable housing that's not subsidized but still housed below market rents. Usually because that housing stock is older, what some refer to as naturally occurring affordable housing. This legislation also follows through on our statement of legislative intent of zero zero for a001 that Council adopted in November 2020. I understand that rental housing providers have had to absorb many changes and requirements over the past few years. Yet for us, time is running out for the simple, yet vital data before we attempt to update the city's comprehensive plan that will serve as a foundation for future housing and land use policies. The July 2019 Report prepared by the city's Office of Prepared for the City's Office of Planning and Community Development States by the Urban Displacement Project. University of California titled Heightened Displacement Risk Indicators for the City of Seattle states that a more granular and localized data set is needed to best meet the city's racial equity goals. The Seattle market rate, housing needs and supply analysis prepared for the city in 2021, stated that displacement can result from demolition of rental housing for redevelopment . As I mentioned before, we adopted a statement of legislative intent in 2018th November 2020 that asked the executive to come back with a plan to address this data gap. Unfortunately, the plan was not effective, merely suggesting that we hire a different private survey firm, which Dupré and Scott went out of business in 2018, demonstrating that we probably should not be relying on a private sector firm to collect data for a large city like Seattle that has dynamic changes going on with its policies. So it's time for us to take additional steps, such as requiring the data we need to mitigate and prevent displacement. So the IRR, the IO database already exists, but received an analysis of the rental housing data will require the contracted research university to set up spreadsheets or a database to enter and sort the rental rates and other information. I'm happy to address questions about cost. I can touch on that briefly here, but I believe the figures in the fiscal note are very high estimates and they lack the cost effective rigor and reality of a competitive request for proposals process that will occur. Also exceeding the budgets of PCD and CCI increased substantially from 2021 to 2022. During as part of the new bill that was introduced a few weeks ago, we did insert a sunset clause. So for landlords concerned about the ongoing burden of providing listing information that they would normally have for their own record keeping and tracking of rental revenues, this bill contains a sunset clause to end this process by December 2025. In other words, for those concerned about the bill, it's already been modified substantially by limiting the amount of time it's in effect. While the first round of data may not be available for the executive departments to complete their initial draft of comprehensive planning materials . The data will be available for for us, for city council members before any final decisions are made on the comp plan. So happy to answer questions or turn it over to others. Before I turn over to Councilor Solon, does anyone have any questions or comments for Councilmember Peterson before we let councilmembers address it and then we'll move to Councilmember Ellis in a moment. Okay. Not seeing any customers. So what do you want to address this? And then I believe Caspar Morales has a few items for us. Thank you. I support this bill and I thank Councilmember Peterson for bringing it forward. It will be good to have more data about the rent landlord's charge. This bill simply requires landlords to disclose the rent that they charge so that policymakers can have accurate, objective data. So it is pretty ironic that in public comment, landlords are simultaneously claiming both today and the committee they claim ultimately claim that they charge low rent and also objected to actually disclosing the rent they charge. I'm not I don't buy the stated reasons by these landlords that they are opposed to collecting the data because it will be some sort of onerous burden. It's not clear at all why it would be a burden to simply report the rent that you're already charging. You're already doing the paperwork. And I think it's it's really telling that the landlord lobby has turned out in opposition to this very straightforward and a bill that simply is about data collection. It is not a commentary on rent in any way. It's certainly not anything like rent control. I think the reason is clear. More accurate and more complete data will help further confirm what every renter in Seattle and every housing advocate in Seattle already knows big landlords. And the predatory real estate markets are gouging renters with totally unconscionable rent hikes. The cost of housing is being set by the greed of speculative banks, private equity funds and rapacious property management corporations rather than what it actually costs to house people. So while the real estate barons make billions, working people and the poor are increasingly price gouged just to have a roof over their heads and both are getting pushed into homelessness, we need to strengthen all the aspects of renters rights. We also need strong citywide rent control and a big increase in taxes on the rich. Like the Amazon backs that our movement won in 2020 to fund and increase expansion of publicly owned social housing. This bill will simply stipulate that landlords have to provide information to the city about the rents that they are charging. So I will vote yes on this legislation and I hope all council members also vote yes. Thank you. First one, does anyone have any questions for Casper Salant before we move on to Councilman Morales? Okay. Not seeing any. Councilmember Ellis. Good afternoon, colleagues. Thank you very much, Council President. I do have a couple of amendments, so I would like to first move Amendment eight to House Bill 120325. These were distributed on Friday the second. I will grant you a second. Councilman Morales, thank you very much. This amendment, colleagues, just adds a recital to state that the council intent with this is that this information would be public. As we know, anything we do is public. And the data itself, as many have said, is already publicly available. I just want to cover our bases that stating that this correlation of publicly available information and its use by the city will ultimately be public, either through public disclosure or via a data source like the Seattle. Services. Portal. So that is what we are trying to do with this. Thank you. 30 Comments for Councilor Morales regarding her Amendment. Not seeing any. Will the clerk please call