Appeal for Personal and Organizational Endorsements for the
Tenant Rights Action Conference
Saturday, February 11th, 12:00-4:30p.m
Common Good, 621 Tacoma Ave, Tacoma, WA 98402

We are asking community leaders and organizations to endorse the Tenant Rights Action Conference by emailing Tacoma4All@gmail.com. For personal endorsements, please list your name and any relevant roles, titles, or affiliations (if needed, we’ll make clear you are endorsing in personal capacity only). We hope to announce an initial list of endorsers in early January.

Tacoma urgently needs a comprehensive Tenant Bill of Rights.
Landlords in Tacoma and Pierce County evict tenants at a 56% higher rate than the rest of the state, with 90% of evictions due to inability to pay rent. A majority of Tacoma tenants are “rent-burdened,” paying more than a third of their income on housing. Studies show exceeding this threshold leads to spikes in rates of homelessness. With housing costs rising far faster than wages, rates of displacement continue to grow.

Tacoma has an acute housing shortage, estimated at 20,000 homes and growing, giving landlords even more leverage to hike rents, evict tenants, and ignore code violations. Landlord profiteering hits communities of color hardest everywhere, but the racial disparities in Tacoma are especially acute: rates of homeownership for Black families are 27 percent lower in Tacoma than the national average.

Robust tenant protections and rent stabilization are proven to reduce inequalities and increase stability, improving outcomes in education, health, employment, and incarceration rates. Yet tenant protections in Tacoma remain extremely limited, even as a wave of tenant rights laws were passed in cities across our state and nationally. It is past time that Tacomans get the same legal protections enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of renters across Washington.

That’s why we are organizing the Tenant Rights Action Conference.
We aim to bring a broad grassroots coalition together in early February to discuss and democratically decide on a strategy to win a robust package of tenant protections (see addendum below). Home in Tacoma for All is preparing both for a possible tenant rights ballot initiative in 2023, as well as opportunities to push our City Council to pass tenant protections.

Whatever strategy we choose, we know that we will need a broad coalition to win against landlord and business opposition. When we launched Home in Tacoma for All last April, we brought together over 120 community leaders, housing justice activists, labor organizers, and those most impacted by housing injustice for a powerful multi-racial rally. In the lead-up to the Action Conference, we aim to grow that coalition further and to emerge with an agreed strategy to organize thousands of Tacomans to take action.

Endorsing the Tenant Rights Action Conference does not mean you or your organization will automatically endorse the strategy decided at the conference, whether that is a ballot initiative or a pressure campaign on City Council. Rather, you are endorsing the urgent need for a serious community dialogue on expanding tenant rights in Tacoma. We thank you for your support!

Renters in Tacoma deserve the same legal protections enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of tenants across our region. Major progress is possible in this political moment. Following the pandemic, a wave of legislation enacting tenant protections has been gaining momentum across the country. Seattle is paving the way in Washington with the most comprehensive protections, but cities from Bellingham to Olympia, Burien to Federal Way have also enacted important reforms.

We are looking for feedback from coalition partners on what should be prioritized in a Tenant Bill of Rights campaign. Below is our initial proposal for what could be included in a tenant rights ballot initiative, all of which are already law in Seattle and other cities:

Economic eviction protection: If landlords raise rents over 10%, forcing tenants to leave, they must pay tenant relocation assistance equal to 3-months rent.
Require 6-month notice for all rent increases. Allow tenants to break leases without penalty within that period if they need to find other housing.
Ban rent increases where outstanding code violations exist.
Ban evictions of children during the school year and ban evictions during cold-weather months when survival is more challenging.
Cap move-in costs to no more than first & last-month rent. Cap late fees and pet deposits. Ban or cap rental application fees.

In order to take an informed and meaningful decision on whether or not to go forward with a ballot initiative at the Action Conference in February, we have begun serious preparations. The City Council’s vote in favor of the camping ban in October lowered hopes among many tenant rights organizers for what could be achieved through this City Council, and led HTA to explore a ballot initiative more seriously.

The most experienced attorney in the state on progressive ballot measures, Knoll Lowney, is advising us and is confident he can write a legally sound initiative with a robust package of tenant protections. If we submit ballot language by mid-February, we can begin collecting signatures by mid-March, giving us over three months to collect the 4,200 valid signatures needed to get on the ballot.

We are confident our existing volunteer base can easily achieve that 4,200 signature threshold. The harder part will be convincing over half of the 42-46,000 likely voters in November to support a Tenant Bill of Rights. Our goal, therefore, is to expand our volunteer base to over 50 committed to regular shifts by mid-March, and to use the 16 weeks through the end of June to gather over 10,000 valid signatures alongside contact information as an initial foundation for a serious GOTV operation in the fall.

We already have over $25,000 pledged, and we are confident that through small-donor grassroots fundraising we can hire staff and run a professional campaign. We also hope our coalition partners in labor and well-financed community groups can make some larger donations, allowing us to more fully meet the challenge.

We should anticipate a well-funded opposition campaign by landlords and conservative business leaders. Overcoming that will require building a serious political machine capable of reaching tens of thousands of voters with our message over the course of a 7-month mass outreach campaign (March - Nov. 7th, 2023). It will require building a broad coalition of influential labor, faith, and community leaders prepared to communicate with and turnout their base.

Unless we dare to fight, working-class movements will never win. Yet winning also requires clear strategic thinking. We should only pull the trigger on a ballot initiative if we feel confident in our odds for victory. If by the July deadline to turn in signatures we don’t feel strong enough to win in November, we can take the decision then to step back to prepare a stronger fight for 2024.

Yet, our experience over the past year petitioning thousands of Tacomas to support the Home in Tacoma for All Platform has convinced us that tenant rights are increasingly popular. Working-class Tacomans are rent burdened and terrified of rising housing costs. Individuals and organizations stepping forward to back this effort now can show a meaningful and important commitment to real and lasting tenant protections.

There is no room left for silence or standing on the sidelines. Community partners are needed now to help shape this fight and the future of tenant rights in Tacoma. We invite you to contribute as we prepare to consider whether to bring a ballot initiative and what it should include. We invite you to join our grassroots coalition and to help make the Tenant Rights Action Conference in February a successful kick-off to win a robust Tenant Bill of Rights in 2023.