It's not a "ban"; from what's described it's a disclosure requirement. It has always been required to have these in the rental agreements - but you have to publicize them so people see them before they pay an application fee.
It's not that onerous of legislation, but it also feels a bit gimmicky. I have never once had a problem getting the information when asked. And places that provide free utilities or pets already advertise themselves heavily as such - this would really only benefit extreme novices in the market
Maybe you haven't rented in a while from a management company.
There are any number of stupid trends nowadays.
apartment account/login required to do almost anything, including autopay.
electronic phone/garage keys with almost trivial consent of access to your apartment. apartment internet required. third party apps with account/phone/video+photos requirement to access package room, etc.
Seattle should do restaurants next, the number of places with %fees tacked on that aren't tips and aren't optional, just so they don't end up having $20+ entrees on the menu is growing steadily.
I liked reading "the rational optimist" by matt ridley
One point I remember is that with trust, trade is infinite.
This completely follows in my life.
I trust costco, and I buy stuff there without doing any calculus.
I don't trust apps on the apple store, I basically don't buy any of them (even/especially the free ones). Even the phone itself has about 10,000 pages of privacy policy.
GOG sells games without DRM that you can download and played offline, forever. I don't worry about buying any game.
It's amazing how people neglect this basic fact. Free markets already often don't work in practice. But they don't even work in theory if both parties do not have at the very least the same information in order to base their decisions. These sort of scam tactics (like dynamic pricing) are simply fraud, much like hiding problems in a car or a house you sell.
Seattle's push to add additional regulation, compliance, fees and inspections has resulted in an exodus of small landlords, which are down anywhere from 19% to 22% in four years depending on how you slice it, and an explosion in large landlords which are up 77% in the same period.
The city has basically consolidated the rental market so it works best for large corporations. Was that the intent?
Small landlords don't own apartment buildings. They buy houses/units to rent, lowering availability for buyers. So, you'd at least want to look at the number of new apartment rentals available plus the number of first time house buyers to get a better picture.
Small landlords also rent out basement suites and carriage homes on their own property, no? Those may very well sit empty if the return isn’t worth the risk.
Editing to just add: I absolutely support transparent pricing for rental properties.
And market-rate rental complexes replace condos. I can see legitimate reasons for subsidized rental complexes, and there is always some need for market-rate units, but I don't see any justification for dedicated market-rate complexes. People who can afford paying the market rate should be able to buy if they stay in the area long enough, but American cities have a shortage of smaller units you can buy. For some reason, maybe due to regulatory and market failures, developers prefer rental complexes over condos.
No, it doesn't. It states that if a landlord has 3 houses and exits the landlord market, those houses are either kept unused or sold and are available for new buyers.
Can you cite what laws you are talking about. The one being discussed here does not seem to target small landlords, but big predatory ones. There aren't any additional fees or inspections and compliance is as simple as only charging one amount for rent and not tacking on additional fees.
My experience when renting in Seattle a decade ago was that it wasn't particularly hard to find a place, and that the only places that dealt in these bullshit fees were the big corporate landlords.
You are incorrect about this law being "simple". For a start it requires three years of mandatory recordkeeping with an automatic presumption of violation for inadequate records. Forget to save a copy of that ad you ran on Facebook three years ago for your rental? Tough luck, you owe the tenant $4000 plus their attorney fees.
The city also added a private right of action so this law will be weaponized by attorneys with a profit motive, the same way the ADA has been.
Seattle is free to pass whatever laws they wish but they can't do so and then complain about a lack of homes for rent in the city. This hits families who want to rent a home much harder than single people or couples who tend to rent apartments.
"In Highland Park, the data suggests most homes taken off the rental market were sold directly to owner-occupants. While rentals dropped by 252, owner-occupied single-family homes increased by 266, and owner-occupied townhomes grew by 25 units — a mix of houses shifting from renters to homeowners, plus some redevelopment."
This is likely just landlords cashing out in a hot market and people living in the house they bought instead of renting. There is precious little evidence that regulation was invlved. The dynamic that makes it economically lucrative for a landlord to cash out, also makes it illogical for a different landlord to buy. What onerous regulations can you cite enacted between 2019 and 2024 would explain a mass exodus of landlords better than a booming housing market.
I won't even address the first part of your comment since it distorts the actual letter of the law so much as to not be good faith.
I get what you are saying. I think that some forms of regulation are too onerous. Requiring people to keep copies of business paperwork for three years (most of the examples they ask for are things the IRS already wants you to keep for 7 years) isn't onerous. You do a disservice to your argument by acting like a modification to an existing law is going to ruin small landlords.
I think this might help small landlords out a bit. Big corporate landlords can easily add nonsense fees to make the rent look low. Small landlords wouldn't bother charging you to use your own mailbox and usually don't have common areas to charge you for access to. With things made transparent, the small landlords can simply offer a price, and be on a more level playing field.
On one side, I fully understand that. On the other side, if this really reflects the cost of compliance, maybe this is the only way to signal the voter that the "there ought to be a law" approach has some downsides to it.
How would you like it if you rented a VM from AWS, and in the bill they added fees for employee health insurance, social security and medicare? That's a cost of compliance too!
It is not just a matter of whether it is itemized or not. It is a matter of deception. They advertise one price then charge you another. So in the AWS example, you think you agreed to pay $20 per month for the VM, but when you get the bill it is $37 because they added fees for employee health insurance, social security and medicare. Would you not be pissed?
Solution: you may put it on the receipt, but the price you advertise must be final all-in. Gas stations manage it just fine. Advertised price is what you pay, but receipt shows the taxes
You can’t ban business from passing on their costs to their customers.
Australia just tried this by banning businesses from charging a card use surcharge.
You really reckon business aren’t going to then just wrap the cost of card service / merchant fees in to every product, thereby hurting those who pay with cash?
Hint: that’s exactly what businesses are doing. I know because I asked them.
Maybe stop voting for politicians who believe they can tax and regulate an economy to growth and productivity.
The credit card companies have long charged merchants a percentage to use their payment services. In Australia, Visa and Mastercard were typically charging their merchant customers lower rates than American Express -- on chatting with various smaller businesses who are not in a position to negotiate the percentage with AMEX down, AMEX wanted a couple percent more than Visa at approx 4% of the sale price. However in recent years, the customer never sees the full payment cost passed on to them, just a smaller percentage - at a guess 50 - 75 % (Hard to say, bigger companies can negotiate the cost down) of what the merchant pays for processing costs.
Here in Australia when ATM bank cards were introduced and then about the same time with the national Eftpos [1] system, I don't ever recall seeing [myself 1990 onwards] a credit card usage surcharge though Visa or Amex purchases - business were just happy to get those sales from people who might not otherwise have made a purchase.
IIRC it wasn't until the major banks went the way of phasing out plain debit cards (mid 00s) and replacing them with visa debit - where business started to go the route of using visa debit for processing instead of Eftpos, since nearly everyone would have a visa debit card, (I do not, my bank would not provide a Eftpos only,) these business started to pass along a processing fee. When it started to happen I can't say for sure, slow and insidious adoption of passing along the fee means I only recall those external to myself, like family and people I know complaining that various stores were now charging them when they used their card but other stores did not. One would have thought Eftpos fees but on closer inspection the payment was processed via visa ... I do not why some business were not using the Eftpos payment route any more, perhaps the processing system by way of credit services was easier or offered something extra.
Some people have since moved back to cash, even though some stores think they can refuse cash ... but unless the regulations under Credit act in Australia changed in the last 15 years, cash is still legal tender and a system must be in place to accept it - even if that means by way of a temporary account. There are elements in govt here though that would like to track people's spending better ... by banning cash.
A fee for a specific service (ie using a card vs using cash) is pretty different from unavoidable junk fees. As long as a fee like that is advertised up-front it's totally fine; but fees that everybody has to pay are a qualitatively different thing because they are just a way to get a misleadingly low sticker price for the product.
In the US we were well on the way to substantial national bans on these types of junk fees under the Biden administration's CFPB, Khan's FTC, etc and then Trump reversed everything a few months into his current term.
Being ripped off by large corporations at every transaction is what "owning the libs" looks like for your life in practice, but hey at least you can say slurs on twitter now!
We need a national law and FTC teeth to say "The price advertised is the final, final, all-in price you pay" and the right to demand the product be delivered at that price if you were advertised a price. This should include limits on dynamic pricing which "whoops the price changed for the worse between when we showed it to you and when you drove to the store..."
As an example related to Renting. I once saw a place advertised for rent at a price in my budget. Booked a showing the next day. The dynamic pricing increased it several hundred dollars above my budget. The land lord (company) would not honor the price I booked my showing at. I immediately left saying I do not do business with such dishonest practices.
We also need to ban using the renters as a captured audience for products.
