In the late aughts, a college student named Tiffany Johnson ran into her upstairs neighbor, Bernard, in a hallway of the San Francisco apartment building they shared. They chatted about opera. He played his music loudly, so that it reverberated through the building. She liked it. Then they got onto the subject of rent.

She and her boyfriend paid $2,000 a month for their one-bedroom. Bernard, he revealed, paid only $800. “For the exact same apartment!” she stresses, recalling the encounter.

Bernard lived in a rent-controlled apartment. She didn’t. And where was the justice of that? She didn’t know what Bernard did for a living, but she assumed from the way he dressed that he had a good job. Her boyfriend had a good job too, but she was still smarting from years of working two low-paying jobs to afford scummy, high-priced apartments while going to school. She once got so desperate that she considered stripping.

Did Bernard deserve this real-estate advantage just because he had lucked into a rent-controlled apartment a dozen years prior and held onto it for dear life? And why should she, as she saw it, “subsidize” Bernard with her higher rent? These questions remain with Johnson, even though she moved far away from Bernard and his cheap apartment several years ago. Now she owns a home in Seattle, but is once again thinking about rent control, mostly because of a woman named Jess Spear.

Photo by Morgen Schuler

Spear is the 32-year-old socialist making a long-shot bid against veteran House Speaker Frank Chopp in Seattle’s 43rd District by running on a platform centered on rent control—“an extremely controversial subject anyplace, even in crazy, liberal Seattle,” observes Seattle City Councilmember Sally Clark.

This isn’t the first time Seattle has toyed with the idea. A rent-control initiative made it onto the ballot in 1980, though it was defeated. And then the idea was obliterated by the state, which passed a law the following year that prohibited rent control at the city or county level. This isn’t stopping Spear. The law—or overturning it—is rather propelling her run.

“Rent control is an emergency measure,” she elaborates, meeting one day at Voxx Coffee in Eastlake, the neighborhood where Spear and her husband now live, having moved from a Capitol Hill apartment after their monthly rent rose from $1,500 to $1,675. And Seattle, she contends, has on its hands a full-blown “housing emergency.”

She’s far from the only one who thinks so. The U.S. Census recently announced that Seattle’s average rent increases are the highest of any big city in the nation. Mayor Ed Murray, who last month launched a three-pronged plan of attack to deal with housing needs, including the formation of a 28-member advisory committee, also used the “e” word.

“There have been models in other cities that have been very counterproductive. It’s good for people who got in, but not so good for people who come later.”

Asked at a housing press conference about rent control, however, the mayor recalled that he had co-sponsored a bill to do away with the state pre-emption years ago while serving in the state Senate. “The appetite in Olympia wasn’t there.”

Chopp, in measured campaign mode during an interview at a coffee shop near Seattle University, says that in the upcoming session a lot will depend on whether Republicans (with the help of crossover Democrat Tim Sheldon) retain control of the state Senate. If they do, a pro-rent control measure has little chance.

And even if Democrats take over the Senate, Chopp says he’d still want to know: Do Seattle officials actually want the authority to implement rent control? “I personally am in favor of doing away with the pre-emption, but we have limited time,” he explains, adding that he wouldn’t want to waste it by getting an authority that wouldn’t be used.

At his housing press conference, Murray conveyed that he’s not looking for that authority. “There have been models in other cities that have been very counterproductive,” he said. “It’s good for people who got in, but not so good for people who come later.” In other words, the Bernards of the world win, while the Tiffany Johnsons lose.

Clark, chair of the council’s housing-affordability committee, is not pressing for that authority either, saying she’d have a “ton of work to do looking at other cities” before going that route. On the council, only Kshama Sawant, a Spear ally and fellow socialist, has spoken out strongly in favor of rent control.

Yet the political calculus doesn’t seem to trouble Spear. In fact, she looks puzzled when asked if she’s taken the temperature of legislators, then shakes her head. “That’s not our starting point,” she says. “It’s not ‘Where are the legislators?’ It’s ‘What do the people need?’ ” Taking the temperature of legislators, she continues, is not how the battle for a $15 minimum wage was won. Rather, says Spear, the organizing director of 15 Now, it was won through a “broad-based movement”—the kind she’s now trying to build around rent control. And her vision is even more radical than what’s been implemented elsewhere.

Rent-control law first arose in New York City during World War II, when a housing shortage provoked fears of price-gouging during a time of national sacrifice. Other cities followed suit during the runaway inflation and economic slump of the ’70s. Massachusetts, New Jersey, and California have all had extensive experience with rent control, according to Peter Dreier, an Occidental College professor of politics and public policy and a former Boston deputy mayor. In 1994, two years after he left the Boston post, Massachusetts voters did away with rent control following decades of complaints by landlords.

