Rent wars: Casualty list grows

A few weeks back I wrote of a concept that seemed dizzying to me: the 100 percent rent hike.

A Seattle rooming-house tenant saw his rent jacked 107 percent, from $375 to $775. I suggested such extreme sticker shock amounted to an "economic eviction." And maybe ought to be illegal. The city shrugged. Yes, a few hundred tenants added their horror stories. But I also got a laissez-faire lathering.

It's called the free market, wrote some readers. When real-estate costs soar, so do rents, said landlords. It's just the way it is, you socialist meddler, wrote some guy I play basketball with.

OK, if 100 percent isn't too much, I'm back to try again. How about a thousand-dollar-a-month increase?

It happened to Larraine Best, 53, a technology analyst at Washington Mutual. She had been renting at the now infamous Queen Vista on Queen Anne for six years.

It was a good deal. It's a bit rundown, but for $1,200 she got 800 square feet, wood floors and a view.

In April, Glacier Management said her new rent, for her apartment "as is," would be $2,214. That's a $1,014 increase. A renovation this year is expected to raise it more.

"I've been renting since 1973 and I've never seen anything like it," Best says. "A thousand dollars? All at once? I stood there with the letter and I thought: 'I've been evicted.' "

She did move, to a smaller apartment on Queen Anne.

A bunch of landlords wrote to say that stories like this are the exception.

"Plucking a few examples such as the ones you used makes this story a bit sensationalized, don't you think?" wrote Gretchen Bear, a "small-time landlord who goes for the median rents."

No doubt there are countless landlords who realize they are housing human beings, not ATM machines.

But what to make of Dan Beert's landlord in Bellevue, who just jacked his rent $700 a month (74 percent)? Or The Archstone in Redmond, up as much as 51 percent? Or Centennial Court in Belltown, which just told Troy Davis his one-bedroom is going up $730 a month (68 percent)?

I have a modest but growing list of 21 buildings around the region that have hit tenants with one-time hikes of 30 percent or more this year. My personal favorite, Marina Landing in Renton, wrote Phyllis Yoshida that her bill was up 34 percent, but was cheerful about it: "Don't forget to stop in for coffee and cookies!"

Rents must go up. I'm not saying landlords ought to pay for housing for all. But what's going on is out of line. It is sensational. We could try to do something about it. Build more apartments. Move the urban-growth boundary. Pass an economic-eviction ordinance.

There's no simple answer. In 1998, during the last rent rampage, Seattle's then-mayor, Paul Schell, pleaded with landlords to keep rent hikes to a gradual 10 percent a year.

I have no idea if that helped. It's just that now, when it's clearly every man, woman and leaseholder for themselves, it seems quaint — archaic even — that back then the mayor bothered to try.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.