Edit to add:
When I last rented from a big corp I got:
$5 a month semi-mandatory fee on automated payments through their app (as if them handling a check would actually cost them less than an automated payment)
Mandatory internet package through a single provider.
"Resort fee" of $30 a month which was more than the cost of a proximal gym providing 10x the equipment.
Move in charge - $50 just to move in as if I was going to rent but not move in?
Move out charge - $50 just to move out as if I was going to not move out when my lease ended?
I also think rent raises after a year's lease should be limited . Why is the 13th month 100% more as if I'm not a long term renter? It makes some sense for short term rentals but this isnt a 1 month rental, it's a 1 month extension to a long term rent.
There's nothing more American than not knowing the price you're going to pay for something until you have to pay it. This applies to everything from income taxes to health care to big ticket purchases like homes and cars, to airline tickets, to cell phone and cable service, all the way down to restaurants with tips and service fees and everything on the store shelf, where sales tax is not included in the price of the good. Somehow the USA has normalized this throughout its entire culture.
In canada on many products the taxes are hidden in the shelf / advertised price iirc Gas, Alcohol, and Tobacco products have this feature. IMO it should be everything (still show the breakdown on the receipt, but instead of advertising the sub-total advertise the final price)
This isn't about math being too hard. It's about companies deliberately hiding and obfuscating what you owe.
Try this. My cell phone service is AT&T's "Value Plus VL" service with three lines. Tell me my exact monthly bill down to the cent. Do all the Internet searching you need and all the math you need to.
In a world where companies weren't actively hiding what you pay, you would easily be able to do this.
It reminds me of my first time in Europe as an American. You go to a cafe, look at the prices, and know exactly how much money you are going to be handing them. It felt like magic because I couldn't remember the last time I paid just the advertised price on anything.
Now, unfortunately in places like the UK, tips are becoming more frequent as well as a discretionary 12.5% service charge at restaurants. And everything online has a convenience fee.
I wish governments would get serious about price transparency. The solution is quite simple, but I fear that with algorithmic pricing things are going to be getting much worse in the short term.
I don't have any hope for broad legislation that affects all businesses. Americans are so used to + tax + tips + convenience fees that doing anything else would hurt at both ends: consumers will claim inflation (oh that 8.99+30% burger is now 11.50? Tragedy) and businesses will mourn the loss of scam tactics that lets them earn more.
Retailer here. I would absolutely love all inclusive pricing legislation. Since we're not trying to screw our customers (we're a co-op, so our customers are also our owners), I'd love to be on a fairer playing field with frontline pricing from the businesses trying to lie, cheat, and steal their way to a higher margin.
Until Congressional and Executive branch regime change, you should expect city and state efforts to be more effective in the interim. Focus there until regime change and federal change is possible, as it currently is not possible. Death of junk fees via "death by a thousand cuts." Companies can keep up with federal lobbying, they cannot keep up with cities and states all at once. See: data centers and ALPRs.
> think what the DSA are proposing, a complete overhaul of the Constitution.
Strongly agree, onward, elections keep happening, electorate turnover is continuous (and a likely component of why NYC and Seattle have DSA mayors, and Providence, Rhode Island is about to have one).
I wonder if there's any (transparently self-serving) pushback against this on Seattle Nextdoor or the like. It sounds like a straightforward set of rules that's great for everyone... but I've learned that this is never enough, and I'm sure there are some people insisting that this is some massive crime against landlords and, by extension, tenants.
Yes, there are people insisting that this will make things impossible for tenants because "no one will want to be a landlord anymore" if they can't charge junk fees.
I think in general my preference is the other part of this story: Rather than choosing what fees can and can't be offered, require both brutal price transparency and prohibit advertising the unrealistic/lesser cost.
A friend of mine has recently lamented the idea gas stations can advertise "with car wash" pricing on top with what is "fine print" on the sign, which looks good but isn't when you factor in the cost of the car wash.
Another favorite is the personal loan ad, saying you're preapproved for a loan as low as 6% APR but actually you can be denied and the loan could be up to 36% APR even if you get approved. Nonsense.
I don't have a huge problem with a discount for car washes but the advertisement should be an out the door price or rate. Similarly I don't mind capped or content-restricted data plans, but the advertised price should be the unlimited one.
I don't think we should decide what businesses can sell, but we should make it very hard to mislead on the ad. Force advertisements to be the highest price instead of the lowest price, and you'll find companies finding ways to remove fees from the table themselves.
I think you should check out the kinds of fees they call out as no longer allowed[1]. They include things like: a fee to "perform landlord duties" and a fee to "access your mailbox." I absolutely think it should be illegal for your landlord to hold your mail hostage.
That said, this generally allows optional fees - they just need to be disclosed, have clear opt-in and out, and cannot be profit centers for the landlord.
I mean obviously fees should either be included in the original price, or there should be a reason it might apply in some cases but not others. But I can also see someone just wanting to break out the costs as separate line items to highlight where their costs come from. (Here's what I pay for the property taxes, here's what I pay for the included utilities, here's what I pay for these maintenance services, so tada, there's your rent.)
But again, if the advertised price must be the total price, it doesn't matter if there's a mailbox access fee or not. It's no different than if they eliminate the fee but raise the price the same amount. Make the advertised price be the highest price, and say "hey, you can advertise discounts off of that".
Nobody's going to advertise you can save $5 a month by eliminating your mailbox.
A similar effect, would be no longer advertising a plan's price if you enable paperless billing and autopay. You'd have to advertise the price without, and then can offer discounts for those things.
Or movie ticket prices being required to be listed with the convenience fee included, and if a theater wants, it can advertise a discount for buying a ticket some other way. More than likely that would just kill convenience fees.
Banning junk fees / truth in advertising is good. But I absolutely hate that pet rent was bundled in to this. Pets occasionally cause very high amounts of real damage that should be covered by pet owners, not tenants without pets. And Seattle has banned every other possible avenue of passing this expense only to the parties responsible (higher deposits).
Yes this will absolutely raise rents for everyone in order to cover pet damage costs, which can easily reach thousands, exceeding any profit for the lease term. They are the top cause of rental unit damage.
Many smaller landlords will choose to exclude pets entirely in order to keep rental rates competitive.
(I have worked in housing in Seattle and have seen this first hand. And I love pets, have them myself!)
If you worked in housing in Seattle you would know it's not really legal or practicable for landlords to exclude pets, considering the expansiveness of ESA designations. Almost every landlord already excludes pets outside of ESAs
Yes and the ESA program is unfortunately regularly abused. Without judging tenants, I know multiple people from my personal network who proudly got the ESA designation simply to get around the rule.
There are numerous pet-friendly landlords, but typically the rent is not cheap. Pets have a real cost — they aren’t cheap for the owner, I don’t know why the owner assumes they don’t add cost to their living situation.
The main complaint seems to be that there is not a glut of cheap pet-friendly rentals, which is an unrealistic expectation in Seattle where the housing market is already extremely competitive.
Is there data to show that pets actually cause more damage? I see this argument get thrown around quite frequently (often by landlords), but I don't buy that it's a major issue.
It isn't that every pet causes more damage as a rule, its that very frequently pets do damage that is quite expensive. Urine can require floor and subfloor replacement. I've seen dogs chew through walls, etc. Pets in common areas leaving tracks and fur, etc. I'm a dog lover, but it would be folly to pretend that owning a dog does not cause additional wear and tear on my house.
That said, damage from pets should be handled through the damage deposit. Pet rent is just another way to pad the bill.
I am thinking it might be less about the damages (which the tenants are obliged to pay for anyway) and more about the extra work the property must do to deal with noise complaints, escaped pets, possible legal actions, hassles the maintenance might need to show up for, possible extra hours staff might need to work, pooper scoopering, yellowing grass, etc.
Well, there are plenty of lies. Because tenants are liable for the supposed damages regardless of whether landlords can grab $100/mo or whatever.
That's not to say that pets can cause tons of damage: if someone let's a cat spray inside and doesn't immediately clean it, that can cost tens of thousands if it seeps down to the underlayment. But (1) that ain't getting covered by the $50 - $100 they want to gouge people for; and (2) tenants are liable for that either way.
Typically these claims are completely unrecoverable. The tenants don’t have the money, and the cost of pursuing further is too high. The only way to ensure payment is to get it upfront.
Yes, we'll see an exodus of small landlords and see much higher monthly rents passed on to all tenants just to subsidize the ones that cause damage. This isn't better for most tenants.
> And Seattle has banned every other possible avenue of passing this expense only to the parties responsible (higher deposits).
From the very legislation this article is about:
7.24.040 Fees permitted and prohibited
<...>
B. A landlord may charge the following fees in addition to rent:
<...>
4. Pet damage deposits pursuant to Section 7.24.038;
tl;dr: Pet damage deposits may not exceed 25% of the first full month's rent, no other fees are allowed. If I'm reading this correctly the current version of that ordinance was passed in 2016.
land lords assess and charge for damages, regardless of source
why should pets require a monthly, non refundable fee regardless of damages or not?
