Last April, Corey Snelson, a 38-year-old PhD graduate and scientist working at the University of Washington, was trapped living in squalor in a dank U-District basement through no fault of her own. "Before I moved inâbut after I signed a one-year leaseâthere was a flood in the house that dumped 100 gallons of sewage water into my apartment," she explains, "and the landlord refused to remove the carpet."
Snelson's pet basset hound became incredibly sick and dropped 15 pounds before her landlord finally agreed to replace the carpet. But the dank, uprooted carpet revealed a bigger problem: Mold.
"When I contacted him about getting the mold cleaned up, he wouldnât answer emails, texts, messages, he ignored me entirely," Snelson says. "My dog was dying. I couldn't stay there. I couldn't really afford to leave. I didn't know what to do."
At 2:00 p.m. this afternoon, the city council's Housing, Human Services, Health and Culture committee is slated to discuss a proposal (.pdf) to require rental housing landlords to register their 42,000-odd rental properties with the city over the next three years, and conversely, allow the city to conduct random inspections of their properties to better ensure safe living conditions for tenants.
Among other things, the proposal would:
¡Require all Seattle landlords to register all rental properties over the next three years (excluding unconventional spaces like shelters, transitional housing, retirement homes, or vacation units).
¡Require mandatory inspections of properties that have two or more reported violations in three years.
¡Generate an unquantified number of random inspections each year from the master database of all rental properties.
Over half of all Seattle residents are renters, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Snelson was eventually put in contact with the Tenants Union of Washington State, a nonprofit striving to represent Seattle's estimated 27,000 renters in housing disputes, which counseled her on how to file a complaint about her unsanitary living conditions with the city's Department of Planning and Development (DPD). A city inspector came out, toured her unit, and filed a nine-page report of violations against her landlord. In November, 2011, Snelson broke her lease and moved out. "My family pushed me to break my lease and move," she says. "I'm very lucky that I had that supportâmany people don't."
Snelson has high hopes for today's council meetingâwhich is the culmination of over two years' worth of work. In 2010, the City Council passed legislation establishing a Residential Rental Business License and Inspection Program to require rental properties to meet basic health and safety standards. The city immediately convened a stakeholder group filled with landlords, tenants, and city officials to draft the recommendations that would guide implementation of the program.
Last December, the DPD presented its draft proposal of recommendations to the council committee, but it was met with tepid enthusiasm from council members and tenant's rights advocates for pandering to landlords (only allowing property inspectors to conduct random inspections to the outside of rental properties, for example). Today's final proposal includes a few rewritesâallowing inspectors inside rental units to check for basic health and safety standards like smoke detectors, electrical hazards, and the presence of vermin, for example.
Snelson is now happier living in a habitable and mold-free apartment, and her pup has fully recovered. But she notes that someone else is now living in her old place. "I don't know if he ever actually cleaned up the mold problemâhe could've just painted over it," she says.
