WA renters say unregulated ‘junk fees’ are being used to retaliate, discriminate

In the midst of a summer heat wave in July 2023, Vancouver resident ShaWayne Hodges walked out to her porch and saw a notice posted on her front door.

A drive-by inspection of her four-bedroom house had found “brown, long and dying grass on the front yards,” the notice said. It meant Hodges wasn’t maintaining the landscaping to the standard set forth by her lease.

She owed $125 to the property management company, Zenith Properties NW, for noncompliance with her lease. She owed another $125 to Zenith for taping the piece of paper on her front door.

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“They gave me a notice for letting my grass die in the middle of summer, and they charged me $250 for it,” said Hodges, 40. A low-income single mother of five, Hodges is one of many Washington renters facing accumulating rental fees, which have taken off as pandemic-era protections for renters ended, according to tenant advocates, attorneys and policymakers around the state.

Hodges is able to afford her rent through a housing choice voucher, a federal program that assists low-income families with rent subsidies, also known as Section 8. The voucher has helped keep her rent relatively low compared to Zenith’s other properties in Clark County, at $1,895 per month, the same rate it’s been since 2020 when she moved in. Zenith, a locally owned company, specializes in managing single-family homes in Clark County and has nearly 30 rentals open for applications on its website.

As her years in the home passed, and as Vancouver’s rent and utilities costs rose nearly 40% by federal estimates since she moved in, Hodges has been hit with escalating fees — for noncompliance, for delivering notices, for appointments with management about maintenance issues, for fixing plumbing and other maintenance problems that she says she didn’t cause.

In a statement to InvestigateWest, Zenith emphasized that its fee structure complies with Washington’s Landlord-Tenant Act and has been “extensively reviewed” by specialized attorneys.

“Our fees are in alignment with our local competitors. By signing the lease, the tenant agrees to all fees as disclosed in the lease,” Zenith’s statement says.

Hodges owes around $3,000 in fees as of early August, according to her tenant ledger provided by Zenith.

“It was almost like they were trying to poke the bear in order for me to move,” she said about Zenith. “I work two jobs as it is right now. I pay everything that goes along with the bills and rent and child care for two kids and gas.”

If she lived just a few miles south in Oregon, a state with strict laws limiting the fees that landlords can charge their tenants, or in Seattle, which banned fees for posting notices last year, many of the charges on her ledger would be illegal. But she lives in Vancouver, a city that doesn’t limit these fees.

While Washington law requires renters to follow all “reasonable” rules set by landlords and restricts certain tenant screening fees, most other fees — like the ones Hodges is facing for noncompliance and notice delivery — are not regulated at all by state law. Advocates and attorneys say that creates an opening for housing providers to use excessive fees to target certain renters like Hodges, pressuring them to pay or move.

The Biden administration announced a national crackdown on rental housing “junk fees” last year, calling on states to take legislative action against fees for applications, online payments, trash collection and other mandatory services. But Washington’s state and local efforts to cap fees have faced strong opposition from landlord and rental associations that argue regulations will increase costs for housing providers, pushing landlords out of the market and ultimately driving down an already insufficient housing supply.

Notice delivery fees, for example, started cropping up after Washington passed legislation in 2021 regulating how notices must be served to tenants, said Sean Flynn, executive director and board president of the Rental Housing Association of Washington, which serves independent rental property owners and managers.

“Not that long ago, there weren’t that many notices. Why? Because we changed the law that says, ‘Now you have to give these complicated notices to tenants,’” Flynn said. “At the end of the day, no one’s going to prep the notice and go out there and serve it and do the legal paperwork and fill out the affidavit for free.”

But fees aren’t only about affordability. They’re also about power, tenant advocates and attorneys say. Using fees to discriminate and retaliate against tenants is illegal under state law, but it’s difficult for tenants to prove in court, especially when the fees are included in a signed lease.

“We don’t regulate fees, so the landlord could say, ‘Oh no, I wasn’t retaliating. I had to post a notice on that tenant’s door 10 times last month,’” said Michele Thomas, director of policy and advocacy for the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for statewide renter protections. “They’re just sending a message to a tenant through the tenant’s pocketbook.”

‘Bully Tactics’

As of 2019, renters can’t be evicted for failing to pay fees under Washington state law.

But debt from unpaid fees remains a large and lasting consequence for renters, according to attorneys representing low-income tenants. It can damage their credit scores and lead to poor landlord references, which makes it harder to find future places to rent.

In March, a third party conducted an annual inspection of Hodges’ house. They snapped several photos inside her home — bowls on the floor filled with dog food; a bed that looked like it had been slept on; a stroller, planks of wood and other bulk items in front of her garage.

Zenith charged her $500 for an unauthorized pet, $180 for a retroactive pet fee, $125 for having evidence of an unauthorized occupant and trash in her yard, and $125 for delivering the notice. A total of $930.

Hodges disputes that she breached the lease in several of these instances. The “unauthorized occupant” was her son, who’s on the lease, she said. She’d put pet food out for her mom’s dog when her mom came to visit, and she hadn’t gotten around to cleaning it up.

“I have to pay $680 in pets that I don’t even have,” Hodges said.

The notice said if she didn’t comply within 10 days, Zenith would conduct a follow-up inspection for $95 plus taxes. And if the company couldn’t access the property for the follow-up, she’d be charged a $50 rescheduling fee. Hodges cleared her work schedule for the inspection, but when the day arrived, no one showed up to ensure she was in compliance, she said.

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“They strike me as just blatant bully tactics,” said Carl Snodgrass, Hodges’ attorney with the Northwest Justice Project, a nonprofit law firm that provides free legal services to low-income people. “It’s a really simple way to avoid having to give someone’s security deposit back. You just claim over and over again that any little thing is a breach of the lease.”