My main gripe is my building charges $50 more for EV spots and then wants to charge as much as the charging stations, that's a nope for me, I'll just charge while buying groceries
I would think that if a pet causes a high amount of real damage, the landlord should still be able to seek remuneration for that damage. They just can't charge for it in advance.
It's an insurance premium of sorts. They are statistically much more likely to have a problem, so they adjust they rent to make the deal a positive expected value again.
Urine soaking into a subfloor can easily cost more to repair than the security deposit, and recovering damages in court is hard and expensive in its own right (if the person even has money to take).
Not to mention, even when there's no apparent damage, a pet apartment can require extra cleaning to get rid of odors and dander.
It just makes sense for the landlord to price in a potential headache.
Now we know you have never been a landlord... "Seek it after the fact" works out in ~0% of the time. Best case is you can sell the debt to a collections agency for ten cents on the dollar, and that is after a court case that you are unlikely to win in the first place. This is why security deposits exist. Cause "get it after" rarely works out.
Pet rent seldom has anything to do with damage. If you pay pet rent, and then move out and the property manager finds damage, they make you pay for the damage out of your deposit anyway.
The last place I rented had pet rent AND a deposit. The rent definitely a junk fee. It did not accumulate or get tracked.
If only. A bad tenant with a dog can do an obscene amount of damage to a property. The people who leave a place with torn up walls and urine+feces throughout the carpet tend not to be the kind of people who will gladly pay extra fees for the damage they caused.
The landlord can sue them, but that's a slow expensive process and there's a good chance they will never recover enough to pay for the damage.
If you buy like carpet you could reasonably expect to replace it in 10-15 years, and if you allow pets you are more likely to need to. However getting 15-20 years out of it instead without pets is probably more like double-dipping than a subsidy as replacing it on the correct schedule should already be factored into the rent.
We protect kids because they are people, and we socially recognize that even if a person is potentially more likely to cause damage, there is a public interest in not discriminating against people based on age, or gender, or race.
Dogs are not people. Many in Seattle think their dogs are people, or even prefer dogs over people, but they are not, and they do not enjoy the same protections against discrimination.
If you have never been a landlord, I can see why you would think that "if they damage the property, they pay for it" is a reasonable rule that would work, because if your dog destroyed a door, the carpet, and the blinds, you are likely to be willing (if unhappy) to pay to fix it. If you have been a landlord, you know why this doesn't work, and you would also know why pursuing the damages in court also doesn't work.
(If you are wondering why: people do not pay. Deposits, which they also now capped in Seattle, often don't cover the damage. And suing people who have no money in order to get a judgment that you can't collect on is expensive and pointless.)
This just socializes the cost of pet damage onto everyone, which is why this is populist slop.
(Some of the other junk fees make much more sense: mandatory fees that you have to pay, that are fixed in nature, should just be in the advertised lease price. Think "common area fees" you can't opt out of.)
On average, a dog or cat probably causes so little damage to the apartment that the landlord will not do anything beyond maybe throw a fresh coat of paint on the walls. I'm sure there are exceptions which trash apartments, but OTOH... so do human beings.
You know what behavior HASN'T been exceptional in my experience? Landlords playing stupid games with my deposit, trying to hold me accountable for nonexistent or preexisting damage, or just generically being irritating.
Let landlords ban pets other than registered service animals if they want to (none of this ESA nonsense), make sure the eviction process is timely and fair, and otherwise crack the hell down on the games they play with their tenants.
Landlording is so morally fraught that Adam Smith called it out in the Wealth of Nations as an example of unproductive rent-seeking. "Populist slop" is absolutely called for - there is almost no other industry of that size where so many unearned benefits accrue to the already-wealthy.
womp womp, 100% empty argument. This happens with or without pets. Maybe find better tenants instead of trying to pin it on "pet owners" as a whole. Guaranteed the same tenants who let their dogs eat doors, blinds and also don't have the money to pay for damages did their own damage and/or didn't take care of the property.
There's historically massive public interest towards discriminating against people on age, gender, or race and many other attributes. Literally happens all the time. Jobs discriminate in hiring, women and men discriminate in dating, apartments discriminate,etc. etc.
So your Human Resources version of reality is actually the opposite of what's true currently and what always has been true.
As a matter of fact there's a great deal of science showing that people feel more comfortable around their own race and age.
Dogs on the other hand do not discriminate and will love you with no bias.
Adults were kids. Without kids there are no adults. Without adults there is no society. Without pets life is a bit duller but society goes on as it did before people adopted animals as pets.
It's a price discriminator, to dissuade the pet owning group from renting. Why? Because they also cause negative externality to other units. That's what I can think of. If they could do a child charge I'm sure they would.
Pet deposits are allowed, but they are restricted to 25% of the first month's rent and landlords cannot require a deposit if the pet is an "assistance animal" for the tenant.[1] It's unclear what qualifies as an assistance animal. If an assistance animal does cause damage, the property owner must sue for damages. I doubt such lawsuits are common, as the cost to hire a lawyer and sue in civil court is easily thousands of dollars, and compensation is far from guaranteed. Even if you win the case, collecting can be difficult.
Also I'm not sure what the new law changes. Since 2016, Seattle has banned charging extra rent for having a pet. Subsection E states: "Other than the pet damage deposit authorized by subsection 7.24.038.A, the landlord may not charge the tenant any fee for keeping a pet."
It doesn't change anything about pets, the grandparent poster's complaint is a dogwhistle.
What it does ban is shit like 'consigliere' trash disposal, where you are made to pay $50 a month for the privilege of not being allowed to use the building's dumpster. Instead, you have to pile your trash at your door, and then the landlord takes it to the dumpster. You can't opt out of this 'service'.
Oh, and the city's bill for trash disposal is still passed on to you.
Oh, and your building now smells like garbage.
(Landlords are, of course, still free to offer this as an optional paid service, which ~everyone will opt out of.)
> If you want to know why big, progressive cities have the most unaffordable housing, look no further than this law.
This is an unsubstantiated assertion. I'd want to see evidence that things like this actually move the needle on rent vs things like available housing stock, zoning, etc which seem much more likely to actually impact affordability.
OK so this law, enacted now and not in effect yet, which bans rental fees, is the cause of why big progressive cities that in general do not have this law, have the most unaffordable housing. That's a theory, I guess.
It makes costs more transparent, which means the market works better.
We had legal changes in the UK limiting what fees could be charged to tenants and it had no noticeable effect. The main impact was to stop letting agents charging both landlords and tenants, which reduced what they charge overall.
This is not a comment on more recent changes, or other changes, just those around fees.
Are these unaffordable housing units sitting empty?
If not, then high prices generally comes back to supply and demand, which is driven a lot more by zoning and building restrictions than by small differences in rental law.
Generally cities are expensive because people want to live there, and there is limited space for housing. The US especially has been very restrictive on density in urban and suburban areas compared to counterparts found elsewhere around the world. People wanting to live somewhere and a lack of dense housing for them increases prices.
A lot of arguments against "big, progressive cities" seem to boil down to some form of "See, nobody wants to live in these cities because it's so crowded and expensive!" which doesn't make basic economic sense.
> If not, then high prices generally comes back to supply and demand, which is driven a lot more by zoning and building restrictions than by small differences in rental law.
Not discounting the importance of supply/demand, or the damage that restrictive zoning regimes have done, but I'm not sure if this should be so strongly stated, depending on how you want to define "small differences in rental law". For example, per Wikipedia:
> In 1971, the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, a housing expert, said that "rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing". In 1989, Nguyễn Cơ Thạch, then Foreign Minister of Vietnam, observed, "The Americans couldn't destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by very low rents. We realized it was stupid and that we must change policy."
Obviously banning junk rental fees is not the same as rent control, but in either case we're talking about rental law that as an unintended second-order effect is going to (to some degree or another) discourage supplying rentals by making it harder to make money renting.
So, in the interest of being charitable to the OP, I think they're including zoning laws, building regulations, and so on in what they're saying: these cities claim to view housing as a human right, yet simultaneously seemingly do everything in their power to make it incredibly hard, expensive, and risky to supply it.
I don't agree that this attitude is exclusive to big progressive cities: the right theoretically claims to love free enterprise and deregulation, but in practice they're often just as happy with overbearing government control as long as it's their guy doing it. And if anything these days the right more than the left fetishizes certain images of American life that motivate stricter regulations on development; NIMBYism cuts across the political spectrum. But it's an attitude that maybe makes better bedfellows with the left and its intrinsic distrust of markets, and maybe afflicts those left-leaning coastal cities more because they're otherwise much better places to live and thus have higher demand.
