Tacoma rushes on tenants’ rights updates, without much to show for it | Opinion
Tacoma’s debate over tenants’ rights drew a huge crowd to last week’s City Council meeting, and Tuesday will see continued turnout from concerned residents and advocacy groups.
At issue is a set of policies passed in a 2023 ballot initiative. Advocates hoped the ordinance, called the Landlord Fairness Code, would shield tenants from sudden, sharp rent increases and evictions during the cold winter months. Both of those scenarios upend lives and in some cases drive homelessness.
Landlords and some affordable-housing experts warned there would be unintended consequences. Small-scale landlords and affordable-housing nonprofits worried about their business models if they had to wait months to evict someone who wasn’t paying rent, or if they had to slow-roll rent increases regardless of how much their own costs had increased.
The law went into effect Dec. 8, 2023.
Now, two years and less than a month later, the City Council has debated potential changes to the policies that proponents called the Tenants’ Bill of Rights. They’re revisiting rules about how much notice landlords should give tenants of rent increases, when a landlord must help pay tenants’ relocation costs and when exactly it’s too cold outside to evict someone.
The council’s move to consider the amendments this month has raised the ire of tenants’ rights advocates. It caught my attention, too. As it happens, December is the only possible time the current council could vote to change the policy without also getting approval from voters.
That’s because two separate things are true. First, Tacoma’s City Council can’t change an ordinance created through the ballot initiative process before two years have passed – unless they put their proposed changes before the electorate. Second, two voting members of the current council will be replaced in January.
What are they getting for their rush? At this point, it seems like not much. As they’ve engaged with the public and studied the matter, council members introduced and revised amendments that whittled down bigger changes.
For example, an amendment from council member Olgy Diaz has jettisoned the idea of means-testing the winter eviction ban. That would have limited the protection to tenants who earn below a certain income threshold.
Another proposed change aimed to shrink the amount of advance written notice of rent increases that landlords must give tenants. After vacillating between a variety of timeframes, the council appears settled on leaving the number essentially where it was before. Instead of requiring 210 to 180 days of notice as the original ordinance did, the updated law might require a flat 180 days of notice.
The Tacoma City Council makes its final vote on the ordinance and amendments updating the tenant protection laws on Tuesday evening.
Base changes to tenant protections on data
Next month, Anders Ibsen will become mayor and gain a vote on council. Latasha Palmer won Position 6, an at-large city council seat, in November. I wondered what Palmer, who campaigned on housing issues, thought about the council taking up tenant protections before she could take office.
When I talked to her, Palmer said she didn’t like the rush to make changes, but she said it’s not just that she wouldn’t have the opportunity to weigh in. It’s that we still don’t have data on whether the feared unintended consequences have come to fruition.
An effort to study the effects of the Landlord Fairness Code Initiative is still underway. It’s spearheaded by Michael Mirra, the former executive director of the Tacoma Housing Authority. He initially launched the effort with my predecessor Matt Driscoll, and this newspaper’s editorial board advocated for making any changes based on real evidence about the Landlord Fairness Code’s impact.
In October, Mirra and Evergreen State College professor Mike Craw briefed the council’s Community Vitality and Safety Committee on what the project has found so far. That included survey responses from landlords and tenants.
The study is still in process, including the search for Tacoma-specific eviction data that’s hard to parse from the county-level information that’s readily available.
“You do hear the call to wait for the new council members to come in, but I think it’s mostly because they know that that data is what’s going to be considered when we are in,” Palmer said.
She also pointed out that low-income residents face financial uncertainty because of federal benefits and policies. The recent government shutdown threw the SNAP benefit system into chaos. Tariffs have created new reasons for prices to increase. And health insurance premiums are set to go up in 2026 if Congress doesn’t extend Biden-era subsidies.
“There’s a whole lot of things we don’t know right now,” Palmer said, “and to just speed ahead with decisions that could have an adverse effect for these same groups, just doesn’t make a ton of sense.”
This story was originally published December 9, 2025 at 8:27 AM.