the roll on Amendment eight? Councilmember Herbold. Yes. Councilmember Lewis. Yes. Thank you. Councilmember Morales. That's. Councilmember Mosquera I. Councilmember Nelson. No. Councilmember Peterson. Oh. Council members want? Yes. Councilmember Strauss. Yes. Council president, whereas. No. Six in favor. Three opposed. That was six in favor, three opposed. The motion carries an amendment, eight is adopted. Let's move on. Councilmember Ellis, I believe you have another amendment for us. Please. I move to amend Council Bill 1 to 0 3 to 5 as presented on Amendment eight, which was also distributed on Friday second. He's been moved and seconded. Go ahead, customer. Q So this amendment reflects some technical changes that we did receive a request for Stsci, and it would do a couple of things. The first is that it would set the start date for the legislation from the contract signing so that Stsci has some time to kind of ramp up. And it would also provide landlords some time to prepare for compliance of the legislation. And then it also sets sunset for all parts of this bill so that there's no ambiguity around enforcement of certain provisions versus others. And that is what we have with this amendment. Thank you, Mr. Morales. Are there any questions or comments? A customer, Peterson. Thank you. Council President I just want to thank the collaboration with council Morales and so odd and this this this amendment does two different things. I definitely support refining it so that the sunset clause is clearly in all the sections. I'm not you know, it will definitely make for a cleaner bill. I am concerned a little bit with giving the department all that time because the first date when the rental information is due is in October, and we really want to get the information as soon as possible for the comprehensive plan. I'll still support the bill if this pass, if this amendment passes, but be voting no on this amendment. Just wanted to explain why, because I'm not sure there's the teeth exists to make sure that that is expeditiously contracted with the research university. Okay. Thank you. Chester Peterson, is there anyone else before we move to a vote on the amendment, Kessler mosqueda. Thank you very much. I appreciate that this amendment is being brought forward so that we could potentially work with the departments on some of the concerns that they have. I will be supporting this amendment. I still have some concerns on the underlying bill, so I'll make sure to chat about those after the vote. But I will be supporting this amendment today. Thank you, sir. Anybody else? Okay. Not. Oh, Caspar Herbold. I'm sorry. Thanks. I just want to flag Peterson, I think addressed it in his comments, but just want to uplift a little bit more detail. You know, in 2015, this was the first major comp plan that included what was called a displacement risk analysis. And we have, since that time used a displacement risk analysis for many of our land use decisions. The displacement risk analysis was instrumental to council's deliberations on the mandatory housing affordability reasons to try to minimize the likelihood of that those those reasons would sort of accelerate displacement. On April 5th, we all received a memo from the Planning Commission on issue specific topics related to our next major comp plan update. And they wrote to us to say that we should make anti displacement policies a focus of the comprehensive plan and and we should do so to disrupt decades of inequitable growth patterns that led to the disproportionate displacement of bipoc and low income communities. And that the major update to the comprehensive plan expected in 2024 needs to include not only anti displacement policies as a central focus of the plan, but we should supplement knowledge shared by communities affected by displacement, with improved data tracking of high displacement risk areas and the outcomes of policy actions. And so I'm just lifting that up to say if we are going to be making a change to the date when this information is due, we we might be depriving ourselves of of useful data that will help us guide us in making some of the decisions around the major update. So I am, for that reason, not inclined to support this amendment. Making calls for her. I have a question because I was looking at I just want to I'm going to address it to you because you brought up the anti displacement risk analysis. That was the that was like the heat map that we got that would say high opportunity or high displacement. Low. Okay, great. I just want to make sure we're on the same page. It was high up to the low access, high displacement. Okay. Got it. They just didn't make it. And so when we did those amendments to FHA, I remember us having to use those maps. Okay, good. Is there anyone else that would like to comment before we go to a vote on Amendment B? All right. Well, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah, I just want to respond. I appreciate the comments. I don't think anybody is as interested in anti displacement work as I am, given the district that I represent. So I certainly appreciate the comments. This is really about trying to make sure that SDI has the capacity to do the work that we're asking them to do. We know, I'm sure many of us hear about how sort of overtaxed they are and how the challenge that the department has with meeting some of the things that we're asking them to do. So this isn't in any way an attempt to delay us getting access to really important information. It's just a real chance for us to make sure that the department is prepared to do what we're asking them to do. So I urge your support, colleagues. Thank you. Thank you. And because we were also I think Councilmember Herbold wasn't suggesting that you were trying to. I think we're just making the point. So thank you. I'm going to thank everybody because that's what we do here. Okay. So with that, Madam Clerk, can we please call the roll on Councilmember Morales's amendment? Amendment B, Councilmember Herbold? No. Councilmember Lewis. Yes. Councilmember Morales. Councilmember Mosquera i. Councilmember Nelson, you know. Councilmember Peterson. So. Council members want? Yes. Council member Strauss. Yes. Council President. Whereas No. Six in favor. Three opposed. Six in favor. Three Oppose motion carries. Oh, I thought it was five for. That's correct. Council president. It's five in favor. Four opposed. Oh, it's five. Four. I'm sorry. What? Okay. I thought you said six three. Those last time. Okay. So the the motion carries. Correct. Correct. Okay. So the motion carries an amendment. B is adopted in the amended bill. We will move forward to now the amended bill that's in front of us. And so, Councilmember Peterson, our customers want which one