Tenants allege unsafe conditions, steep rent hikes at West Tacoma apartments
Two years ago, Mary Bennett was sleeping on her couch in her West Tacoma apartment when she suddenly woke up to see a strange man standing in front of her.
Bennett was in shock. She chased him out of her one-bedroom apartment and then called the police. Upon arrival, the police told Bennett that he likely broke in through her bathroom window.
“I was just in shock. I didn’t know what to think, what to do,” said Bennett, who was 66 at the time.
When Bennett asked the building management to fix the window to prevent future break-ins, she said they didn’t fix it but instead told her to wedge a stick in the window to make it harder to open.
Bennet is one of several tenants at Westside Estates – which houses largely low-income, disabled and senior tenants – who say that the building’s ownership has perpetuated dangerous living conditions, retaliated against residents for raising concerns and imposed steep rent hikes.
Concerns about renters living in unsafe living conditions abound in and around Tacoma, so much so that tenants rights organization Tacoma For All in 2023 helped pass a “Tenant Bill of Rights,” a series of strong protections for tenants in Tacoma. But unlike other situations involving negligent landlords, organizers say that ownership at Westside Estates appears to be resisting compliance with what the city now calls the Landlord Fairness Code Initiative or LFCI, both by getting involved in litigation with the city over the issue and now by using an exemption from the LFCI.
Steven Arterberry, who owns Westside Estates, pushed back on Tacoma For All’s claim that the building’s use of the exemption is unlawful.
“We’re not scofflaws here,” Arterberry told The News Tribune. “We’re just not.”
All units at Westside Estates are “decent, safe and sanitary residences in compliance with all applicable building codes at all times,” Arterberry wrote in a statement to The News Tribune.
Building maintenance “promptly” complies with maintenance requests, he added.
What tenants are worried about
Lorine Rhodes has lived at Westside since September 2023. Rhodes said her apartment has flooded on numerous occasions in multiple areas, and building maintenance didn’t take sufficient measures to dry her apartment and address the problem. Mold has proliferated in her apartment since then, she said.
Rhodes used to call for building management to address the mold, but she has stopped because it has a history of criticizing tenants who complain about their living conditions, she said.
“I don’t want to hear [their] mouth,” Rhodes told The News Tribune. “I don’t want [them] to sit there and blame me for something that’s clearly their responsibility.”
Today, the mold endures. Rhodes’ apartment has a strong mildewy smell, and she said her cat has started to lose chunks of fur since the mold problem began. Rhodes, who has lupus, said her symptoms have been exacerbated by the mold.
“This mold issue is ungodly in this house, and they’re not doing anything about it,” Rhodes told The News Tribune.
Melody Frazier, who has lived at Westside since 2017, said she learned of a 13.1% rent increase in November 2025 that would go into effect in June of this year. The LFCI requires that landlords pay tenants relocation assistance in the event that they increase rent by 5 percent or more within a 12-month period, which Frazier said Westside also didn’t comply with. Without relocation assistance, she can’t afford to leave her apartment.
“If I had the money, yeah, then I could go and find somewhere else to move,” Frazier told The News Tribune.
City spokesperson Maria Lee said the city has received four 311 complaints about Westside Estates since 2022 , ranging from complaints about overflowing trash that attracted pests to a concern about building management removing a fridge and oven from a unit leaving the resident without a way to preserve their food.
The city responded by assigning the issue to the city’s code-compliance department or by referring tenants to Tacoma Pro Bono or other resources.
Arterberry did not return a request for comment about tenants’ specific complaints.
Westside Estates and the law
Voters narrowly approved the LFCI in 2023. The city had the authority to repeal or amend the measure but only two years after it had been enacted – around fall of 2025. Those changes proved to be deeply controversial, resulting in some of the longest City Council meetings in recent memory that drew intense emotional pleas from both tenants who supported the LFCI and landlords who deeply opposed it.
The council eventually approved a set of changes that didn’t radically scale back tenant protections – like shortening a prohibition on cold-weather evictions. But the change that elicited a significant amount of opposition was one that allowed for any housing unit owned or managed by the Tacoma Housing Authority or a nonprofit that is held as deed-restricted affordable housing to be exempt from the LFCI.
That’s the exemption that Westside Estates claims, according to a letter the building distributed to tenants on Dec. 23, 2025 that was obtained by The News Tribune. It states that Westside Estates is a “nonprofit entity” as defined by the Tacoma Municipal Code, and another letter asked tenants to sign a lease addendum acknowledging the exemption.
Westside Estates in the letter said it was eligible for an exemption given its affiliation to Hearthstone, a housing nonprofit based in Newport Beach in California, according to the Washington Secretary of State’s website. Per the same website, Westside Estates – also known as “North Pearl Street” is a limited partnership whose governors include Hearthstone and an LLC called Pearl Street 1995, whose governors include Arterberry, who’s an attorney, and housing developer Catherine Tamaro.
North Pearl Street is also involved in an ongoing lawsuit against the city that started in 2024, alleging that the LFCI violated the constitutional rights of property owners.
Tenants say they’ve never heard of Hearthstone.
Ty Moore, co-executive director for Tacoma for All, said the organization is suspicious of Hearthstone’s affiliation with Westside, given that Tacoma For All hasn’t seen evidence that Hearthstone plays a “practical management role” at the apartment building.
Moore said the organization wants the Tacoma City Council to address the problem to prevent landlords from falsely claiming exemptions to the LFCI.
“We’re exploring a legal challenge to the landlord saying you can’t have a fake management company as your excuse to strip tenants of their rights,” Moore told The News Tribune.
Mayor Anders Ibsen said he’s concerned about the allegations of Westside Estates improperly claiming an exemption to the LFCI. He said he’s not aware of plans to change the exemption in the LFCI, but he’s open to dialogue on the matter.
“Tacoma residents deserve safe housing and predictable living conditions,” he wrote to The News Tribune in a statement.
Among Tacoma For All’s chief concerns about the LFCI are that it doesn’t contain an enforcement mechanism. Currently, the only way to do so is for tenants to pursue legal action, The News Tribune previously reported.
That concern about the enforcement of the LFCI is the reason Tacoma For All is collecting signatures for another ballot initiative called “Safe Homes for All.” The initiative would require the city to enforce those rules, funded by a rental-unit license fee that landlords would be required to pay. The situation at Westside, Moore said, is more reason for the Safe Homes For All campaign to get either the City Council or the voters’ approval.
“Tenants who complain get threatened with retaliation, and so in most cases, they don’t report violations to the city, they don’t exercise their right to sue because they’re scared of losing their housing,” he added. “We need stronger enforcement in the city, and that’s what the Safe Homes for All initiative is designed to achieve.”