In this case, I don't know that the result will be increased prices necessarily. If landlords are forced to show people honest prices (as opposed to now where the advertised price is at least a few hundred under the real price, but those are mandatory "fees" instead of rent), they may have to bring prices down to compete. It's possible that the currently "honest" landlords will raise rent to match the new higher prices with fees lumped in, so we'll have to see how it plays out.
Well, the main reason is that locals have a lot of tools to stop construction of housing, and they've been using those tools to prevent new housing from getting built for decades. But yes, this won't do anything to lower costs. It'll just get baked into the rent everyone pays.
> Which, of course, means that non pet owners are now subsidizing pet owners and the damage and wear and tear that pets cause
But most people don't think that all. And I notice that you ignored all the other fees also...
Anyway there are moral arguments against junk fees other than "cost". Nobody actually wants to live in a world where service providers are constantly sneaking fees into things. It's just unjust and shitty. You and I both know that the only reason landlords include pet fees is because they get away with it, not because it's the only way to recoup losses or something like that.
Some people are obsessed with free-riders and never happy until they know they're only narrowly paying for the smallest granular subset of things they use, and nothing that they are not personally using. This is why we have all these little fees for everything everywhere--to satisfy those people. This is why airlines are terrible now: they granularly charge for every little thing. "Why should I pay for meal service if I personally don't want to eat?" people are getting their way.
What an insanely narrow and purposely ignorant opinion. Subsidizing pet owners? Good tenants are subsidizing bad tenants, people w/o kids subsidizing people w/kids. What is the conclusion of your argument? After i sign I do an insurance style risk assessment and they get to tack on a bunch of fees? I don't think a landlord is jacking up prices cause I have a pet and it is insane to think that I would need to pay more than someone else for that reason. I don't think it was about having or not having a pet, it was designed to squeeze as much as you can out of someone. What is the difference between human caused damage or animal caused damage? The person signing the agreement is still liable for whatever damages at the end of the day. Why can't we just leave it at that?
"may include" - do you really want to argue the side that ADHD children exist in a proportion that damage apartments that noticably increase the cost on tenants without children? Is that what your imagined ADHD child is doing, just ripping apart the walls?
> If you want to know why big, progressive cities have the most unaffordable housing, look no further than this law.
Eh, I'd be willing to wager it's because those cites are where many high-paying jobs are.
Anyway:
> Which, of course, means that non pet owners are now subsidizing pet owners and the damage and wear and tear that pets cause.
Or owners can just quantify and charge for the actual wear and tear? If someone's dog digs up the yard or their claws scrape the up wood floors, just charge them to fix it (or, more likely, take it out of the deposit).
That's why these are often viewed as "junk fees", they charge you for some potential damage vs. any actual damage.
The deposit is also limited. In California, deposit is max one month rent... Not sure how difficult/possible it would be to recover more than that from a renter.
That said pets is likely not the driver of increased housing costa by any means.
> There is no market incentive to advertise the all-in price of a rental unit. Research by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research documents individual businesses losing significant market share when switching to all-in pricing. A landlord that advertises an all-in price appears more expensive than competitors with a lower base rent and unbundled fees.
> Rental junk fees represent a market failure and collective action problem that will not self-correct. Regulation of these fees is necessary to level the playing field for landlords who are transparent about their costs and protect renters from unpredictable and predatory pricing models.
This legislature requires transparency in pricing. If landlords could handle that bare minimum of responsibility on their own, without being compelled by law, it wouldn't have been required.
There's a monthly non-refundable fee that I pay for use and regular wear and tear of the property. It's called R E N T, and the difference between that and a landlord's costs is called profit. If you don't want any wear and tear on your property, or any income from it, there's a simple remedy - don't let it out.
Some people cause less than regular wear and tear. Some people cause more. If it gets too high, it becomes irregular, it gets pulled out of your damage deposit. If that's not enough, the landlord is free to sue.
None of this is relevant to this thread, though, because pet fees have been banned for 10 years in Seattle. This legislature isn't about pet fees.
Also, in many apartments, if you try to break your lease, they will charge you a fee. We should have a regulation requiring landlords to refund the full amount charged for the previous lease if they find a new tenant to occupy the apartment after you leave.
With current market, we have to keep relocating here and there and leasing for 12 month doesn't make sense.
It's not a "ban"; from what's described it's a disclosure requirement. It has always been required to have these in the rental agreements - but you have to publicize them so people see them before they pay an application fee.
It's not that onerous of legislation, but it also feels a bit gimmicky. I have never once had a problem getting the information when asked. And places that provide free utilities or pets already advertise themselves heavily as such - this would really only benefit extreme novices in the market
Maybe you haven't rented in a while from a management company.
There are any number of stupid trends nowadays.
apartment account/login required to do almost anything, including autopay. electronic phone/garage keys with almost trivial consent of access to your apartment. apartment internet required. third party apps with account/phone/video+photos requirement to access package room, etc.
The electronic keying is probably annoying but it's got to be an order of magnitude better than having master keys and locks.
At least when it's electronic it's logged and auditable somewhere. The amount of bad outcomes from keys floating around out there is absurd.
> third party apps with account/phone/video+photos requirement to access package room
And despite that, packages will still be stolen regularly.
Having been an extreme novice once, I can appreciate these laws. But as always you’ll probably get your experience the hard way.
You can't compare if you don't know the cost, if you can't compare it is hard for the invisible hand to price the market.
Price transparency makes more efficient markets.
Seattle should do restaurants next, the number of places with %fees tacked on that aren't tips and aren't optional, just so they don't end up having $20+ entrees on the menu is growing steadily.
I liked reading "the rational optimist" by matt ridley
One point I remember is that with trust, trade is infinite.
This completely follows in my life.
I trust costco, and I buy stuff there without doing any calculus.
I don't trust apps on the apple store, I basically don't buy any of them (even/especially the free ones). Even the phone itself has about 10,000 pages of privacy policy.
GOG sells games without DRM that you can download and played offline, forever. I don't worry about buying any game.
This issue exists everywhere in the USA.
Go check the price for a movie ticket. At the end they slap on an additional fee. Why can't they show the fee included in the main price?
I went to the Verde Canyon Railroad, when gas prices were really low. Still a fee for higher gas prices on the receipt...
It's amazing how people neglect this basic fact. Free markets already often don't work in practice. But they don't even work in theory if both parties do not have at the very least the same information in order to base their decisions. These sort of scam tactics (like dynamic pricing) are simply fraud, much like hiding problems in a car or a house you sell.
Seattle's push to add additional regulation, compliance, fees and inspections has resulted in an exodus of small landlords, which are down anywhere from 19% to 22% in four years depending on how you slice it, and an explosion in large landlords which are up 77% in the same period.
The city has basically consolidated the rental market so it works best for large corporations. Was that the intent?
Small landlords don't own apartment buildings. They buy houses/units to rent, lowering availability for buyers. So, you'd at least want to look at the number of new apartment rentals available plus the number of first time house buyers to get a better picture.
Small landlords also rent out basement suites and carriage homes on their own property, no? Those may very well sit empty if the return isn’t worth the risk.
Editing to just add: I absolutely support transparent pricing for rental properties.
And market-rate rental complexes replace condos. I can see legitimate reasons for subsidized rental complexes, and there is always some need for market-rate units, but I don't see any justification for dedicated market-rate complexes. People who can afford paying the market rate should be able to buy if they stay in the area long enough, but American cities have a shortage of smaller units you can buy. For some reason, maybe due to regulatory and market failures, developers prefer rental complexes over condos.
They don't own the buildings, but it's frequently part of a condo association and they own a unit or two.
Yes, this is the same as buying a unit and renting as in my original post.
> lowering availability for buyers
This makes an unsubstantiated assumption that everyone would rather buy and can afford to, ignoring that people have reasons to rent.
No, it doesn't. It states that if a landlord has 3 houses and exits the landlord market, those houses are either kept unused or sold and are available for new buyers.
Sold...to a large landlord company... yes. That is what happened in Seattle
Assuming the same homes, which group do you think is larger:
A) Households who are currently renting who would prefer to own their home
B) Households who currently own who would prefer to be renting
I'm going to guess A >>> B, but I've never seen the data.
"prefer" is irrelevant. I prefer to be a billionaire and own an island. Question is of ability.
Can you cite what laws you are talking about. The one being discussed here does not seem to target small landlords, but big predatory ones. There aren't any additional fees or inspections and compliance is as simple as only charging one amount for rent and not tacking on additional fees.
My experience when renting in Seattle a decade ago was that it wasn't particularly hard to find a place, and that the only places that dealt in these bullshit fees were the big corporate landlords.
You are incorrect about this law being "simple". For a start it requires three years of mandatory recordkeeping with an automatic presumption of violation for inadequate records. Forget to save a copy of that ad you ran on Facebook three years ago for your rental? Tough luck, you owe the tenant $4000 plus their attorney fees.
