It’s time to celebrate our first big victories of 2023! Yesterday, Seattle took a major leap toward reining in the punitive fees that more and more renters, especially those with corporate landlords, are facing in this housing market:

With a 7-2 vote, the city council passed legislation that bans Notice Delivery Fees. These arbitrary charges, often as much as $50 or $75, are tacked on whenever a landlord pins a notice to a tenant’s door. Read more about the problem of rental “junk fees” here.

And…. Drumroll… after plenty of contentious debate, Seattle joined the South King County cities of Auburn and Burien and capped late fees at $10 per month, one of the strongest standards in the nation!

But there’s more. Last week in SeaTac, after months of deliberation, with much testimony & pressure from renters and community members, the SeaTac City Council took a final vote on new protections for renters! Here’s what they passed:

• 120 days notice for rent increases greater than 3%
• 180 days notice for rent increases greater than 10%
• Move in fees are limited to the equivalent of one month’s rent, payable in installments
• Late fees are limited to 2 percent of the monthly rent
• Limits around requiring social security numbers
• Renters on a fixed income can adjust the rent due date
• Stronger protections from eviction without just cause
• Rent cannot be increased on uninhabitable rental units

These new protections for SeaTac renters will go into effect in mid-May.

THANK YOU to everyone who helped to make these victories possible! TRU and the Stay Housed Stay Healthy Coalition are proud to have championed this legislation in Seattle and SeaTac. Join us as we continue the fight for stronger renter protections and stable, affordable housing across King County!

It’s been a big year for TRU! Here’s some of what we accomplished.

We raised Tukwila’s minimum wage to $19 an hour!

Late last year, we began laying foundations for a workers’ rights campaign in south King County. We surveyed nearly a hundred workers at and around Tukwila’s Westfield Southcenter Mall, one of the largest retail shopping centers in Washington state. Through conversations with workers, local immigrant-owned businesses, and organizations rooted in Tukwila’s diverse communities, we decided to take on an ambitious campaign to raise Tukwila’s minimum wage to match the higher minimum wages in neighboring SeaTac and Seattle.

We built a broad community-labor coalition and mobilized our members and volunteers for a citywide door knocking operation, talking with Tukwila residents about their struggles and the need for higher wages, and gathering thousands of petition signatures to qualify for the November ballot. We did it! Tukwila voters passed our measure in a landslide, with over 82% voting yes. Tukwila’s minimum wage will rise to about $19 an hour in July 2023, more than a 30% raise from the 2022 statewide minimum wage of $14.49. Our measure also includes an “access to hours” policy that requires employers to offer available hours to existing part-time employees before new hiring, to prevent corporations from cutting workers’ hours to avoid having to provide benefits.

We’re now discussing how to continue organizing with Tukwila workers and residents next year to ensure the new law is enforced and to fight for further gains, and how to spread the movement to other cities across King County.

Organizing with renters for stronger tenant protections in King County

This year, TRU continued working with allies in the Stay Housed Stay Healthy coalition, which we helped to build in 2021. We organized with renters and fought for stronger tenant protections in cities across King County. This work is especially timely as median rents skyrocketed this year, in many cities rising 20-30% since before the pandemic. By door knocking at apartment buildings and mobilizing renters and allies to put pressure on elected officials, we’ve won crucial protections in five cities this year. Our work in the city of Kenmore was covered in The Seattle Times earlier this year. We plan to continue this vital work in more King County cities, including SeaTac and Tukwila, in 2023.

Continuing the Fight for Progressive Revenue

Washington state has long had the most regressive tax system in the country. After dramatic tax battles with Amazon and Seattle’s corporate class going back to 2017, in 2020 TRU played an instrumental role in winning a big business tax (“JumpStart Seattle”) targeting the tech sector, which raised over $250 million in its first year— revenue that helped Seattle weather the COVID-19 crash, is now funding affordable housing and other community priorities, and will be key to sustaining basic services during the coming economic downturn and budget crisis. Last year we won a commitment from the city council to continue making our tax system more just, and this year the city laid foundations for a new Progressive Revenue Task Force!  TRU has a seat on this workgroup, which convened this fall and will continue its work through spring of 2023.

Sustaining Our Unsheltered Neighbors

The pandemic has been brutal for people experiencing homelessness. This year, TRU’s camp outreach project has turned tens of thousands of dollars into food, propane, batteries, water and other basic necessities for our neighbors surviving outside. This project is powered by TRU members’ volunteer labor, cooking meals and visiting camps every weekend, and funded entirely by individual donations from TRU members and supporters.

House Our Neighbors Coalition & Initiative 135 for Social Housing 

TRU is part of the House Our Neighbors coalition, which collected signatures this year for a Seattle Social Housing initiative and qualified for the ballot! Next February, Seattle voters will decide whether to create a Public Development Authority to build affordable mixed-income housing on the model of Vienna and other cities worldwide with large non-market public housing sectors.

Organizing for a Solidarity Budget

TRU is a proud member of the Seattle Solidarity Budget coalition, which grew out of the 2020 uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. This year the coalition’s priorities included fighting for living wages for human services workers, opposing police-based responses to the homelessness crisis, transportation investments to end deaths and injuries due to vehicle traffic, massively increasing the pace of affordable housing construction, and fully funding Seattle’s Green New Deal.

