It was exactly four years ago this week that I took the stage with Councilmember Kshama Sawant. to debate rent control. What have we learned as a city in that interval? Not much. This weekend Sawant will rally rent control supporters. Her followers have already been gathering signatures on a petition. For anyone who knows what’s really going on in the city (if there is anyone else out there) the language the Sawant uses is hilarious. Here’s a paragraph from the petition page titled, “Shhh! Don’t tell the billionaires and corporate developers: Our rent control movement has early momentum!”

We will no doubt face massive opposition from billionaires, big developers, and corporate landlords and the establishment politicians who serve them. The developers and landlords are making untold profits by exploiting renters. And as we saw with the Amazon Tax fight, they will do everything possible to resist paying their share of taxes so that we can build more affordable housing.

Remember that the first two groups that are supposed to be giving rent control “massive opposition” capitulated on Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA). Vulcan and other large developers downtown and in South Lake Union cut a deal for themselves that they could easily absorb, paid the fees they would have likely paid anyway, and moved on. Everyone else in town is stuck dealing with per square foot fees that have started tipping projects into infeasibility. And from what I’ve been hearing, the chickens are starting to roost with townhouse and small apartment builders getting big bills for fees they can’t pay.

What about the “corporate landlords?”

We’ll see. I’ve been hearing a very unsettling buzz that a deal should be struck like the one reached in Oregon which established rent control statewide with a high ceiling for the price control. Why would landlords want this? Just like developers and most business people, as I’ve said, landlords want certainty more than they want lots of extra profit. The logic is that a high allowance for increases plus allowing the increase to include a setting for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) would have no effect on rents. After all, rents aren’t going up all the time and more importantly the increase across the housing economy is largely attributable to new product hitting the market, the so-called “skew of the new.”

My more pessimistic side tells me that this is, indeed, what will happen. I would guess that Sawant’s efforts will result in some kind of direction from the City Council to it’s lobbyists in Olympia to pass an Oregon like measure. The thing is that billionaires and big developers really don’t care all that much about rent control. I wish they did because if they did, we’d have a chance to stop it. As for landlords, there simply is no political clout there. The landlord lobby simply can’t muster votes to do anything other than break their fall in Olympia, usually with their own head. I think the Council will lean hard on the legislature which has already promised to pass a measure in 2020.

The truth is that like MHA and changing the purpose of the REET, there just isn’t much backbone in the real estate community. The prevailing wisdom is that it is better to choose the least painful form of public humiliation rather than reject the underlying premise that housing is bad and an impact and that the only solution to housing price increases is price controls and more regulation. If there were billionaires and corporations that could think beyond the edge of their pro formas and portfolios I do think we could not just stop rent control, but turn this whole thing around with solid data, good policy ideas, and a determination to change the narrative. Will that come together in the next six months? We can dream, right?