The city also added a private right of action so this law will be weaponized by attorneys with a profit motive, the same way the ADA has been.
Seattle is free to pass whatever laws they wish but they can't do so and then complain about a lack of homes for rent in the city. This hits families who want to rent a home much harder than single people or couples who tend to rent apartments.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/where-seattle...
From your article:
"In Highland Park, the data suggests most homes taken off the rental market were sold directly to owner-occupants. While rentals dropped by 252, owner-occupied single-family homes increased by 266, and owner-occupied townhomes grew by 25 units — a mix of houses shifting from renters to homeowners, plus some redevelopment."
This is likely just landlords cashing out in a hot market and people living in the house they bought instead of renting. There is precious little evidence that regulation was invlved. The dynamic that makes it economically lucrative for a landlord to cash out, also makes it illogical for a different landlord to buy. What onerous regulations can you cite enacted between 2019 and 2024 would explain a mass exodus of landlords better than a booming housing market.
I won't even address the first part of your comment since it distorts the actual letter of the law so much as to not be good faith.
I get what you are saying. I think that some forms of regulation are too onerous. Requiring people to keep copies of business paperwork for three years (most of the examples they ask for are things the IRS already wants you to keep for 7 years) isn't onerous. You do a disservice to your argument by acting like a modification to an existing law is going to ruin small landlords.
Small landlords aren't the ones dropping junk fees on tenants
I think this might help small landlords out a bit. Big corporate landlords can easily add nonsense fees to make the rent look low. Small landlords wouldn't bother charging you to use your own mailbox and usually don't have common areas to charge you for access to. With things made transparent, the small landlords can simply offer a price, and be on a more level playing field.
Causation or correlation (if that)? I doubt small time landlords are charging these fees anyway.
We need a global ban on junk fees. I am tired of shit like AT&T's "Administrative & Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee".
On one side, I fully understand that. On the other side, if this really reflects the cost of compliance, maybe this is the only way to signal the voter that the "there ought to be a law" approach has some downsides to it.
How would you like it if you rented a VM from AWS, and in the bill they added fees for employee health insurance, social security and medicare? That's a cost of compliance too!
I mean, those costs are in the bill, they just don't itemize them. What difference would it make to you if they did?
It is not just a matter of whether it is itemized or not. It is a matter of deception. They advertise one price then charge you another. So in the AWS example, you think you agreed to pay $20 per month for the VM, but when you get the bill it is $37 because they added fees for employee health insurance, social security and medicare. Would you not be pissed?
Solution: you may put it on the receipt, but the price you advertise must be final all-in. Gas stations manage it just fine. Advertised price is what you pay, but receipt shows the taxes
This isn't a ban on junk fees. It's an upfront disclosure requirement.
I honestly think a us ban would get us quite far, also in a global setting.
You can’t ban business from passing on their costs to their customers.
Australia just tried this by banning businesses from charging a card use surcharge.
You really reckon business aren’t going to then just wrap the cost of card service / merchant fees in to every product, thereby hurting those who pay with cash?
Hint: that’s exactly what businesses are doing. I know because I asked them.
Maybe stop voting for politicians who believe they can tax and regulate an economy to growth and productivity.
The credit card companies have long charged merchants a percentage to use their payment services. In Australia, Visa and Mastercard were typically charging their merchant customers lower rates than American Express -- on chatting with various smaller businesses who are not in a position to negotiate the percentage with AMEX down, AMEX wanted a couple percent more than Visa at approx 4% of the sale price. However in recent years, the customer never sees the full payment cost passed on to them, just a smaller percentage - at a guess 50 - 75 % (Hard to say, bigger companies can negotiate the cost down) of what the merchant pays for processing costs.
Here in Australia when ATM bank cards were introduced and then about the same time with the national Eftpos [1] system, I don't ever recall seeing [myself 1990 onwards] a credit card usage surcharge though Visa or Amex purchases - business were just happy to get those sales from people who might not otherwise have made a purchase.
IIRC it wasn't until the major banks went the way of phasing out plain debit cards (mid 00s) and replacing them with visa debit - where business started to go the route of using visa debit for processing instead of Eftpos, since nearly everyone would have a visa debit card, (I do not, my bank would not provide a Eftpos only,) these business started to pass along a processing fee. When it started to happen I can't say for sure, slow and insidious adoption of passing along the fee means I only recall those external to myself, like family and people I know complaining that various stores were now charging them when they used their card but other stores did not. One would have thought Eftpos fees but on closer inspection the payment was processed via visa ... I do not why some business were not using the Eftpos payment route any more, perhaps the processing system by way of credit services was easier or offered something extra.
Some people have since moved back to cash, even though some stores think they can refuse cash ... but unless the regulations under Credit act in Australia changed in the last 15 years, cash is still legal tender and a system must be in place to accept it - even if that means by way of a temporary account. There are elements in govt here though that would like to track people's spending better ... by banning cash.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFTPOS
Ofcause you can!
You just ask the business to advertise a single price.
Naturally businesses pass on the cost of doing business, it is literally their job.
Pricing just needs to be transparent - this is a key requirement for an efficient market. And something the US is failing at miserably.
A fee for a specific service (ie using a card vs using cash) is pretty different from unavoidable junk fees. As long as a fee like that is advertised up-front it's totally fine; but fees that everybody has to pay are a qualitatively different thing because they are just a way to get a misleadingly low sticker price for the product.
In the US we were well on the way to substantial national bans on these types of junk fees under the Biden administration's CFPB, Khan's FTC, etc and then Trump reversed everything a few months into his current term.
Being ripped off by large corporations at every transaction is what "owning the libs" looks like for your life in practice, but hey at least you can say slurs on twitter now!
[flagged]
We need a national law and FTC teeth to say "The price advertised is the final, final, all-in price you pay" and the right to demand the product be delivered at that price if you were advertised a price. This should include limits on dynamic pricing which "whoops the price changed for the worse between when we showed it to you and when you drove to the store..."
As an example related to Renting. I once saw a place advertised for rent at a price in my budget. Booked a showing the next day. The dynamic pricing increased it several hundred dollars above my budget. The land lord (company) would not honor the price I booked my showing at. I immediately left saying I do not do business with such dishonest practices.
We also need to ban using the renters as a captured audience for products.
Edit to add:
When I last rented from a big corp I got:
$5 a month semi-mandatory fee on automated payments through their app (as if them handling a check would actually cost them less than an automated payment)
Mandatory internet package through a single provider.
"Resort fee" of $30 a month which was more than the cost of a proximal gym providing 10x the equipment.
Move in charge - $50 just to move in as if I was going to rent but not move in?
Move out charge - $50 just to move out as if I was going to not move out when my lease ended?
I also think rent raises after a year's lease should be limited . Why is the 13th month 100% more as if I'm not a long term renter? It makes some sense for short term rentals but this isnt a 1 month rental, it's a 1 month extension to a long term rent.
There's nothing more American than not knowing the price you're going to pay for something until you have to pay it. This applies to everything from income taxes to health care to big ticket purchases like homes and cars, to airline tickets, to cell phone and cable service, all the way down to restaurants with tips and service fees and everything on the store shelf, where sales tax is not included in the price of the good. Somehow the USA has normalized this throughout its entire culture.
Because of innumeracy. You can hide a business opportunity in basic arithmetics. If it's "too hard" to calculate people give up.
I’m not an American, but here in Canada there are a lot of extra fees and such where I live as well.
I don’t believe the problem is purely innumeracy on the consumer’s part.
If companies clearly stated “A(B + C)” as a price, even people with poor math skills would understand that the price is not “B”.
But it’s more like the price is advertised as “B” and “A(B+C)” only appears in fine print or seconds before payment.
Your comment says you can “hide a business opportunity”. I would instead call that “being dishonest”.
In canada on many products the taxes are hidden in the shelf / advertised price iirc Gas, Alcohol, and Tobacco products have this feature. IMO it should be everything (still show the breakdown on the receipt, but instead of advertising the sub-total advertise the final price)
This isn't about math being too hard. It's about companies deliberately hiding and obfuscating what you owe.
Try this. My cell phone service is AT&T's "Value Plus VL" service with three lines. Tell me my exact monthly bill down to the cent. Do all the Internet searching you need and all the math you need to.
In a world where companies weren't actively hiding what you pay, you would easily be able to do this.
It reminds me of my first time in Europe as an American. You go to a cafe, look at the prices, and know exactly how much money you are going to be handing them. It felt like magic because I couldn't remember the last time I paid just the advertised price on anything.
Now, unfortunately in places like the UK, tips are becoming more frequent as well as a discretionary 12.5% service charge at restaurants. And everything online has a convenience fee.
