Spokane landlords now required to engage in eviction prevention programs, council votes

Spokane landlords must participate in eviction prevention programs before removing someone for nonpayment, the City Council voted Monday.

Landlords will be required by city law to participate “in good faith” with a diversion program for at least 30 days after submitting a demand for payment, though only if they began eviction proceedings purely for nonpayment of rent. Tenants who violate other aspects of state law, including using illegal drugs on the property or seriously damaging it, could be evicted without the 30-day grace period.

Landlords must also include information about these eviction prevention programs in lease agreements and in any notice of intent to evict for nonpayment.

City Hall will create a more informative and frequently updated list of the various local nonprofits that manage eviction prevention programs to make it easier for tenants to navigate these resources. The city will also now need to designate a diversion program operator to either help tenants access eviction prevention funds or otherwise mediate disputes with landlords.

“I really do hope this program can become a model for other cities,” said Councilman Paul Dillon, one of the cosponsors of the ordinance. “As we confront extreme housing insecurity, we need an eviction prevention program to help keep families in their homes.”

The new law was approved Monday on a 5-2 vote, with Councilman Michael Cathcart and Council President Betsy Wilkerson opposed.

“I will not be voting in support of this tonight, not because I don’t think it’s a good idea, but the structure that needs to be in place – I am challenged with that,” Wilkerson said, noting that rental assistance funds were limited and questioning the city’s ability to administer its responsibilities under the new law.

The issue brought 20 people to testify before the council Monday, ranging from landlords and landlord associations to attorneys who serve low-income tenants facing eviction.

Landlords opposed to the law worried they ultimately wouldn’t be paid back rent, raising costs for other tenants .

“By extending eviction timelines and requiring mandatory programs, I think this ordinance will increase the long-term risk of nonpayment,” Gabriel Grant said at Monday’s meeting. “The more tenants we have that are nonpaying, and the longer the benediction timeline is, the more we have to cover operating expenses in rents from other tenants.”

Others argued that the council was focused on landlord responsibilities while doing too little to expect accountability for tenants, particularly irresponsible ones.

Attorneys who assist indigent tenants argued that their clients don’t decide to stop paying rent because they’re irresponsible, but because they’re “desperate.” This law would ensure that those who qualify for assistance won’t be evicted because they can’t quickly access that funding, they argued.

“We can all agree that a (domestic violence) survivor with two toddlers should not have to live in her car … for not getting rental assistance in time,” Hannah Swenson, managing attorney for the Housing Justice Project, a nonprofit providing assistance to tenants facing eviction, said of a real-life case she has seen. “It was awarded three days too late, and she’s going to be living in her car… this wouldn’t be happening if this ordinance had existed last month.”

Swenson also alleged that Spokane County has the fastest-moving eviction proceedings in the state, with more than 100 cases filed each month.

“Cancer-ridden grandfathers – I had three cases of that last month,” Swenson added. “These are the faces of eviction in our community.”

Landlords, meanwhile, contested that eviction proceedings are already slow. Councilman Michael Cathcart read from a letter prepared by Ben Stuckart, former Spokane City Council President and executive director of the Spokane Low Income Housing Consortium, who argued the law would harm the very communities the council was trying to protect.

“Today, it commonly takes approximately six months from the first missed rent payment to the execution of a writ in a typical non-payment matter,” Stuckart wrote. “Mandatory diversion requirements will delay, not prevent, evictions.”

Cathcart argued that the council’s efforts would be better focused on creating assistance programs among other efforts, not on a law he felt would make housing less affordable.

“Obviously, nobody, certainly myself included, wants to see an eviction occur,” Cathcart said. “But there is also just the realities of life and the costs associated with maintaining housing .”

He also argued that the city had a poor track record of creating programs meant to help tenants and boost affordable housing without adequately following through with those programs.

“I would question why our housing navigator isn’t here, but we haven’t actually hired one or created one, even though that was established three years ago,” Cathcart said. “We established a legal and relocation fund that has not really been established. There was a mitigation fund that was established, but it has never been actually set up.”

Funding for the eviction prevention programs – which includes help to pay back rent, legal fees and mediation between landlords and tenants – has been coming from the state to the city of Spokane and the county for years. That funding has served as a continuation of the state’s eviction protections that began during the COVID-19 pandemic.

That moratorium had a dramatic impact on evictions in Spokane County and across the state. There were an average of 1,400 evictions per year between 2016 and 2019; in 2020 and 2021, when the moratorium was in place, that figure dropped to an average of 480 per year.

Evictions quickly shot up after the moratorium expired toward the end of 2021. In 2022, over 1,050 evictions took place in Spokane County, more than doubling by 2024 to nearly 2,200 evictions.

While the sweeping eviction moratorium has long since ended, the funding for eviction prevention has continued in a bid to stem the flow, particularly to prevent people from becoming homeless.

In the most recent two-year funding cycle, which runs through June 2027, the city has received $2.9 million from the state Department of Commerce for eviction prevention programs.

While these programs remain funded, their mandatory use could assist landlords in recouping back rent and removing a tenant without having to go through eviction courts. But if and when the programs run out of money, landlords would still be required to participate in the diversion program for 30 days before evicting a tenant.

And it appears likely that the programs would run out of funding within a given two-year cycle. Gaps could occur due to delays in contracting or protracted debates over the state budget. The state funding source, a mix of general funds and document-recording fees, appears fairly stable, according to Commerce officials, but that’s not a guarantee, and demand may well outstrip funding even if it remains static. Designated nonprofits spent 100% of Spokane’s funding in the last cycle in a truncated timeline and without the kind of universal communications the city is now considering to make the programs more accessible.

“So we could expend all funds in advance of contracts (ending) in this round depending on demand and utilization of funds,” wrote Dawn Kinder, director of Spokane’s Neighborhood, Housing and Human Services division, when the ordinance was introduced in December.

Steven Wareham, a landlord representing the Rental Housing Association of Washington at Monday’s meeting, argued this possible lack of state funding could mean loss of revenue for landlords and a false sense of security for tenants.

“Again, these programs may or may not have funding capacity,” he noted. “Is the city going to fund these programs? This creates false expectations for tenants, when they think that there’s help out there, and then it’s not because there’s no funding. The rents just keep adding up.”

Dillon argued when the law was introduced in December that landlords should still be required to participate in eviction diversion even if funding isn’t available to pay back rent, because the alternative “sets us up to fail.”

In part, he argues that having a strong program would make the city attractive for additional state eviction prevention funds, potentially expanding the pool of available resources. But even if funds to cover back rents dried up, other resources could still be available.

“There are additional resources, such as the Northwest Mediation Center, the eviction courts, legal counsel, that would be folded into this program as a resource,” Dillon said. “Which is why, if the funds weren’t there, I still want to make sure that people can access these resources and get deferrals.

Councilwoman Kitty Klitzke also suggested that, by preventing people from entering into homelessness, funding may be freed up to divert to eviction prevention programs.