The Corporate Landlord Offensive

Gwendolyn Hart

Evictions just hit a record high. In King County, evictions rose by 12% last year. Before the pandemic, the number of evictions filed by landlords hovered around 5000. In 2025, that number passed 8000.

There’s one reason for this. The rent is simply too damn high!

According to multiple rental application sites, the average cost of a two-bedroom apartment in King County is over $2800/month. Nearly half of all renters in Seattle pay over 30 percent of their annual income to rent, which officially designates them as “rent-burdened”. In Renton, Southeast Seattle, and the Central District specifically that figure is over 50 percent of renters.

Black communities are feeling the brunt of the corporate landlord offensive. Not only did Black households receive higher increases on average, but one quarter of Black renter households had a rent increase of $250 or more in 2023. This is why 15% of homeless people in King County are Black, despite Black people only making up 7.5% of the county population.

We need reparations from the rich, including a massive expansion of public housing in Black communities.

Seattle is a majority renter city. Attacks by corporate landlords are pushing the whole working class into a crisis. Immigrants have also lost millions in income due to fear of ICE raids at work. We need an eviction moratorium until the cost of living crisis is resolved.

The all-Democratic Seattle city council has taken no action on this issue. Instead, last year they tried to attack our renters’ bill of rights, which was won by a powerful renters’ rights movement and socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant. Former City Council Democrat Cathy Moore spearheaded a move to strike out sections of the ethics laws preventing landlord councilmembers from voting to overturn renters rights. The movement fought back alongside Kshama Sawant, packed city hall council chambers, and beat that bill. Then Moore resigned in disgrace.

Last February, Seattle’s working class passed the Prop 1A ballot initiative to fund a public housing developer by taxing the rich. This was won against serious efforts by the Democratic Party to kill it. We need to get organized to build on this victory, to win rent control in Seattle and expropriate big corporate landlords to provide quality public housing to the city.