I wish governments would get serious about price transparency. The solution is quite simple, but I fear that with algorithmic pricing things are going to be getting much worse in the short term.
I don't have any hope for broad legislation that affects all businesses. Americans are so used to + tax + tips + convenience fees that doing anything else would hurt at both ends: consumers will claim inflation (oh that 8.99+30% burger is now 11.50? Tragedy) and businesses will mourn the loss of scam tactics that lets them earn more.
Retailer here. I would absolutely love all inclusive pricing legislation. Since we're not trying to screw our customers (we're a co-op, so our customers are also our owners), I'd love to be on a fairer playing field with frontline pricing from the businesses trying to lie, cheat, and steal their way to a higher margin.
What happens when the government raises one of its taxes or imposes a new one?
At most you'd need a ~3 month grace period that covers only that exact difference. Beyond that they adapt
The same thing that happens when suppliers raise prices. The retailer is free to raise prices.
What they shouldn't be able to do is to hide the price increase until you're at the till.
Until Congressional and Executive branch regime change, you should expect city and state efforts to be more effective in the interim. Focus there until regime change and federal change is possible, as it currently is not possible. Death of junk fees via "death by a thousand cuts." Companies can keep up with federal lobbying, they cannot keep up with cities and states all at once. See: data centers and ALPRs.
"Regime change" will have to be deeper than a switch of the usual parties—think what the DSA are proposing, a complete overhaul of the Constitution.
Lina Khan was very effective under the last administration, which is why she works for Mamdani now in NYC.
Mamdani taps Lina Khan and Tony Shorris for key New York economic posts - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/22/lina-khan-ny... - July 22nd, 2026
> think what the DSA are proposing, a complete overhaul of the Constitution.
Strongly agree, onward, elections keep happening, electorate turnover is continuous (and a likely component of why NYC and Seattle have DSA mayors, and Providence, Rhode Island is about to have one).
Citations:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950696
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48788820
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529387
I wonder if there's any (transparently self-serving) pushback against this on Seattle Nextdoor or the like. It sounds like a straightforward set of rules that's great for everyone... but I've learned that this is never enough, and I'm sure there are some people insisting that this is some massive crime against landlords and, by extension, tenants.
Yes, there are people insisting that this will make things impossible for tenants because "no one will want to be a landlord anymore" if they can't charge junk fees.
I think in general my preference is the other part of this story: Rather than choosing what fees can and can't be offered, require both brutal price transparency and prohibit advertising the unrealistic/lesser cost.
A friend of mine has recently lamented the idea gas stations can advertise "with car wash" pricing on top with what is "fine print" on the sign, which looks good but isn't when you factor in the cost of the car wash.
Another favorite is the personal loan ad, saying you're preapproved for a loan as low as 6% APR but actually you can be denied and the loan could be up to 36% APR even if you get approved. Nonsense.
I don't have a huge problem with a discount for car washes but the advertisement should be an out the door price or rate. Similarly I don't mind capped or content-restricted data plans, but the advertised price should be the unlimited one.
I don't think we should decide what businesses can sell, but we should make it very hard to mislead on the ad. Force advertisements to be the highest price instead of the lowest price, and you'll find companies finding ways to remove fees from the table themselves.
I think you should check out the kinds of fees they call out as no longer allowed[1]. They include things like: a fee to "perform landlord duties" and a fee to "access your mailbox." I absolutely think it should be illegal for your landlord to hold your mail hostage.
That said, this generally allows optional fees - they just need to be disclosed, have clear opt-in and out, and cannot be profit centers for the landlord.
[1] https://seattle.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=15702946&GUID=...
I mean obviously fees should either be included in the original price, or there should be a reason it might apply in some cases but not others. But I can also see someone just wanting to break out the costs as separate line items to highlight where their costs come from. (Here's what I pay for the property taxes, here's what I pay for the included utilities, here's what I pay for these maintenance services, so tada, there's your rent.)
But again, if the advertised price must be the total price, it doesn't matter if there's a mailbox access fee or not. It's no different than if they eliminate the fee but raise the price the same amount. Make the advertised price be the highest price, and say "hey, you can advertise discounts off of that".
Nobody's going to advertise you can save $5 a month by eliminating your mailbox.
A similar effect, would be no longer advertising a plan's price if you enable paperless billing and autopay. You'd have to advertise the price without, and then can offer discounts for those things.
Or movie ticket prices being required to be listed with the convenience fee included, and if a theater wants, it can advertise a discount for buying a ticket some other way. More than likely that would just kill convenience fees.
https://wilson.seattle.gov/2026/08/12/in-major-affordability...
https://seattle.legistar.com/ViewReport.ashx?M=R&N=Text&GID=...
Banning junk fees / truth in advertising is good. But I absolutely hate that pet rent was bundled in to this. Pets occasionally cause very high amounts of real damage that should be covered by pet owners, not tenants without pets. And Seattle has banned every other possible avenue of passing this expense only to the parties responsible (higher deposits).
Yes this will absolutely raise rents for everyone in order to cover pet damage costs, which can easily reach thousands, exceeding any profit for the lease term. They are the top cause of rental unit damage.
Many smaller landlords will choose to exclude pets entirely in order to keep rental rates competitive.
(I have worked in housing in Seattle and have seen this first hand. And I love pets, have them myself!)
If you worked in housing in Seattle you would know it's not really legal or practicable for landlords to exclude pets, considering the expansiveness of ESA designations. Almost every landlord already excludes pets outside of ESAs
Yes and the ESA program is unfortunately regularly abused. Without judging tenants, I know multiple people from my personal network who proudly got the ESA designation simply to get around the rule.
There are numerous pet-friendly landlords, but typically the rent is not cheap. Pets have a real cost — they aren’t cheap for the owner, I don’t know why the owner assumes they don’t add cost to their living situation.
The main complaint seems to be that there is not a glut of cheap pet-friendly rentals, which is an unrealistic expectation in Seattle where the housing market is already extremely competitive.
> Many smaller landlords will choose to exclude pets
That would be amazing! Imagine no poop and no smell! And no barking!
And no subsidizing others peoples farm animals!
Funny how "pets" does not usually include rabbits, mouse, aquarium fish or snakes.
Pet deposit is for that, not pet rent. Or just deposit in general. Humans _can_ cause just as much damage as pets.
This will likely result in more "No pets allowed" leases
Is there data to show that pets actually cause more damage? I see this argument get thrown around quite frequently (often by landlords), but I don't buy that it's a major issue.
Yes, absolutely.
It isn't that every pet causes more damage as a rule, its that very frequently pets do damage that is quite expensive. Urine can require floor and subfloor replacement. I've seen dogs chew through walls, etc. Pets in common areas leaving tracks and fur, etc. I'm a dog lover, but it would be folly to pretend that owning a dog does not cause additional wear and tear on my house.
That said, damage from pets should be handled through the damage deposit. Pet rent is just another way to pad the bill.
I am thinking it might be less about the damages (which the tenants are obliged to pay for anyway) and more about the extra work the property must do to deal with noise complaints, escaped pets, possible legal actions, hassles the maintenance might need to show up for, possible extra hours staff might need to work, pooper scoopering, yellowing grass, etc.
Well, there are plenty of lies. Because tenants are liable for the supposed damages regardless of whether landlords can grab $100/mo or whatever.
That's not to say that pets can cause tons of damage: if someone let's a cat spray inside and doesn't immediately clean it, that can cost tens of thousands if it seeps down to the underlayment. But (1) that ain't getting covered by the $50 - $100 they want to gouge people for; and (2) tenants are liable for that either way.
Can property owners not just go to small claims court?
Typically these claims are completely unrecoverable. The tenants don’t have the money, and the cost of pursuing further is too high. The only way to ensure payment is to get it upfront.
That's what damage deposits are for, no?
Damage deposits are capped.
It is not hard for an irresponsible renter to do way more damage than a deposit can cover.
Maybe we'll see an exodus of landlords as this becomes a less economically viable lifestyle.
Yes, we'll see an exodus of small landlords and see much higher monthly rents passed on to all tenants just to subsidize the ones that cause damage. This isn't better for most tenants.
Which is exactly what another post was saying: that large corporations will step in instead.
Seattle severely caps deposits, too.
> And Seattle has banned every other possible avenue of passing this expense only to the parties responsible (higher deposits).
From the very legislation this article is about:
7.24.040 Fees permitted and prohibited <...> B. A landlord may charge the following fees in addition to rent: <...> 4. Pet damage deposits pursuant to Section 7.24.038;
https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal_code...
tl;dr: Pet damage deposits may not exceed 25% of the first full month's rent, no other fees are allowed. If I'm reading this correctly the current version of that ordinance was passed in 2016.
land lords assess and charge for damages, regardless of source
why should pets require a monthly, non refundable fee regardless of damages or not?
