On November 30, 2009, the City of Seattle City Council repealed Seattle Municipal Code (SMC) Chapter 10.09 “Public Nuisances” and replaced it with Chapter 10.09 “Chronic Nuisance Properties.” The sponsor of the ordinance was Seattle City Councilmember Tim Burgess, then chair of the Affordable Housing, Neighborhoods & Finance Committee. SMC 10.09 defines a “chronic nuisance property,” specifies a process to deem a property a chronic nuisance and establishes the remedies to be used to “fix” such a property. Once a property is deemed to be a chronic nuisance, the court issues a court order that provides remedies for abatement. The Seattle CNO allows for an abatement that displaces the tenant of such a property and forces the property from the rental market:

[I]f as part of its order abating a chronic nuisance property, the court orders a person in charge to cease renting or leasing a property, the court may order the person in charge to pay relocation assistance not to exceed $3,300 to any tenant (1) who must relocate because of the order of abatement, and (2) the court finds not to have caused or participated in nuisance activities at the property. (SMC 10.09.085 – Additional remedies)

According to Seattle Municipal Code 22.210.030 – Definitions, a “Tenant” is expressly defined as “any person who is entitled to occupy a dwelling unit primarily for living or dwelling purposes under a rental agreement and includes those persons who are considered to be tenants under the State Residential Landlord-Tenant Act, chapter 59.18 RCW and those tenants whose living arrangements are exempted from the State Residential Landlord-Tenant Act under RCW 59.18.040(3) if their living arrangement is considered to be a rental or lease pursuant to RCW 67.28.180(1).”

The new law upped the ante for tenants occupying single-family homes in Seattle, as well as for those home owners who lease them out. CNOs give third parties, including unethical neighborhood organizations and real estate speculators, a platform from which to interfere in landlord-tenant lease agreements while minimizing exposure to claims of “tortious interference.” It is likely that CNOs, which in some locales threaten even criminal penalties against the owners of “nuisance properties,” discourage the holding and rental of single-family homes in favor of housing speculation and gentrification.

In fact, in the case of the Seattle Chronic Nuisance Ordinance, the threat of eviction does not expressly fall upon the inhabitants of properties deemed nuisances. Rather, Seattle’s CNO threatens only those who rent with loss of home.

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There is an unspoken assumption that a property that is not rented is not a “nuisance.” When owners occupy their properties, “nuisances” are tolerated or remediated in accord with the laws that affect us all. A man’s home is his castle, after all. At least, a man is entitled to a castle.

Describing the origin of the saying, Wiktionary cites Cicero, “What more sacred, what more strongly guarded by every holy feeling, than a man’s own home?” (“A man’s home is his castle,” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_man%27s_home_is_his_castle) The privacy and security of those who rent is accorded less weight, and the privacy and security of women who rent less still. I am reminded of a recent New York Times feature about an elderly tenant who was forced into adult guardianship after the complaints of the property management company that sought to evict her from her long-time apartment, ostensibly for “hoarding” (“I’m petitioning… for the return of my life,” by John Leland, December 7, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/nyregion/court-appointed-guardianship-like-prison.html).

I’ve often wondered if my nasty neighborhood watch and its cronies, including the male home owners of the north and south mobbing houses, would have dared to do to a man, what they’ve tried to get away with doing to me.

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Renting is the root cause of the nuisance condition. Or so we are given to believe. We accept the codification of this bias in our laws, and we tolerate discrimination that is based upon this bias. As someone remarked to me a few years back when I told them how those renting single-family homes were treated in my neighborhood, “Renters are one of the last groups that it’s okay to be prejudiced against.” [Note 06/08/21: I should have made the point here that it’s not meaningful to say you support the housing rights of minority groups when you assail the housing rights of tenants. Those who are economically disempowered for reasons of sex, race, creed or color are more likely to remain tenants. Discrimination against those who rent hides discrimination against minority groups.]

Seattle has not been alone in repealing an existing nuisance ordinance and replacing it with one demanding satisfaction from owners. In Hazeltown, Pennsylvania, for example, also in 2009, the city saw fit to repeal and strengthen its existing nuisance ordinance with an ordinance mandating charges for “abatement” (“Nuisance Abatement Ordinance 2015-9, http://www.hazletoncity.org/City-Ordinances/nuisance-abatement-ordinance.html).  Perhaps the recasting of a condition of nuisance as a condition of blight severe enough to displace residents and force properties to sale is a measure taken to ensure that nuisance ordinances have teeth, in other words, that someone is held accountable for nuisance conditions. Certainly, in creating laws that strong-arm property owners into divesting themselves of rental properties, the priority is not housing. Unethical speculators and home owners’ organizations, however, can use CNOs to twist the arms of property owners, forcing owners to initiate eviction proceedings against their tenants and pressuring them to sell.

