Rick Dahms
Rent for Casey Korder's dream dump jumped from $400 to $1,200. He wants rent control, now.
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EVERYBODY HATES LANDLORDS," says rookie Seattle City Council Member Judy Nicastro, laughing at her own outrageousness. Then she becomes serious, "Tenants are pissed. The tide is turning." She knows she shouldn't talk so frankly to a reporter but she can't contain her emotion. "Everybody has a rental housing horror story." If not about themselves then one about their "son or daughter or grandkid."
Nobody at City Hall speaks plain English like this. The last person to try was Charlie Chong and he only lasted a year. And he sure as hell wasn't 34 years old, busting with energy, drive, charisma, and ambition. Most importantly, Chong's core constituents were folks from single-family neighborhoods concerned about runaway growth and mad-as-hell little guys pissed about government pork. Nicastro is fighting for renters, a group that makes up a majority of the city (around 52 percent) but which is viewed by political insiders as young, transient, and unlikely to vote or lobby City Hall. In other words: insignificant.
Nicastro says she has a "mandate to fight" on behalf of renters. Sure she only won by 1,551 votes out of 157,000 cast, but as she puts it: "I knew if I could tie [my opponent, Cheryl Chow,] to landlords, I would win the election." It's hard to see any other reason for her victory in last November's contest. After all, she started the election with virtually no name recognition, she raised $81,000 to her opponent's $97,000, and she bounced around on the issues like a crazed pinball. Nicastro didn't have significant establishment support; she didn't have the backing of the grassroots from the relatively strong neighborhood movement or the weak but feisty left-wing activists. She didn't even have enough money to do any mailings in the last crucial weeks of her election race. Yet she beat an opponent, Cheryl Chow, who had twice before won election to City Council.
Nicastro also beat the landlord lobby that threw a bucketload of cash into Chow's coffers and into an independent expenditure campaign to boot. It is difficult to say for certain whether a renters' surge at the polls actually elected Nicastro, but her largest margin of victory came in the renter-heavy 43rd District that includes Capitol Hill and the U District. Nicastro believes that by making the election a referendum on landlords, she attracted a broad cross section of voters—both renters and homeowners. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether she actually received a mandate from the electorate because she believes passionately she has one and she's in office.
Spiraling costs drive the debate over rental housing. Nicastro estimates an average Seattle one-bedroom has seen its rent jump by 25 percent over the last five years, from $608 in 1995 to $756 today. In specific neighborhoods, rents have jumped much higher and faster: Belltown, home to 4,000 rentals, has seen rents increase by 35 percent; Central District rents went up a whopping 54 percent. "Lots of people around the city have experienced rent hikes. They are angry and they should be," comments Nicastro.
The landlord lobby is shitting bricks over Nicastro's attempts to fan the flames of class resentment. "There is a war brewing," warns Paul Birkeland, vice president of the powerful Apartment Association of Seattle & King County (AASK). "What is [Nicastro's] agenda? What is she trying to accomplish if it isn't rent control or some euphemism?"
Birkeland argues the cost of everything, not just rentals, is going up. "In the long run rent has not gone up nearly as much as the cost of buying a house or a postage stamp or a hamburger."
Nicastro and Birkeland do agree on some things. For instance, city government cannot control the rents of private apartments . . . yet. Back in 1981, local activists, including John Fox of the Seattle Displacement Coalition, put a rent control initiative on Seattle's ballot. It lost badly. The landlords raised a tremendous amount of money opposing it. In fact they had so much left over that they went to the state Legislature and had rent control banned statewide.
EIGHTEEN YEARS LATER, Nicastro made her mark politically by mounting a campaign to overturn the state ban. She packed the house on Capitol Hill with a forum called "Rents out of control," founded an organization (Local Housing Needs Local Laws), and lobbied like hell in Olympia. The Legislature, surprising all political observers, actually held a hearing on the subject and drafted a bill exempting Seattle from the state ban. The bill ultimately went nowhere, but Nicastro used the campaign to launch herself politically.
Now Nicastro is gearing up to "bring home the bacon" for renters. Step one: her renters' summit this weekend at Seattle Center (see box). Step two: Develop good policy to help tenants. Step three: line up a majority, five votes, on the City Council.
Despite all this sound and fury, what can Nicastro really do for renters? She plans on using both carrots and sticks to persuade landlords to keep rents affordable and living conditions decent.
The carrots are incentives to increase the supply of new apartments. Currently City Hall has all kinds of regulations that make construction of new apartments more expensive—for instance, requiring 1.5 parking spaces per apartment. And some regulations inhibit construction entirely. Most of Seattle is zoned exclusively for single-family houses. Supply-siders like Mayor Paul Schell use the familiar supply-and-demand arguments from Econ 101: cutting regulations and increasing the number of apartments will eventually help control the runaway costs that are driving the rental crisis.