My main gripe is my building charges $50 more for EV spots and then wants to charge as much as the charging stations, that's a nope for me, I'll just charge while buying groceries
Damage is what damage deposits are for, and Seattle allows pet damage deposits.
Seattle severely caps deposits; this isn't even close to adequate.
I would think that if a pet causes a high amount of real damage, the landlord should still be able to seek remuneration for that damage. They just can't charge for it in advance.
It's an insurance premium of sorts. They are statistically much more likely to have a problem, so they adjust they rent to make the deal a positive expected value again.
Urine soaking into a subfloor can easily cost more to repair than the security deposit, and recovering damages in court is hard and expensive in its own right (if the person even has money to take).
Not to mention, even when there's no apparent damage, a pet apartment can require extra cleaning to get rid of odors and dander.
It just makes sense for the landlord to price in a potential headache.
Did you ever had to salvage house after cats or dogs? Normal deposit or insurance does not cover that!
Usually it means replacing carpets, wooden floors and bottom part of walls!
Urine contamination gets everywhere , there is no way to remove that smell!!
the monthly fee is not going to cover that amount of damage either
we already have courts and torts to cover those rare occasions
"Rare occasions"? Really?
Edit: right, dogs never ever urinate inside house. It is extraordinary event, that should involve courts!
As a new account, please review the comment Guidelines
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The ordinance does not prohibit a pet deposit.
No, that was already separately prohibited (capped extremely low). Lol.
Now we know you have never been a landlord... "Seek it after the fact" works out in ~0% of the time. Best case is you can sell the debt to a collections agency for ten cents on the dollar, and that is after a court case that you are unlikely to win in the first place. This is why security deposits exist. Cause "get it after" rarely works out.
Because it exceeds the security deposit?
security deposits are set such that "exceeds" is rare precisely because collecting is impossible on average
If you want to know why big, progressive cities have the most unaffordable housing, look no further than this law.
It bans "pet rent". Which, of course, means that non pet owners are now subsidizing pet owners and the damage and wear and tear that pets cause.
All for what, exactly?
Pet rent seldom has anything to do with damage. If you pay pet rent, and then move out and the property manager finds damage, they make you pay for the damage out of your deposit anyway.
The last place I rented had pet rent AND a deposit. The rent definitely a junk fee. It did not accumulate or get tracked.
You choose to own a pet. Building owners choose to set the rent.
What exactly is the problem, here? Other than a small group of people wanting special treatment?
I don't think I can have a conversation about this if you don't understand the concept of "junk fees."
Shouldn't there be a kid fee then? Kids are likely to cause damage and everyone is subsidizing it.
It should just be common sense. You have a kid or you have a pet. They damaged the property, you pay it.
Kids do less damage and there's a stronger argument for subsidizing them than dogs.
Pet rent isn't about directly covering damage; it's more like buying an insurance policy that occasionally covers large pet-necessitated repairs.
Nobody is subsidizing anything. If damage occurs the tenant pays for it
If only. A bad tenant with a dog can do an obscene amount of damage to a property. The people who leave a place with torn up walls and urine+feces throughout the carpet tend not to be the kind of people who will gladly pay extra fees for the damage they caused.
The landlord can sue them, but that's a slow expensive process and there's a good chance they will never recover enough to pay for the damage.
If you buy like carpet you could reasonably expect to replace it in 10-15 years, and if you allow pets you are more likely to need to. However getting 15-20 years out of it instead without pets is probably more like double-dipping than a subsidy as replacing it on the correct schedule should already be factored into the rent.
Lmao.
Depends on the kid
Probably should be a fee for heavy-handed people banging doors and drawers and faucets around too.
This is the only junk rental fee I might actually support, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with property damage.
We protect kids because they are people, and we socially recognize that even if a person is potentially more likely to cause damage, there is a public interest in not discriminating against people based on age, or gender, or race.
Dogs are not people. Many in Seattle think their dogs are people, or even prefer dogs over people, but they are not, and they do not enjoy the same protections against discrimination.
If you have never been a landlord, I can see why you would think that "if they damage the property, they pay for it" is a reasonable rule that would work, because if your dog destroyed a door, the carpet, and the blinds, you are likely to be willing (if unhappy) to pay to fix it. If you have been a landlord, you know why this doesn't work, and you would also know why pursuing the damages in court also doesn't work.
(If you are wondering why: people do not pay. Deposits, which they also now capped in Seattle, often don't cover the damage. And suing people who have no money in order to get a judgment that you can't collect on is expensive and pointless.)
This just socializes the cost of pet damage onto everyone, which is why this is populist slop.
(Some of the other junk fees make much more sense: mandatory fees that you have to pay, that are fixed in nature, should just be in the advertised lease price. Think "common area fees" you can't opt out of.)
On average, a dog or cat probably causes so little damage to the apartment that the landlord will not do anything beyond maybe throw a fresh coat of paint on the walls. I'm sure there are exceptions which trash apartments, but OTOH... so do human beings.
You know what behavior HASN'T been exceptional in my experience? Landlords playing stupid games with my deposit, trying to hold me accountable for nonexistent or preexisting damage, or just generically being irritating.
Let landlords ban pets other than registered service animals if they want to (none of this ESA nonsense), make sure the eviction process is timely and fair, and otherwise crack the hell down on the games they play with their tenants.
Landlording is so morally fraught that Adam Smith called it out in the Wealth of Nations as an example of unproductive rent-seeking. "Populist slop" is absolutely called for - there is almost no other industry of that size where so many unearned benefits accrue to the already-wealthy.
womp womp, 100% empty argument. This happens with or without pets. Maybe find better tenants instead of trying to pin it on "pet owners" as a whole. Guaranteed the same tenants who let their dogs eat doors, blinds and also don't have the money to pay for damages did their own damage and/or didn't take care of the property.
Expected damage(broke with pet) > Expected damage(broke and no pet).
When a person doesn't pay for damages, how much damage they did very much matters. Why is that hard for you to wrap your head around?
The assumption that a pet inherently causes more damage is completely false. Got any numbers to back that up? Doubt it.
There's historically massive public interest towards discriminating against people on age, gender, or race and many other attributes. Literally happens all the time. Jobs discriminate in hiring, women and men discriminate in dating, apartments discriminate,etc. etc.
So your Human Resources version of reality is actually the opposite of what's true currently and what always has been true.
As a matter of fact there's a great deal of science showing that people feel more comfortable around their own race and age.
Dogs on the other hand do not discriminate and will love you with no bias.
Adults were kids. Without kids there are no adults. Without adults there is no society. Without pets life is a bit duller but society goes on as it did before people adopted animals as pets.
And without humans life would be just fine in this planet
And if we recursively say that about each and every species as this would reduce to, we can state that Venus and Mars are just fine.
I had a pet who caused damage to a rental. I had been paying pet rent, and was also charged for the damage. What exactly was the pet rent covering?
Charge for damage if and when there is damage. Anything else is ridiculous.
It's a price discriminator, to dissuade the pet owning group from renting. Why? Because they also cause negative externality to other units. That's what I can think of. If they could do a child charge I'm sure they would.
Does Seattle allow pet deposits? That seems like a straightforward way to handle that, and it's what I've seen when renting elsewhere.
Pet deposits are allowed, but they are restricted to 25% of the first month's rent and landlords cannot require a deposit if the pet is an "assistance animal" for the tenant.[1] It's unclear what qualifies as an assistance animal. If an assistance animal does cause damage, the property owner must sue for damages. I doubt such lawsuits are common, as the cost to hire a lawyer and sue in civil court is easily thousands of dollars, and compensation is far from guaranteed. Even if you win the case, collecting can be difficult.
Also I'm not sure what the new law changes. Since 2016, Seattle has banned charging extra rent for having a pet. Subsection E states: "Other than the pet damage deposit authorized by subsection 7.24.038.A, the landlord may not charge the tenant any fee for keeping a pet."
1. https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal_code...
> Also I'm not sure what the new law changes
It doesn't change anything about pets, the grandparent poster's complaint is a dogwhistle.
What it does ban is shit like 'consigliere' trash disposal, where you are made to pay $50 a month for the privilege of not being allowed to use the building's dumpster. Instead, you have to pile your trash at your door, and then the landlord takes it to the dumpster. You can't opt out of this 'service'.
Oh, and the city's bill for trash disposal is still passed on to you.
Oh, and your building now smells like garbage.
(Landlords are, of course, still free to offer this as an optional paid service, which ~everyone will opt out of.)
It does not. Total deposit is capped at a single month's rent.
Click the link to the ordinance. It explicitly permits pet damage deposits.
Again, deposits are capped well below the damage a pet can cause. And recovery post facto is impossible.
Yes, this legislature explicitly permits them.
> If you want to know why big, progressive cities have the most unaffordable housing, look no further than this law.
