Exactly a four years ago yesterday, I wrote a post at Publicola about why we don’t need rent control. The post was built on the idea that we already have thousands of rent restricted units, that is, units of housing that have rents that can’t go up because they are restricted to rents by covenant, contract, or because they are publicly owned. At the time I wrote the post the number of rent restricted units was in the tens of thousands. From that post:

The truth is we don’t need rent control because we already have price controls in place for many units in the city. Based on the Puget Sound Regional Council’s database on affordable housing, Seattle has about 82,000 rental units that are priced affordably—with rents that are 30 percent of monthly area median income (AMI)—for people who earn zero to 80 percent of AMI. That’s the income band targeted by the mayor’s call for 20,000 new affordable housing units in the next 10 years. (Eighty percent of AMI for a single person is $44,750; that band should pay about $1,198 in rent. Fifty percent of AMI for a single person is $39,000; renters in that band should be paying about $827.) Of those 82,000 existing units, there are already 36,000 that are rent restricted, meaning the rents of those units are locked in—controlled if you like—for anywhere from 12 to 40 years.

Those 36,000 units, roughly 44 percent of all the units at those levels of income are set by government agencies and covenants; they are a mix of units paid for by government grant, the city’s housing levy, through the city’s Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) program, or vouchers issued by the Seattle Housing Authority. The rents won’t go up unless those units go though an extensive process or are converted into market rate units. That happens, but the city has a lot of control over that even though the Office of Housing only tracks a fraction of these units to be sure they aren’t in financial trouble or has an owner that is having trouble operating them.

So there are two important things lost in the discussion of rent control. First, the Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) Program accounts for roughly 8,000 of these rent restricted units according to the City’s annual report on the program. The MFTE program exempts a portion of the property taxes in exchange for restricting rents in 20 percent of the units in the project. Yes, 20 percent, more than twice the percentage in the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program. I’ve argued that the MFTE program performs much better than the MHA program ever will in terms of providing people with lower rents. In fact, if the MFTE program us unleashed instead of limited, MHA would never catch up. That means less suffering and frustration for renters.

Second, there are a lot more rent restricted units that have contracts or covenants that require restricted rents in addition to those 8,000 units. The City doesn’t track these. And that’s why we get the stories from time to time about residents being “evicted” from buildings that have been sold with these units in them. The reason why these transactions move forward is because the contracts with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) or some other agency expire. Buyer and seller haven’t done anything wrong, but the media covers this as if the buyer is targeting the people living in these units. This is unnecessary. From my post from four years ago:

Today, the city could start tracking every single one of these rent-restricted units, determine how long their rent restrictions are in effect, and develop backstops to be sure they stay rent controlled. Additionally, the council could adopt a strong resolution directing staff to develop a workable plan to use the city’s borrowing (bonding) authority to build housing on usable pieces of public land and to buy rent-restricted buildings that are in trouble. The council could push to expand the Seattle housing levy, the MFTE program that uses reduced property taxes to stabilize rents, and expand SHA’s voucher program. And they should stop wasting time worrying about rent control.

Has the City done anything like this? Of course not. Instead we’re debating about rent control, whether Seattle is dying, how much to tax jobs, imposing taxes on new housing, and who is a journalist and who isn’t. Math and economics don’t matter; it’s scorched earth for the extreme sides of the debate on homelessness in Seattle, a poorly defined problem with only ideological solutions offered. The solution to much of the housing problem is right in front of everyone’s face. All those buildings out there have lots of rent restricted housing that is based on fair exchanges of value, existing covenants and contracts, or because they are older buildings. Yet, Seattle is doing nothing but claiming we have a “crisis” and trying to squeeze more money to punish prosperity. Who will try to change this? We will! More on that soon.