Opinion: How the legislature just voted to raise your rent

Mark Harmsworth argues that House Bill 1217 will drive up rent costs, reduce housing supply, and worsen Washington’s affordability crisis.

Mark Harmsworth believes House Bill 1217 is bad policy, will increase rents, reduce housing supply and should be rejected by the Washington Senate to prevent it becoming law

Mark Harmsworth
Washington Policy Center

According to its title, House Bill 1217 (HB 1217), is supposed to help keep rents low and create affordable housing, but the reality is that it will only increase rent and exasperate the housing shortage in Washington.

The bill passed off the floor this afternoon despite over 80 amendments that were offered to improve the bill being rejected by the majority party. While only Democrats voted in favor of the bill, some Democrats and all the Republicans voted against the bill.

The floor vote echoed previous committee action by Housing Committee Chairman Storm Peterson (D), who ignored hundreds of people that signed in to testify against the bill, many having driven across the state to be at the hearing in person. Representative Peterson gaveled testimony closed after only an hour, choosing to ram the legislation through in a similar fashion to the floor action today.

This is an affront to the legislative process and ignores the people that elected the very same representatives to office.

HB 1217 would limit rent and fee increases to 7% during any 12-month period and prohibit rent and fee increases during the first 12 months of a lease. It adds notification and penalties for the property owner for any increases of over 3% and caps late fees and security deposits.

To run a well-maintained rental property costs money. The price of appliances, roof repairs, carpet, paint, gaps in renting the property, costs to evict of bad tenants, tax increases, regulations and other unexpected costs are not capped as HB 1217 would cap rents. It puts the property owner in a position, if not on day one, but certainly very quickly, where a capped rent increase may no longer cover the cost of maintaining the rental property.

This is the fiscal reality of the situation. Costs are going up faster than the proposed caps and eventually rental property will eventually become a losing proposition under HB 1217. Property owners will sell their properties, not renew leases or be forced to increase rents significantly after cancelling leases on existing tenants.

King County Property Tax receipts in 2024 increased 5.1%, far surpassing the 3% notification threshold for lease penalties. This alone demonstrates the folly of penalizing property owners that are forced to increase rents over an arbitrary government mandated threshold because the very same government increased taxes. Add the maintenance costs and other local fee increases and the increase will quickly exceed the 7% cap.

Government manipulation of zoning and regulation, causing a housing shortage, is the main reason for high property prices and rents.

The real solution to the housing crisis lies in increasing housing supply of which several bills, such as House Bill 1164, introduced during the 2025 legislative session would address. The housing affordability crisis can also be immediately relieved by freezing erroneous development regulations that add thousands of dollars to the cost of building a home. The Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW) estimates the regulatory cost of building a home has increased $39,876 since 2009 alone and now represents 23.8% of the final price of a new home.

This is where the lawmakers need to be focused. Passing laws that reduce the regulations and easing the draconian Growth Management Act (GMA) that artificially constricts the building of new homes will ease the crisis.

Unfortunately, at least for the House of Representatives, politicians have chosen to ignore the realities of housing market economics and passed HB 1217 which will only destroy the housing rental market.

When the renters of Washington begin to realize the damage this legislation has caused to the cost of renting houses, the elected officials who voted for it will likely be out of office and there will be no one to hold accountable.

House Bill 1217 is bad policy, will increase rents, reduce housing supply and should be rejected by the Washington Senate to prevent it becoming law.

For the full list of Washington Policy Center recommendations on how to create affordable housing, see our Policy Brief here.

Mark Harmsworth is the director of the Small Business Center at the Washington Policy Center.