Dreier is still a passionate advocate for rent control, which he says rests upon the premise that “housing is a basic right.” While property owners chafing under rent-control restrictions insist they can’t make money, he maintains that they can earn a “reasonable profit.”

As he points out, such regulation doesn’t cap rents; if it were enacted today in Seattle, an apartment owner could still charge, say, $2,000 for a one-bedroom. Instead, it regulates how much rent can increase each year, usually through a board that uses a formula tied to the Consumer Price Index. (Some people prefer to use the term “rent stabilization” rather than rent control to convey the lack of caps.) If landlords could make a profit on $2,000 a month, they should be able to make the same profit with that plus increases that account for inflation, Dreier reasons.

Spear looks puzzled when asked if she’s taken the temperature of legislators. “That’s not our starting point,” she says. “It’s not ‘Where are the legislators?’ It’s ‘What do the people need?’

There is, however, lots of room for argument. Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, asserts that her city’s law, which holds rent increases to 60 percent of the CPI, leads to “substandard housing” because “there’s no way we can make enough to improve our buildings.” Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic and author of the 1992 initiative that established the current formula, responds that 60 percent is fair because it tracks with costs related to housing, as opposed to other things the CPI takes into account, like food or energy.

That argument aside, rent control’s even bigger Achilles heel is the arbitrariness of its application. Tiffany Johnson’s story of inequity is not unique. In New York, scandals broke out when it emerged that rich celebrities like Mia Farrow and Bianca Jagger were living in rent-stabilized flats. (New York, confusingly, has both “rent-stabilized” and even cheaper “rent-controlled” apartments.)

One reason this could happen is that most cities that have enacted rent control have applied it only to existing buildings. Anything built after a rent-control law was passed was exempt, the theory being that doing otherwise would discourage new construction. And so, over time, a stock of market-rate housing developed that existed, with no particular logic, alongside rent-controlled buildings.

Some say the solution should be means-testing, so that rent-controlled units go only to those who need them. Spear, however, has a different idea—applying rent control to all units, present and future. This, she says, would prevent rent-controlled housing from becoming a “scarce commodity,” with only certain people benefiting. If that means some Amazonians with six-figure salaries will get a cheaper apartment than they need, she’s fine with it. Some affluent people now opt for low-rent apartments because, say, they’re saving for a boat, she rationalizes. “Do we means-test them now?”

Dreier, for one, thinks blanket rent control is a good idea, although he says he might exempt small, owner-occupied buildings. The fact is, he contends, even universal rent control will benefit mostly the people who need it. People with high incomes usually move on to a condo or house.

In contrast, San Francisco’s New says “You will never get me to agree to rent control,” any kind of rent control. “It’s a failed policy.” Her remarks are worth paying attention to. You have to consider what similar rent-control opponents might do if a serious proposal emerged here.

In California, the real-estate lobby persuaded legislators to adopt something called “vacancy decontrol.” This allows owners of rent-controlled apartments to jack the rent up to market rate when a vacancy occurs. That’s the other reason glaring inequities exist—even in the same building. It’s also why landlords have been known to withhold heat or water as they try to push tenants out.

So even if Spear manages to win the election and successfully marshals an attack on the state’s anti-rent-control law, and even if local jurisdictions make use of their new authority, it’s hard to predict whether we’d get coherent regulation or the flaws that exist in other cities.

Chopp is bypassing that debate. “I haven’t done enough research,” he says when asked for his opinion on rent control. That’s a little surprising given his deep history on housing issues: He was for many years the executive director of the Fremont Public Association, now called Solid Ground, which provides housing and assistance to the homeless among other services for the poor. He also was a founder of the Tenants Union, an advocacy group.

The House speaker, however, says he’s brimming with other ideas to create affordable housing. “One of the critical ways is to create community ownership”—housing owned by either the city, a housing authority, or a public-development authority like Capitol Hill Housing (which is chartered by the city of Seattle).

For instance, he says the city, “rather than being a passive player and saying ‘Woe is me,’ could go out there and buy apartment buildings” on the market. This would stop new for-profit owners from coming in, remodeling, and hiking up rents—a phenomenon now familiar all over town. After eventually paying off the mortgage, the city could then decrease rents, Chopp continues. “If we own it, we control the rent.”

He seems to be using the word “control” deliberately, as an implicit response to Spear’s challenge. He makes the point more clearly when he walks down the street to show off the Jefferson, an apartment building developed by Capitol Hill Housing with state funding. Rent for tenants making no more than 60 percent of the area’s median income range from $732 a month for a studio to $975 for a three-bedroom.

“This is a perfect example of permanent affordable housing that is rent-controlled,” he enthuses. The Jefferson is not part of a regulated system, of course, so the terminology is arguable. But his use of it does show that the concept, in some form, is up for discussion.

nshapiro@seattleweekly.com