In “Use of anti-harassment orders and Chronic Nuisance Ordinances (CNOs) to constructively evict” (https://onbeingmobbed.com/2017/01/20/mobbers-use-of-anti-harassment-orders-to-constructively-evict/), I discussed how anti-harassment orders may be used by neighborhood watch groups and speculators to make legally rented single-family homes into “nuisance properties” that must be “abated.” Anti-harassment orders appear to be one of numerous methods used by at least some neighborhood watch groups in Seattle to scare tenants out of residential neighborhoods. In writing this blog entry, I was fortunate to be informed by Salim Katach’s note examining the effects of CNOs on tenants’ Fourteenth Amendment rights to liberty. See “A Tenant’s Procedural Due Process Right in Chronic Nuisance Ordinance Jurisdictions” ( Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 43:875; https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2825&context=hlr).

Another method of rousting tenants and turning over properties appears to be to write continual letters and email threatening legal actions and fines against those who dare to rent out their properties instead of selling them. In my case, such letters were written by a builder and his real estate agents, in addition to neighborhood watch captains and others of their allies. Seattle Roosevelt Neighbors’ Alliance, an alliance of “neighbors” that likely includes no renters, makes this easy by distributing form letters from their website, letters that appear to advocate open demands that tenants be “gone as soon as it is legally possible.” In fact, such demands have little to do with the law; not Seattle’s Just Cause Eviction Ordinance, or the Seattle CNO. Seattle’s Municipal Code provides a noise ordinance as well as copious laws regulating the behavior of Seattle residents. Instead of attempting to erode the relationship between tenant and landlord, home owners who are legitimately disturbed by illegal behavior should call Seattle Police Department. Municipal codes should be uniformly and fairly applied. When those who rent act in a manner that does not conform to code, they should be treated the same as other residents. Renters should not be subject to a double-standard of selective code enforcement against them, nor should they be demeaned by threatening letters to their landlords and other potentially tortious interference for legal behavior or behavior that is in keeping with the customs of their neighborhoods.

By its form letters and their salutations to “Mr and Mrs. Pinchpenney” (sic) of “666 Heck Street,” the Roosevelt Neighborhood Alliance makes its feelings about rented homes clear. Curiously, one of the “sample” letters that the Roosevelt Neighbors’ Alliance so helpfully offers to Seattle home owners, copies the Seattle Community Police Team officer assigned to the neighborhood, in this case, North Precinct CPT Officer Randy Maxwell (Roosevelt Neighbors Alliance: Nuisance Properties, http://www.rooseveltneighborsalliance.org/main/_Nuisance_Properties.html).

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In the last week there was outcry about putting members of the Seattle Police Department’s Community Police Team (CPT) back on patrol because of staffing problems. One woman interviewed on the news objected, saying that the CPT prevents crime. In my experience, the North Precinct CPT’s close relationship with neighborhood watch groups likely encourages the bullying and harassment of tenants as watch groups openly copy Community Policing Team officers on correspondence intended to bully landlords and their tenants. For example, a South Cedar Park neighborhood watch email that, by its recipient list, not only suggested collusion between the neighborhood watch, select home owners on either side of one tenant, and at least two local builders, but that openly voiced the intent to “encourage” tenants to move. In the following excerpt, co-captain Sandra Motzer states her intention to ask Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) to “paint the street around the hydrant” next to a rented house. Noting how codes regulating 72-hour parking and parking near hydrants might be used to constrain the use of on-street parking by the occupants of two rented houses, Motzer says:

“Between that rule and the no parking within 5 feet of a driveway and 15 feet of a fire hydrant, it’s going to be lots tougher for [renters in house 1] and [renter in house 2] to take over our [emphasis mine] street—and it gives us legal tools to regain control that apparently just appalling awful behavior does not. And perhaps will serve as encouragement for both [renters in house 1] and [renter in house 2] to move.