This is an unsubstantiated assertion. I'd want to see evidence that things like this actually move the needle on rent vs things like available housing stock, zoning, etc which seem much more likely to actually impact affordability.
OK so this law, enacted now and not in effect yet, which bans rental fees, is the cause of why big progressive cities that in general do not have this law, have the most unaffordable housing. That's a theory, I guess.
It makes costs more transparent, which means the market works better.
We had legal changes in the UK limiting what fees could be charged to tenants and it had no noticeable effect. The main impact was to stop letting agents charging both landlords and tenants, which reduced what they charge overall.
This is not a comment on more recent changes, or other changes, just those around fees.
Are these unaffordable housing units sitting empty?
If not, then high prices generally comes back to supply and demand, which is driven a lot more by zoning and building restrictions than by small differences in rental law.
Generally cities are expensive because people want to live there, and there is limited space for housing. The US especially has been very restrictive on density in urban and suburban areas compared to counterparts found elsewhere around the world. People wanting to live somewhere and a lack of dense housing for them increases prices.
A lot of arguments against "big, progressive cities" seem to boil down to some form of "See, nobody wants to live in these cities because it's so crowded and expensive!" which doesn't make basic economic sense.
> If not, then high prices generally comes back to supply and demand, which is driven a lot more by zoning and building restrictions than by small differences in rental law.
Not discounting the importance of supply/demand, or the damage that restrictive zoning regimes have done, but I'm not sure if this should be so strongly stated, depending on how you want to define "small differences in rental law". For example, per Wikipedia:
> In 1971, the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, a housing expert, said that "rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing". In 1989, Nguyễn Cơ Thạch, then Foreign Minister of Vietnam, observed, "The Americans couldn't destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by very low rents. We realized it was stupid and that we must change policy."
Obviously banning junk rental fees is not the same as rent control, but in either case we're talking about rental law that as an unintended second-order effect is going to (to some degree or another) discourage supplying rentals by making it harder to make money renting.
So, in the interest of being charitable to the OP, I think they're including zoning laws, building regulations, and so on in what they're saying: these cities claim to view housing as a human right, yet simultaneously seemingly do everything in their power to make it incredibly hard, expensive, and risky to supply it.
I don't agree that this attitude is exclusive to big progressive cities: the right theoretically claims to love free enterprise and deregulation, but in practice they're often just as happy with overbearing government control as long as it's their guy doing it. And if anything these days the right more than the left fetishizes certain images of American life that motivate stricter regulations on development; NIMBYism cuts across the political spectrum. But it's an attitude that maybe makes better bedfellows with the left and its intrinsic distrust of markets, and maybe afflicts those left-leaning coastal cities more because they're otherwise much better places to live and thus have higher demand.
> If you want to know why big, progressive cities have the most unaffordable housing, look no further than this law.
And how exactly does the causality for this work, in your head? Rent is already high in the big, highly desirable cities, before this law.
Is this some new form of retro-causality? A law passed today drove rent up 5 years ago?
It is an example of how cities regulate housing, which I believe pushes prices up, not down.
In this case, I don't know that the result will be increased prices necessarily. If landlords are forced to show people honest prices (as opposed to now where the advertised price is at least a few hundred under the real price, but those are mandatory "fees" instead of rent), they may have to bring prices down to compete. It's possible that the currently "honest" landlords will raise rent to match the new higher prices with fees lumped in, so we'll have to see how it plays out.
Well, the main reason is that locals have a lot of tools to stop construction of housing, and they've been using those tools to prevent new housing from getting built for decades. But yes, this won't do anything to lower costs. It'll just get baked into the rent everyone pays.
Well that's if you believe
> Which, of course, means that non pet owners are now subsidizing pet owners and the damage and wear and tear that pets cause
But most people don't think that all. And I notice that you ignored all the other fees also...
Anyway there are moral arguments against junk fees other than "cost". Nobody actually wants to live in a world where service providers are constantly sneaking fees into things. It's just unjust and shitty. You and I both know that the only reason landlords include pet fees is because they get away with it, not because it's the only way to recoup losses or something like that.
Some people are obsessed with free-riders and never happy until they know they're only narrowly paying for the smallest granular subset of things they use, and nothing that they are not personally using. This is why we have all these little fees for everything everywhere--to satisfy those people. This is why airlines are terrible now: they granularly charge for every little thing. "Why should I pay for meal service if I personally don't want to eat?" people are getting their way.
You're just not talking about the junk fee phenomenon at all. Like, you've mistaken it for a different thing.
I don't like nickel and diming either but that's not what this is about.
To be fair, it seems like landlords may still ban pets and they are explicitly permitted to have a pet damage deposit.
What an insanely narrow and purposely ignorant opinion. Subsidizing pet owners? Good tenants are subsidizing bad tenants, people w/o kids subsidizing people w/kids. What is the conclusion of your argument? After i sign I do an insurance style risk assessment and they get to tack on a bunch of fees? I don't think a landlord is jacking up prices cause I have a pet and it is insane to think that I would need to pay more than someone else for that reason. I don't think it was about having or not having a pet, it was designed to squeeze as much as you can out of someone. What is the difference between human caused damage or animal caused damage? The person signing the agreement is still liable for whatever damages at the end of the day. Why can't we just leave it at that?
Also, renters of well-behaved, toilet-trained, quiet pets are subsidizing renters with ADHD children.
You don't seem to know what ADHD is.
ADHD creates the founders that create the returns that pay for the operations of the site we are reading.
Neither do you apparently:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/adhd/symptoms...
"Hyperactive means being too active and having too much energy. It may include disruptive behavior."
"Run around or climb in situations when it's not proper."
"may include" - do you really want to argue the side that ADHD children exist in a proportion that damage apartments that noticably increase the cost on tenants without children? Is that what your imagined ADHD child is doing, just ripping apart the walls?
Both generalizations seem to be intentionally exaggerating to make their points.
It bans pet fees, but it does not ban pet damage deposits. Try reading before complaining.
Greystar's near monopoly on rentals is why
> If you want to know why big, progressive cities have the most unaffordable housing, look no further than this law.
Eh, I'd be willing to wager it's because those cites are where many high-paying jobs are.
Anyway:
> Which, of course, means that non pet owners are now subsidizing pet owners and the damage and wear and tear that pets cause.
Or owners can just quantify and charge for the actual wear and tear? If someone's dog digs up the yard or their claws scrape the up wood floors, just charge them to fix it (or, more likely, take it out of the deposit).
That's why these are often viewed as "junk fees", they charge you for some potential damage vs. any actual damage.
How successful do you think landlords are at recovering damage costs from former tenants that aren't covered by the deposit?
The tenants might have a bit more money to claw back if the landlord wasn't extracting predatory fees in excess of what the renter was signing up for.
The deposit is also limited. In California, deposit is max one month rent... Not sure how difficult/possible it would be to recover more than that from a renter.
That said pets is likely not the driver of increased housing costa by any means.
From the legislature:
> There is no market incentive to advertise the all-in price of a rental unit. Research by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research documents individual businesses losing significant market share when switching to all-in pricing. A landlord that advertises an all-in price appears more expensive than competitors with a lower base rent and unbundled fees.
> Rental junk fees represent a market failure and collective action problem that will not self-correct. Regulation of these fees is necessary to level the playing field for landlords who are transparent about their costs and protect renters from unpredictable and predatory pricing models.
This legislature requires transparency in pricing. If landlords could handle that bare minimum of responsibility on their own, without being compelled by law, it wouldn't have been required.
Oh, and pet damage deposits are still legal.
one-time, refundable deposit is very different from a monthly non-refundable fee
There's a monthly non-refundable fee that I pay for use and regular wear and tear of the property. It's called R E N T, and the difference between that and a landlord's costs is called profit. If you don't want any wear and tear on your property, or any income from it, there's a simple remedy - don't let it out.
Some people cause less than regular wear and tear. Some people cause more. If it gets too high, it becomes irregular, it gets pulled out of your damage deposit. If that's not enough, the landlord is free to sue.
None of this is relevant to this thread, though, because pet fees have been banned for 10 years in Seattle. This legislature isn't about pet fees.
Ridiculous take. It doesn't increase the average rent.
to support the fledgling private pet security industrial complex, who's going to stop the undesirables from dining on our furry friends?
/s
The only "undesirables" feeding on furry friends are dogs and cats. Their owners should be prosecuted for animal torture!
Somehow squirrel hunting is still tolerated in 21dt century!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49791786
Also, in many apartments, if you try to break your lease, they will charge you a fee. We should have a regulation requiring landlords to refund the full amount charged for the previous lease if they find a new tenant to occupy the apartment after you leave.
With current market, we have to keep relocating here and there and leasing for 12 month doesn't make sense.
That already exists in many states. The problem is you need to take the landlord to court to recover, if they don't pony up.