Vern raised much more than rents

In writing about egregious rent increases, I've noticed that many tenants whose rents were jacked 30, 40, 50 percent happen to live in buildings that aren't run by human beings.

There's a new landlord in town. It's called the "Lease Rent Optimizer." The Optimizer is software developed a few years ago by Archstone, which manages 10 apartment complexes around Puget Sound and dozens more elsewhere. It sifts data to squeeze more profit out of rental housing by relentlessly resetting rents, sometimes on a daily basis.

The stated goal is to remove human empathy from the apartment business.

"The Optimizer has no emotions, has no attachments to residents, has no angst," explained an Archstone executive in a recent trade article. "It's an automated system that says, 'This is what I see and so this is how we need to price.' "

When I read that quote to Vern Campbell, he eyed me like I'm from another planet.

"I thought I'd heard it all," he says.

Vern is 100. He's been a landlord in Seattle for 72 years — since 1935, when he paid $500 for a shack on Magnolia's Government Way.

Eventually he built or renovated 30 rental buildings, most of them on Queen Anne. It was a hobby, he says. His job was a neon-sign business he ran with his dad. His signature sign is that red 50-foot icon that since the '50s has beamed "R-A-Y-S" across Shilshole Bay in Ballard.

He's also housed hundreds of Seattleites. He says he did it to make money.

"I wasn't trying to make the last buck," he says, "but I never thought of myself as doing tenants any special favors, either. I was just the guy who took their money every month."

Hardly. On Vern's 100th birthday, on June 20, something came in the mail that still chokes him up thinking about it. It's a five-paneled card, constructed to look like one of his old buildings, the Crest Manor. On it are pictures and well wishes from 20 former tenants, some going back 30 years.

"Vern, you were a very good landlord," wrote one.

"My thanks to you and your family for allowing me to live in Apt. 404," wrote another.

"I think of Vern as a father or a grandfather," says Jody MacDonald, 52, who was a tenant at the Crest Manor for 21 years. "He didn't see us as something to be sucked dry. We were his community."

Sure he'd raise rents, says Hugh Boyd, a tenant since 1995. But it was always reasonable. He'd come in person to explain it. And he'd let folks slide during hard times.

Vern shrugs.

"You go through two world wars and a Depression, you arrive in Seattle flat-ass broke — I suppose it gives you some sympathy for others," he says. "I'm not sure that's much of a story."

It is a story, Vern. And it's a story that it's a story.

Maybe the real-estate boom is so boomy we've lost our minds, like with stocks in the '90s. Maybe times have been so good for so long that we're losing our heart. I don't know.

But something has shifted in our culture. We used to have Vern. And now we have the Lease Rent Optimizer.

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