I’ll call Jim Curtin at SDOT Monday. I will ask SDOT to paint the street around the hydrant so the no-parking boundaries are clear. Plus now Tim and I really need a guard rail along the length of the right-of-way that abuts our property.”

The landlords of one of the rented homes had received alternate demands from a co-captain of that neighborhood watch to “return” the driveway of their rented home to green space and to force their tenant to give construction workers parking in the driveway she leased (“My neighborhood has a problem with bullying,” https://onbeingmobbed.com/2016/01/25/my-neighborhood-has-a-problem-with-bullying/).

Taking a page from the playbook of the Roosevelt Neighbors’ Alliance, the Motzer letter copied Officer Kipp Strong, the Community Policing Team officer assigned to watch over the South Cedar Park neighborhood. I knew who the CPT officer was; I’d tried to get them to intercede in the threatening bullying situation that was evolving in my neighborhood. In the end, I was passed back and forth between patrol officers and the North Precinct Community Policing Team with meaningless assurances about how certain officers were particularly skilled at resolving situations of neighborhood harassment.

On one occasion, I used the form on the City of Seattle website to ask if the 3′ by 8′ billboard that was planted in front of a neighbor watch captain’s parking strip on a daily basis was legal. The sign, which read “STOP VIDEOTAPING US,” addressed me by name and publicly disclosed my street number. The neighborhood watch captain posted the sign in varying places over her parking strip for several weeks, holding street-side court while gossiping and excoriating me to passersby, some of who appeared to be participants in an orchestrated parade past my home. The use of the term “videotaping” was doubtlessly a way to “write around” the fact of the matter—that I had installed legal security cameras after my car was vandalized in broad daylight. As I recall, it was CPT Officer Kipp Strong who responded, telling me only that the City Attorney had said it was legal for the watch captain to publicize not only my name but my street address in large lettering on this sign that attempted to intimidate me, a single woman living alone, into removing the legal security cameras I’d installed to protect myself (“My neighborhood has a problem with bullying,” https://onbeingmobbed.com/2016/01/25/my-neighborhood-has-a-problem-with-bullying/).

No protection was offered to me, a woman living alone in the midst of a potentially dangerous adult bullying situation. That was one of few times I received a response from an officer of Seattle’s Community Policing Team.

The bullying escalated. When it became clear that the police were not my “friends,” and after a dispatcher responded to a legitimate grievance by asking if I took “medication,” I learned that the risk of calling the police when you’re being defamed by a neighborhood watch and its speculator friends is too great. [11/23/20 Note: I received a similar response when I tried to report the same harassment to Seattle Police a few scant months ago. This time the dispatcher asked if I was under the care of a doctor. I suppose that was intended as a “tactful” way to determine mental illness. I filed a complaint about this poor response to the honest report of a crime that could be easily solved with a modicum of interest yet again to SPD’s office of internal affairs (OPA). I have received no response. It is as though the City of Seattle is determined to ignore complaints of cyberstalking against tenants, and perhaps against those single female tenants they are tricked into prosecuting when the women report digital crime.] When no one responded to help me, one woman alone in a real estate-fueled neighborhood bullying situation, and when the neighborhood watch and the single male home owners on either side of me began calling the police and saying that it was I who was harassing them, I stopped asking the police for help, even as I was victimized by more than one crime, and no matter how frightened I was. Like many women in situations of abuse, I had learned that when the police focused attention on me, it would be as the source of the problem.

The tactic of threatening letters that copy members of the Seattle Police Department should be regarded as an attempt to elicit and use police bias against tenants to intimidate and bully landlords into selling properties. Such attempts should be seen as discriminatory. When the police fail to report attempts on the part of neighborhood watch groups and their allies, in development or otherwise, to expel legal tenants from their homes, when police ignore dangerous adult bullying situations whose goal is the constructive eviction of legal residents, the City of Seattle becomes a party to discrimination and should be liable to be sued for the same.

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My writings on real estate mobbing are based on documents published by the United Nations and Amnesty International. In the United Nations Human Rights document, “Forced Eviction” (https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS25.Rev.1.pdf), real estate mobbing is defined as a type of forced eviction that occurs due to “real estate and private business actions” (p. 4). In the United States, we fail to recognize real estate mobbing and to treat it more as isolated instances of harassment, for example, the story about Trump hiring goons to urinate in the hallways of his buildings in an attempt to—to use a word from the email of the northeast Seattle neighborhood watch group—”encourage” tenants to move. In fact, such organized efforts likely constitute attempts at forced eviction, which the United Nations states “are generally discriminatory or lead to discrimination.”

