From a fox news site:

My landlord is a dying breed. He’s a middle-class guy who owns and rents out the tiny house we live in, built in the 1950s on the other side of the lake from Seattle. That house is his retirement plan.

When he comes to repair the stuff our kids break, he always asks about the latest with Seattle’s housing regulations. He asks because I’m an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, a public interest group that has sued Seattle over several of its housing ordinances. He’s terrified the misguided policies infecting Seattle’s housing market will spread across the lake. If that happens, my landlord would likely sell, as many Seattle landlords are doing now.

A few months ago, he fixed the toilet seat lid—which I broke this time—and stayed for a plate of spaghetti. We talked about two of Seattle’s recent housing laws we’re challenging in court: the first-in-time rule and the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance.

First-in-time, the only ordinance of its kind in the country, required landlords to offer tenancy to the first applicant who meets rental criteria—credit history and such. We defeated that law in court in April. The Fair Chance Housing Ordinance, on the other hand, forbids landlords from checking criminal background or considering prior criminal convictions when selecting tenants.

Each of these laws by itself curtails landlords’ rights to their own property and raises serious safety and financial risks. But in tandem, the two rules make the risks of renting out property utterly intolerable for the average mom-and-pop landlord.

Two of my clients, MariLyn and Chong Yim, are raising their young family in one unit of a triplex they own. They have close relationships with their tenants/neighbors and share the yard.

Confidence in one’s good intentions is not a license to sacrifice property owners’ constitutional rights to make their own decisions about whom they share their property with.

Let’s say MariLyn meets the first person to apply for a vacant unit in her triplex. The applicant checks out on paper, but she’s disturbed to see his skin is littered with swastikas and prison tattoos.

Under the first-in-time rule, she would have had to offer him the unit. Happily, she can use her own judgment now to say no to someone who makes her feel unsafe, thanks to our court victory last year. But still, under the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance, she can’t check someone’s criminal history to hunt for less obvious red flags. So far as she knows, she could be blindly renting the unit next door to her family to someone with a past murder conviction.

MariLyn, her family, and her other tenants simply become collateral damage in Seattle’s blind, self-congratulatory march to social justice. I understand why my landlord frets while he eats spaghetti at our dinner table.

The results of these laws are easy to predict. Small-time landlords like the Yims will respond in one of two ways: they’ll either try to filter out bad eggs by jacking up rent and toughening rental criteria, or they’ll just sell. Neither are desirable outcomes, but it already appears that many landlords are taking the second option. They simply can’t stomach trying to do business in such a toxic legal environment.

The great irony is this: the only entities capable of surviving as landlords in Seattle’s regulatory climate will be the large corporate residential leasing companies. They alone can endure in these mandates because they have the capital reserves and the sophistication to navigate the perils of renting out property in Seattle. If the Yims wind up with a bad tenant, they may well be years in the hole trying to recover. A housing and property management company, however, can spread the risk across a larger number of rental units. This is the bitter harvest of laws passed by the same city council that rails against big money in politics, that touts small business, and that decries corporate greed.

Mom-and-pop landlords are a boon to a community. They tend to offer lower rents. They can be more understanding when the rent check is late or your kid tears the towel rack from the bathroom wall. And they might sit down to dinner with you. But Seattle—if it has its way—will usher in more corporate property managers whose token personal touch might stretch as far as a bowlful of joyless candies at the reception desk.

Certainly, city leaders regard their attempt to help the marginalized as virtuous. And we should all want to help ex-offenders move on from their troubled pasts. And sure, rental practices should be fair and non-discriminatory. But confidence in one’s good intentions is not a license to sacrifice property owners’ constitutional rights to make their own decisions about whom they share their property with.

Socialism at its finest hour, coming to a city to town in your neighborhood.

This sounds like exactly the crap we hear from our friends in Ontario have to deal with. If we don't get these moronic do-gooders out of office they will destroy exactly what they are trying to protect. Their ignorance is laughably intolerable and no sane person would put up with it.

An interesting sidelight to Ann’s example as it would play in CA:

CA does not have any first-in-time statute, but it does have an omnibus statute that does prohibit discrimination on any arbitrary basis. Examples of applications that have reached the higher courts are, expulsion of a long-haired teenager from an upscale mall, after he waited for his mother by sitting on a curb and refused request to move; sex-based pricing, in the case of no cover charges for women in a SF bar; and (back in 1982, before federal or CA law forbad discrimination based on family status) housing discrimination against children because children are ”rowdier, noisier, more mischievous and more boisterous than adults”. My personal favorite is the case of an undercover policeman who attended an open meeting of the ACLU on police surveillance, who was recognized and outed as a policeman and expelled from the meeting.