Defeating an Amazon warehouse near the Mt. Baker Transit Center 

Last year, we learned that Amazon was scoping sites in Seattle for new warehouses, including two sites near a light rail and bus station in the historically Black and Asian neighborhood of Mt. Baker. As Consumer Reports recently showed, Amazon opens warehouses in low-income and Black, brown and immigrant communities, with disastrous effects on their health and safety. We helped to build and support a coalition opposing these plans. In July, when news broke of a planned rally, Amazon announced that it no longer intends to build warehouses in South Seattle! Now the coalition is pushing to get those sites dedicated to neighborhood-supported uses such as affordable housing to prevent Amazon from changing its mind in the future.

Let’s get out there and knock some doors! Sign up to volunteer.

Tuesday evening, the Redmond City Council heard testimony from renters in crisis and members of the Stay Housed Stay Healthy coalition. They debated and finally voted 6-1 to pass these important protections:

• 120 days notice required for rent increases above 3%, 180 days for increases above 10%.
• Move in fees are capped at the equivalent of one month’s rent, payable in installments.
• Late fees are capped at 1.5% of monthly rent.
• Social security number cannot be required to apply for a rental home.
• Renters on a fixed income like social security can adjust their rent due date.

There’s much more we want them to do, but this is a really great start! Enormous rent increases and displacement are happening now all over King County, and these protections will help to mitigate the harm to Redmond families and communities.

What’s next for the Stay Housed Stay Healthy coalition? We are expecting the Kirkland City Council to vote on a similar set of protections on Wednesday, August 3rd. And we are expecting Kenmore (which already passed the above protections) to vote on a second ordinance next Monday, July 25th, including a local Just Cause Eviction law that applies to all lease types, closing some gaping loopholes in the statewide law.

TRU and the Stay Housed Stay Healthy coalition will continue working to pass strong permanent renter protections in cities all across King County!

Over the past three months, we’ve been hard at work gathering signatures to win a living wage for Tukwila workers. As you may have seen in The Seattle Times, last week we learned that we submitted more than enough signatures to qualify for the ballot!

Thank you so much to everyone who helped with this achievement: all the volunteers who knocked doors, entered data and made phone calls; our hard-working TRU organizers; allied groups that endorsed the campaign & gathered signatures; everyone who’s donated so far— and, of course, all the Tukwila residents who signed the petition and all the Tukwila workers who spoke up about why it’s time for higher wages. Together we will win on election day!!!

But… It’s going to be a fight. We expect to be far outspent by corporate interests that care way more about maximizing their profits than the well-being of their workers. They’ll try to scare Tukwila voters into rejecting a minimum wage increase— just like they tried to do when SeaTac and Seattle were fighting for the same thing. We need to run a super strong Get-Out-The-Vote campaign this fall to counter their misinformation, and for that we need to raise a lot more money than we have on hand right now. To help us off to a solid start, please consider making a donation of $10, $100 or $1000 now in honor of TRU’s 10th birthday!

Back in March, the University of Washington finally agreed to provide fully-subsidized, employer-paid transit passes to ALL its employees. This was the result of a multi-year pressure campaign that TRU was deeply involved in, bringing together UW workers, labor unions, community allies, and transit and environmental advocates. It took years of pressure, from the inside and the outside, to push the UW to fully adopt this common sense pro-climate, pro-worker policy. The new benefit goes into effect on July 1! Read about how we got here in The Stranger, and celebrate with us on June 30!

On Saturday, March 26, we launched a new campaign called Raise the Wage Tukwila! Tukwila is one of the largest job centers in the state, with thousands of low-wage retail and food service jobs at and around Southcenter Mall. The neighboring cities of SeaTac and Seattle have higher minimum wages of over $17, but in Tukwila many workers are still making the statewide minimum wage of $14.49. That’s just not enough.

We need to collect signatures of thousands of Tukwila voters before the end of June to qualify for the November ballot. Check out our campaign website and sign up to volunteer at RaiseTheWageTukwila.org, and read more in The Seattle Times and MyNorthwest. Together let’s Raise the Wage!

Rents aren’t just rising in Seattle, they’re going up fast all across King County. That’s a big problem. Where are low-income renters supposed to go?

TRU and our allies in the Stay Housed Stay Healthy coalition are rising to the challenge and organizing to pass stronger permanent renter protections in multiple King County cities. Earlier this month, the city of Kenmore took a huge step forward. Check out this great article in The Seattle Times that highlights our work.

On Valentine’s Day, council members heard testimony from Kenmore renters and members of Stay Housed Stay Healthy, and devoted hours to discussing a long list of possible protections. They agreed to move forward with a number of them, including requiring longer notice of significant rent increases and capping move-in fees and late fees. Others they decided to study further. We expect a first piece of legislation to be passed later this month, and hopefully a second later in the spring. The Seattle Times article features stories from Kenmore renters and also one of the champions of our legislation, Councilmember Corina Pfeil:

“Several years ago, homelessness knocked on Corina Pfeil’s door. When her landlord raised her rent $300, Pfeil couldn’t pay, nor could she quickly find a cheaper place in Kenmore, where she’d lived for three decades.

‘I thought I was going to end up in a shelter,’ possibly separated from her older son, who was 18 and who has autism, she recalled.

That didn’t happen, thanks to a last-minute negotiation. But the upsetting incident stayed with Pfeil, who now serves on the Kenmore City Council and is pushing to pass a batch of new tenant protections. She still rents, in a sprawling complex tucked behind pine trees.

‘We have to be willing to take a hard look at the inequities in our community,” she said. “We’re a community with haves and have-nots.‘”

TRU and Stay Housed Stay Healthy will be working over the next few months to pass strong legislation in Kenmore, which will help to propel forward our work in other cities later this year.