of you will be discussing? Have any closing remarks before we go to a vote on that? Or and then after that, my colleagues can also raise their hand if they want to speak to it. I don't have any closing remarks. I don't either. Okay. Council members, let's see. Let's start with Councilmember Nelson, then Councilmember Morales. Well, I support. The stated policy goals. Of preserving affordable. Housing and also. Prioritizing displacement prevention as we deliberate on the plan. But I don't support. Singling out. A group of business owners to generate the data that will be using to make those decisions. And that's what this legislation does to housing providers. So I'll be voting no. Thank you. Casper Morales. Q I just want to ask I've been working with Councilmember Peterson with this on this legislation for some time. So I'd like to ask to be added as a co-sponsor. And want to encourage. Support you very much. You. Thank you, sir. Any other comments? Castro mosquito. Thank you very much. I'm excited about the conversation, about getting ready for the plan. So I'll focus first on where I think that there's a shared common ground, and that's a lot of excitement about the opportunity to address the housing needs in our city, both to develop new affordable housing units and to make sure that we're looking at displacement. I think it's been well articulated already in this meeting and in previous meetings that the plan in front of us of the community engagement this year, the policy development next year and then the drafting of the policy in 2024 is a real it's a huge opportunity to address the growing needs in our community and to also make sure that we're preventing displacement. I think that there is a number of ways that we concurrently get the data that was being sought here. And I really hope that we turn towards some of the data that the director of the University of Washington Center for Real Estate Research has offered to us to offer to help out help a framework and community engagement strategies to work on getting some of the information that we might need on rental data collection and look forward to potentially working with them. I also think that there is a huge opportunity for us to dig into the data that's currently being provided by the city and work with these external partners to really pull out from it additional information that might be needed. My concern is the price tags still associated with this. And thank you, Councilmember Peterson, for speaking to the potential opportunity to drive down some of those costs. And Councilmember Morales, your amendment is trying to extend out the the timeframe I think may help with some of the costs. But given that the departments have indicated via the central staff memo and the cost estimates in the fiscal note, an estimated range of 2 million to $5 million in a year where we have many competing budget priorities and a budget gap, as we've discussed, that we're going to be looking to close not just this year but in the out years. I want to make sure that we have a process to address the department's capacity concerns, to implement a program with our existing staff, including Staffing for Compliance, Review and enforcement, customer support and communications and I.T. upgrades to track the information that's being submitted. I'm also interested in working to see what we can do to support the departments because they've stated a large amount of uncertainty for the amount of funding that will be needed and a hindrance in attracting qualified entry to contracts with entities for the data collection and opacity has also identified that there's issues with the bills specification for the information property owners would provide and suggested various amendments that I don't see in the legislation in front of us. Again, not being on the committee. I appreciate the hard work that went into this, but at this point today, especially focused on the fiscal note and the other available data and the external partners who I think can help us get some of the data that the legislative intent really speaks to. I'm going to be voting no on this today, and I look forward to working with folks on that common ground that I started with. Thank you, sir. Anyone else? So I'm going to share that I will not be supporting this bill today. And I had a really good opportunity to talk to Councilmember Peterson about what some of my concerns were and obviously value the goals of looking at displacement. Councilor Herbert, thank you for bringing up what we were talking about in 252 to 24 with the comp plan and the anti displacement and what tools we've already been using. I guess for me there's a lot of things. I think some of this I spoke to Joint Committee on May 20th. I am concerned about the data. I'm concerned about the third party possession. And so I'm concerned that we have new data points. I'm concerned what customer data brought up about the budget implications and also having a firm number about what the cost would be. And I you know, someone threw out 2 million. We don't that's probably way at the high end as Councilmember Peterson shared with us earlier. But I really am concerned about the city having additional in a burdensome new possession and production responsibilities of raw rent data pursuant to the Public Disclosure Act. I don't know how much more we can place on PCD and CCI twice a year to bring forward this kind of raw data, because at the end of the day, the city will be responsible for the data, for the possession, for maintaining the data, for releasing the data. There are no exceptions, obviously, again, under the Public Disclosure Act. So at this juncture and this form, I'm going to have to unfortunately not be able to be supportive today. So with that, not seen any more. Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll on the passage of the amended bill? Councilmember Herbold? Yes. Councilmember Lewis. Yes. And remember Morales as. Council members must get to know. Councilmember Nelson. They. Councilmember Peterson. Yes. Councilmember. Silent? Yes. Councilmember Strauss. No. Councilmember Morris No. Five in favor for post write the bill passes as amended and the chair will sign it. Will the clerk please fix my signature to the amended legislation on my behalf? Right. Well, we Don, we will go to the Public Safety and Human Services Committee of the mighty Councilmember Herbal. Madam Clerk, can you please read item number two to the record? Well, to the report of the Public Safety and Human Services agenda item to council, but one to 0 to 94 relating to app based worker labor standards, establishing a compensation scheme for app based workers with the minimum requirements and related standards for transparency and flexibility.