Zenith wrote in a statement to InvestigateWest that its team is extensively trained on all state and federal fair housing laws. “If there is photographic evidence that proves a violation of the lease terms, fees will be charged as per the terms of the lease,” Zenith wrote.

Ryan Makinster, director of government affairs for the Washington Multi-Family Housing Association, which represents property management companies and advocates against policies that limit rental fees, acknowledges that a $125 fee for delivering a notice seems “egregious.”

“But an anecdote of a property management company — or two or three, even, as an example — I would say does not constitute the actions of the whole market,” Makinster continued. “It has to be widespread. We don’t write laws for outliers. It’s not good policy. It’s not good practice.”

Tenant advocates, however, say situations like Hodges’ are not uncommon across the state.

“It happens all the time,” said Thomas, with the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance. “Tenants who stand up for their rights are often targets for retaliation.”

Retaliation against a tenant is prohibited under state law. But the law is difficult to enforce, Thomas added.

Edmund Witter, managing attorney at the King County Bar Association’s Housing Justice Project, which serves low-income renters at risk of eviction, said he’s never seen Washington’s retaliation protections used successfully in his career.

The law defines retaliation as actions like increasing rent and evicting a tenant, Witter noted. “But the problem is, on a policy level, what does that mean? Is the landlord prohibited from ever raising your rent? Is your landlord ever prohibited from evicting you? What kinds of protections are you actually given?”

To effectively protect renters from retaliation and discrimination, Thomas argues that more state regulations are needed.

“Until fees are regulated, landlords will continue to be able to use fees to intimidate, retaliate, discriminate and harass tenants,” she said.

‘Pushing on a Balloon’

Washington lawmakers introduced a bill in January that would have capped some rental fees. The bill — like others introduced in 2022 and 2023 that proposed to regulate late fees — died after facing pushback from associations for housing providers, who caution the regulations could backfire in the long run.

Flynn with the Rental Housing Association of Washington argues that capping fees will just divert costs to other areas, like rent.

“It’s like pushing on a balloon,” Flynn said. “The balloon just bulges someplace else.”

Washington has seen that analogy bear out in recent years. In 2021, the Legislature passed a “just cause eviction” law requiring landlords to give 60 days’ notice and a legitimate business reason, like nonpayment of rent, before ending a month-to-month lease. The goal was to reduce landlords’ ability to discriminate against tenants by evicting them without citing a reason, according to Rep. Nicole Macri, D-Seattle, the bill’s lead sponsor.

But after it passed, some Washington landlords found a loophole, according to a recent case study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable housing policies. Landlords began charging “exorbitant” fees for month-to-month leases in order to push tenants into fixed-term leases, which can be ended without cause, the study says.

In January 2022, Zenith attempted to raise Hodges’ month-to-month rent by $950, Hodges’ records show. But because she uses a housing voucher, her rent must be approved by a public housing agency as “rent reasonable” under federal regulations. The Vancouver Housing Authority denied Zenith’s offer as not reasonable. Her rent remained at $1,895.

In the months following the lease renewal offer, Zenith began charging her noncompliance and notice delivery fees, her ledger shows.

“I think probably the underlying real motivation is getting her out so that they can charge more rent,” said Snodgrass, Hodges’ attorney. “It would be illegal for them to say that, but it seems pretty implicit.”

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For Macri, Washington’s just cause law illustrates that in order to effectively protect the state’s renters, rent and fees need to be addressed together.

“We need to bring (fees) into control,” Macri said. “But if you do it without also regulating rent, then there’s really going to be no net benefit for renters.”

As state legislation stalls, some cities in western Washington are taking matters into their own hands. At least 10 cities, from Seattle to Tacoma to Shoreline, have passed ordinances limiting late fees, move-in fees and even notice delivery fees like the ones Hodges has been charged.

Witter, the attorney with King County’s Housing Justice Project, said fewer clients in Seattle have come to him with fee issues in recent years.

“It definitely made a difference,” Witter said. “The ledgers we see for our clients are just simpler. It’s just, like, the rent and what’s been paid. Whereas before, you would see potentially a dozen different charges per month for God knows what.”

Olympia took a different approach, enacting an ordinance in May that lists specific fees that landlords can charge and gives renters the right to opt out of all others. Christa Lenssen, the city’s housing program specialist, said Olympia’s approach was influenced by Oregon law, which similarly defines which fees are allowed rather than which aren’t.

Yet even as some cities take action, tenant advocates argue that statewide legislation is still needed.

“It’s really too bad that it has to go down to the local municipalities, because a lot of people don’t have a lot of real choice in where they live,” said Faith Foote, an attorney with Sound Legal Aid, a nonprofit that provides free legal services for low-income residents in the South Puget Sound area. “I guess you’re lucky if you have been in Olympia and you can stay in Olympia, but those outside are probably not going to be moving in, because they can’t afford it.”

Vancouver, where Hodges lives, doesn’t currently have plans to cap rental fees, although addressing the fees was discussed in a recent City Council workshop, according to Vancouver’s strategic communications manager, Tim Becker.

Now, the entrance of Hodges’ house is crowded with cardboard moving boxes. In July, she notified Zenith that she’s leaving, and before the summer ends, she’ll be heading with her kids to Georgia, where her father lives and where living costs are more affordable.

Zenith has listed her house on Zillow for $2,495 per month — $600 more than Hodges’ rate. Still, she doesn’t feel like she’s lost the battle, she said. She plans to keep pushing back against the fees with her attorney.

“Here, me being a single mom, it’s just, it’s not — I can’t do it anymore,” she said. “I’m done treading water. I need to thrive.”

InvestigateWest (invw.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Reporter Kelsey Turner can be reached at kelsey@invw.org.