Discrimination is frequently a factor in forced evictions. Discrimination means any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of various grounds which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise of human rights. It is linked to the marginalization of specific population groups and is generally at the root of fundamental structural inequalities in society. Prohibited discrimination can exist in either the public or the private sphere. Rights can be violated through the direct or indirect action or omission by States, including through their institutions or agencies at the national and local level, as well as in their international cooperation and assistance.

(“Forced Eviction,” pp. 7-8) As a class, tenants lack economic clout, they have limited income and less access to resources to combat societal inequities. The renting class may also include high numbers of minorities who are more likely to suffer from economic hardship and societal prejudice. Even before we consider anti-renter bias from neighborhood watch organizations that seek to discourage the rental of single-family homes in “their” neighborhoods, tenants are disempowered as a class.

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The interests of residential real estate investors in a speculative climate are in bringing single-family homes to market, whether through building, remodeling, or “flipping.” Most real estate agents make their livings based on a traditional model of real estate sales in which it takes a sale to net a paycheck. On my street, it’s common to see the same real estate agents selling the same houses again and again and, perhaps based solely on prior sales and existing relationships, following home builders and speculators as they gentrify their way down the street. As a long-term lessee of a single-family home in a gentrifying neighborhood, my landlords and I have been the targets of threats and intimidation not only by the neighborhood watch and at least one allied builder, but by the real estate agents whose livelihood requires the turnover of single-family homes. Instead of nurturing their relationships with renters as future buyers, the real estate agents in my neighborhood are more inclined to disparage renters as public nuisances.

You might have to sell a neighborhood to sell a home, but you don’t have to harass tenants and turn over legally rented homes to do it. To create healthier, more diverse neighborhoods, it may be time for us to embrace new models of home sales that cut out the middleman, or at least minimize his role.

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Bias against tenants is codified in the codes and customs of the City of Seattle. The Just Cause Eviction Ordinance protects Seattle tenants from unfair eviction at the hands of their landlords, but the Seattle CNO makes targets of tenants, opening the door to the attempts of unethical neighborhood watch groups and real estate speculators to sidestep protections and abuse civil and criminal processes to bully tenants out of housing and force property owners to sell. Chronic Nuisance Ordinances are expressly discriminatory in their intent to force only those who rent from their homes. According to the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU, there is evidence that CNOs “can cause real harm to survivors of domestic violence, people with mental disabilities, and people of color” (Chronic Nuisance and Crime-Free Ordinances: Endangering the Right of Domestic Violence Survivors to Seek Police Assistance, https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/nuisance_ordinance_issue_summary_-_final.pdf). No city with a CNO should be regarded as being pro-tenant, or pro-Human Rights. Renters should not have to meet a higher legal standard than home owners do, to keep their homes under the legal agreements that they maintain in good faith. The right to home is a human right. The Seattle Renters’ Commission and the Seattle Tenants Union should call for the revocation of the Seattle CNO.

Letters like those of the northeast neighborhood watch group that sought to “encourage” the tenants of two single-family homes to move, and the sample letters of the Roosevelt Neighbors’ Alliance that openly suggest landlords be demanded to expel their tenants, should not be taken lightly. Letters that target the tenants of single-family homes for expulsion from the neighborhood and are routinely copied to Seattle Police Officers should be considered discriminatory and should be alarming to the City of Seattle. Police officers should be required to report neighborhood watch groups that openly seek the expulsion of legal residents to the City of Seattle for investigation. It hasn’t been that long since some northwest cities refused home ownership to African Americans. Nor has it been long since mortgage companies refused to lend to single women.

Finally, the involvement of Seattle police officers, willing or not, in attempts by organized neighborhood groups to constructively evict tenants or expel anyone, should be reviewed by Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability (OPA). In the case of the neighborhood groups cited in this blog entry, the practice of copying the police appears to be strategic and enlists police in improper conduct of a discriminatory nature.

If  you, too, are troubled by such conduct, you can help me by writing the Seattle Police Department Office of Public Accountability (OPA). Ask the OPA to initiate a meaningful investigation into the role of the police in neighborhood watch harassment of tenants, including me, in Seattle. Go to https://www.seattle.gov/opa.