Don’t Blame Tenant Protections for Surging Evictions

By Tyron Moore
Tacoma for All

Originally published by the Tacoma Weekly, 1/30/25

On Wednesday, the Tacoma News Tribune published a major article on the record-breaking 3,366 evictions filed by Pierce County landlords in 2024. The headline posed the question: "Did Tacoma ‘Tenant Bill of Rights’ make an impact?”

Unfortunately, this framing does more to confuse than clarify. As the campaign manager for the Tenant Bill of Rights Initiative 1 campaign, I felt it was critical to reply.

The article largely revolves around Tacoma’s Initiative 1, the Landlord Fairness Code, and the suggestion that eviction moratoriums are designed to prevent (rather than delay) evictions––or even that tenant rights may be to blame for rising eviction rates.

This is a red herring, reinforced with quotes from landlord representatives who explicitly blame the Landlord Fairness Code for worsening the crisis. The obvious subtext, mentioned only briefly, is the simmering push on the Tacoma City Council to weaken tenant protections passed by voters in November 2023.

The TNT article barely touches on the most crucial fact in this debate: Evictions are at record highs across Washington State. In fact, the rate of increase was far higher in other counties.

Spokane County topped the charts with eviction increases between 80% and 120% over the historic monthly average. King County increased by about 60% most months. Meanwhile, Pierce County’s monthly increase was between 20% and 48% in 2024, according to the Eviction Research Network.

It is clear that rising eviction rates cannot be explained by Tacoma-specific policies like the cold-weather eviction moratorium (Spokane has no such protections). Yet the TNT’s failure to frame Pierce County’s record-setting evictions within these wider statewide trends leaves readers vulnerable to these populist blame-games promoted by conservative groups like the Rental Housing Association.

Eviction Moratoriums Buy Tenants Time

Eviction moratoriums don’t prevent evictions outright, but they do buy tenants critical time to recover from financial hardships—such as a medical emergency or job loss—that led to missed rent payments.

The goal is to disrupt the eviction-to-homelessness pipeline – especially in the deadly winter months – and to keep kids in school even when families face financial crises.

Starting in December 2023, the Landlord Fairness Code established a school-year eviction moratorium for families with children and educators, as well as a cold-weather moratorium from November 1 to April 1. Landlords can still file evictions in this period but cannot carry them out until the moratoriums end.

The graph published in the TNT shows a sharp decline in evictions in winter, our intended goal. In this more limited sense, the numbers show that the Landlord Fairness Code is succeeding at keeping people housed rather than homeless in the deadliest conditions. However, no one should be surprised when this number spikes up again after April 1.

Are Tenants Abusing the Moratorium?

During the campaign to pass Initiative 1, landlord groups loudly warned that tenants would use eviction protections to free-load off landlords. This claim is recycled in the TNT article in a quote from Michael Mirra, the former head of the Tacoma Housing Authority. Landlords "are prohibited from evicting people for not paying the rent for almost half the year, in an ordinance that makes no distinction between inability to pay and unwillingness to pay.”

The claim that a significant number of tenants are simply "unwilling" to pay rent is both cruel and false. It casts a shadow of suspicion over thousands of families who are in financial crisis, who our economy has failed, and who don’t need respected city leaders shaming them in their most vulnerable moments.

Even Sean Flynn, the head of the Rental Housing Association who led the fight against the Tenant Bill of Rights, felt compelled to acknowledge: "Most people don’t pay their rent because they don’t have the money.” Flynn told TNT, "It’s not rocket science. If you have the money, you pay the rent.”

Lauren Romero, the contract attorney for Tacoma Tenant Legal Aid, previously worked at Tacomaprobono. She replied to Mirra saying:

"Out of the nearly 300 eviction defense cases I worked on, I only remember one situation that could have maybe been categorized as willful nonpayment of rent. Most of my clients were single mothers just trying to keep a roof over their kids' heads or disabled, elderly folks on fixed incomes. Nobody chooses to get an eviction on their record or to have their credit destroyed. Tenants know that it's incredibly hard to get new housing after an eviction.”

As highlighted in the TNT, Michael Mirra is convening a study group of community leaders—including representatives from Tacoma for All—to assess the impacts of Initiative 1 on both tenants and landlords. If this study is to earn public trust, its convenor should avoid unsubstantiated claims that tenants in crisis are willfully refusing to pay rent. Responsible analysis should be rooted in statistics, not anecdotes and harmful stereotypes that stigmatize struggling families.

We’re Failing to Build Enough Affordable Housing

"The increase in eviction filings is startling and alarming,” the State Senate’s former Housing Committee Chair, Patty Kuderer, told the Washington State Standard. "There will be a tsunami of homelessness if we don’t handle this correctly.”

Band-aid solutions like rental assistance programs and eviction moratoriums are needed to meet this moment. But everyone agrees that the best answer to rising evictions, homelessness, and Tacoma’s growing number of rent burdened tenants is to build more affordable housing.

To meet the needs of a growing population, the City of Tacoma says we must build 43,000 new homes by 2044, with 60% of those new homes affordable to those earning less than 80% of the area median income.

This requires 1,400 new affordable homes annually—five times the current rate of production. The City’s reliance on subsidizing private developers is clearly inadequate when building luxury apartments remains far more profitable. To make matters worse, City Council stripped affordability requirements for developers from the Home in Tacoma zoning reform.

Tacoma for All has long maintained that only a strong public-sector intervention can solve this crisis. A social housing developer could build tens of thousands of mixed-income homes with a modest dedicated tax revenue and by using the City’s considerable bonding authority. Social housing is key to addressing the housing shortage, lowering housing costs, and creating good union jobs building green, walkable communities downtown, near the Tacoma Mall, and in other transit-centered neighborhoods.

The central argument of the Rental Housing Association and big landlords quoted in the TNT is that the Landlord Fairness Code is depressing the affordable housing supply, worsening the problems we set out to solve. So far they have cited no evidence–aside from anecdotes–that this is true. However, I sincerely hope that everyone in Tacoma who is serious about solving the affordability crisis will join Tacoma for All in the fight to build affordable housing on the scale we so desperately need.