Under this statute, Marilyn would not be able to deny her housing to the subject in question, “because his tattoos made her feel unsafe”, since her fear of tattooed men is arbitrary, despite the subject of the tattoos being swastikas and prison tats.

This statute is little-known and not ordinarily used by landlords or tenants as a control of ordinary housing actions.

Needless to say, the statute must be balanced against the CA’s extreme housing shortage, which makes non-discriminatory housing policy a necessity, rather than a matter of landlord’s free choice.

"...which makes non-discriminatory housing policy a necessity, rather than a matter of landlord's free choice..."

Yes, strictly from the landlord's point of view.

But government's job is to make sure that there is housing for everyone. And in case of extreme shortage of housing, those that don't rise to the top of the list cannot find housing at all. Thus government HAS TO make rules that will make housing available even to those who some landlords may find distasteful.

You are evidently unable to see anything other than your own selfish advantage in this situation. Everyone needs housing. When there is not enough housing to go around, and government is not able to make enough housing, they must do SOMETHING to help those who are homeless, and that always means that some people will have to give up something for the common good.

To be sure, a free and open market is the most efficient way to solve the problem. But that takes money (capital, lots of it) and cooperation (builders and developers) and a level of organization that government is generally not capable of. So they go to the next best strategy.

If it is the government's job to make sure there is housing for everybody, maybe the government should be building all that low cost housing with the taxpayer's money instead of trying to seize private property and force private property owners to provide welfare out of their private pockets.

" Only socialists think it is the government's job to make sure there is housing. "

Really, AllyM?

You may like that point of view morally, but as public policy, it is not reasonable. Too many homeless people will result in revolution and the actual destruction of government and society. We cannot legislate responsible people, but we can legislate responsible housing policy. Remember the depression? Ordinary people, homeless and hungry, America would have had a revolution if not for having elected such a talented president. In the rest of the world, without that president? The basis for German rearmament, World War II, complete chaos. Which is better for the world, AllyM? and, which is good for only landlords?

" maybe the government should be building all that low cost housing with the taxpayer's money "

They do, but its not enough housing. If they really did build enough, where do you think they would get the taxpayer's money?

Yes the Soviet Union built a LOT of housing in the 50s,60, 70s. They were cold in winter hot in summer,ugly,with leaking pipes, barely adequate electric service,..became dirty,bug and rat invested, with no maintenance,..not much different from the government high rises in my town (add hi crime)

Then there was Brooklyn,..when the city initiated price control. Landlords walked away in droves,..1100 rentals became abandoned in a short time,..more followed later.

The city took over to manage these units. In a few years they were cockroach and rat invested, most were so run down that they would have been cited and in some cases condemned by the local health and building inspectors. (of course they wouldn't do that to the city.

Yeah governments are good landlords.

The USA is extremely resilient. We can eventually fix all the follies imposed by the progressive socialist liberal democrats if the political pendulum ever swings back toward center.

I am a Federalist by nature - 10th Amendment should be strictly enforced. The way you defeat these extremists is to vote with your feet. MOVE !!!!!! Let them die by their own idiocy.

I don't understand why people just don't move. I mean I would love to live in Greenwich CT but I can't afford it so I don't. Seattle is great if you make $300k a year working in tech, if not don't live their.

Everyone has a right to live, but not a right to live wherever they chose regardless of income.

Also if Seattle wanted to fix this they could in a heartbeat all they have to do is change zoning to allow more dense construction. Add more units and the pricing will go down, even NYC figured this out look at their market this year its saturated.

Never one to be easily defined, and one who is blessed/ cursed at being able to empathize with many points of view, I believe the answer lies in the middle. Government hand-outs don't work in the long run, but saying someone should just pick themselves up isn't all that easy without a mentor. People come with all sorts of baggage leftover from their up-

bringing, from the environment they were raised in. Takes a lot to turn that ship around. Government 'assistance' programs seem more about getting votes than improving the resiliency of a population.

That's why I mentor my tenants.

Year's = tenant's