Last week Seattle City Councilmembers Kshama Sawant and Nick Licata held an affordable housing town hall. From the news reports of the meeting, it sounds like rent control was the main agenda item. As I’ve written before, this is a bad idea. Still, it seems like this may be the new hot topic in Seattle, now that the $15 minimum wage is being implemented.

Crosscut sets the stage:

The concern regarding rent stabilization is that it would slow all housing growth. Developers, largely motivated by increasing market rates, might hesitate to build new housing because their profits would be less. As Seattle continues to grow, lackluster housing development could be an issue.

The question of supply is part of every affordable housing conversation. On one end is the carrot: Seattle’s Multifamily Tax Exemption program provides property tax breaks to developments that dedicate 20 percent of units for affordable housing. On the other end is the stick: linkage fees, spearheaded by Councilmember Mike O’Brien, will be further considered in the coming months. Under that model, developers would be charged a larger per square foot fee if they don’t provide affordable housing.

KUOW reports that “Sawant said landlords should only get to raise their rents by small amounts to keep up with inflation and maintenance expenses.” But enacting rent control would be much more difficult for Seattle than the $15 minimum wage was because the state preempts cities from instituting rent control on private residences.

And according to the PSBJ:

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, who as a state legislator unsuccessfully backed a law that would have allowed cities to implement rent control, last fall called it unfeasible and said it would be a distraction in the city’s ongoing effort to rein in rising rents.

So perhaps much ado about nothing. A final thought via PubliCola:

But not everyone in attendance was in line with the cause. Pro-development folks like Roger Valdez, a developer lobbyist with Smart Growth Seattle, thinks Sawant and Licata are selling a false hope to distressed renters.“[Rent control is] kind of the heroin of politics,” Valdez told Publicola this morning. “It feels really good and it’s very, very addictive but it has a very, very negative effect.”