Every four months, Philippe Knab, the reentry and eviction defense program director for Washington’s Office of Civil Legal Aid, compiles a report on eviction trends across the state. Since 2021, each review has painted a worse picture than before — especially the most recent one.
“The number of people being displaced right now is at a historic high in Washington state,” said Knab. “January 2025 was the single highest month we’ve ever seen seasonally. February and March were just a hair under that.”
In King County alone, eviction filings in January 2025 were 66% higher than pre-pandemic levels.
“It’s pretty mind-boggling,” he said.
Evictions in Washington have been steadily increasing over the last few years, with no signs of slowing. The spike stems from rising rents coupled with stagnant wages, lack of affordable housing and the expiration of pandemic-era eviction protections such as increased rental assistance. Filings statewide reached an all-time high in 2024, having increased by 53% since 2019. And fiscal year 2025 is on pace to surpass those numbers.
The increase in evictions is stretching Washington’s Right to Counsel program thin. The statewide program began in 2021 as the first of its kind in the nation, and it’s meant to ensure that low-income tenants have access to legal representation while navigating the eviction process, which greatly increases a person’s likelihood of winning their case and accessing housing resources.
“Until about six months ago, I used to start every presentation on this topic by saying, ‘We’ve represented every single low-income tenant who’s eligible since 2021,’” said Knab, who oversees the state’s Right to Counsel program. “We can’t say that anymore, because we finally got to a point in King County where we couldn’t keep up.”
The uptick in evictions is happening amid a record-setting homelessness crisis, with proposed cuts on the horizon to federally funded safety net programs that help low-income households stay afloat. As of late May, the Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rent assistance program for low-income households by around 40%. And a proposal moving through Congress seeks to cut roughly $700 billion from Medicaid, which provides free or reduced health care to those with limited incomes. The cut would impact more than 600,000 Washington residents throughout the state.
“People can’t afford the rent, and it’s gonna[sic] get worse as the federal government cuts Medicaid and other critical safety net services,” said Michele Thomas, the director of policy and advocacy with the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance.
Housing advocates in Washington hope a newly signed law limiting how much a landlord can increase rent each year will help prevent evictions by ensuring renters aren’t priced out of their units. Washington is the third state to implement rent stabilization statewide, following Oregon and California.
The bill, signed into law by Gov. Bob Ferguson in May, caps yearly rent increases to 7% plus inflation, or 10% — whichever is lower. For mobile home park residents, rent is not allowed to increase more than 5% in a year. Under the new law, which went into effect immediately, landlords are required to provide tenants with 90 days’ notice before raising rent.
While housing advocates are celebrating the win, Thomas stressed there’s still a long way to go to address the state’s housing affordability crisis.
“It’s not going to keep rents affordable, it’s just going to keep tenants from being (price) gouged,” she said. “There will be tenants who will get rent increases that they can’t afford, and that sets them up for eviction because there’s no place else affordable to move.”
High evictions strain the state’s Right to Counsel program
The state saw a lull in eviction filings during the height of the pandemic due to local and federal eviction moratoriums and an increase in the availability of rental assistance, according to state data. But as those protections have wound down, evictions have skyrocketed.
State data shows that eviction filings in 2024 were the highest on record, increasing by nearly 41% from 2023. Eviction filings so far this fiscal year are on pace to once again break that record.
In places like Clark County, which has the highest eviction rate per capita in the state, nearly 1 in every 300 residents has gone through an eviction proceeding.
“I think people are unfortunately feeling pretty comfortable with it, and what that means is that the numbers are continuing to go up,” Knab said.
“Over 30% of the folks that come through eviction court identify as having a disability,” he added. “Over 40% are people of color.”
Some counties, such as King and Kitsap, saw the number of evictions filed more than double from fiscal year 2023 to 2024. Other counties that have seen large percent increases year over year include Douglas, Whatcom, Skagit and Snohomish, according to data from the Office of Civil Legal Aid.Knab said before the Right to Counsel law was passed in 2021, less than 10% of tenants were represented by a lawyer during an eviction proceeding. Up until recently, they were able to represent nearly all of those eligible.
While eviction filings continue to increase, outcomes for renters have improved in part due to the program, according to Knab. Since the program began in 2021, 56% of people facing an eviction were allowed to remain in their housing, with the case either being dismissed or resolved through an agreement between the tenant and landlord. His office doesn’t have access to reliable data from before the program was implemented, but he said he’s seen how the program has fundamentally changed the dynamics unfolding in courtrooms across the state.
“The idea of this program, and what it’s been able to do in five years, I think is pretty astounding,” he said.
Sean Flynn, the president and executive director of the Rental Housing Association of Washington, said the Right to Counsel law has extended the time it takes to conduct an eviction, costing property owners more money because of increased legal fees and missed rent payments. The influential advocacy organization lobbies on a local and state level on behalf of property owners, managers and investors.
Before the Right to Counsel program was implemented, evictions were more of a “business transaction” that moved quickly, he said, because many of the cases ended in a default ruling on behalf of the property owner if a person missed their court date. Now, each case is getting “dragged through the courts.”
“Why would you want to keep a tenant in a unit that they can’t afford to pay the rent?” he said. “Nine times out of ten, they don’t have the money, and it’s due to lack of resources. We need better subsidies for the tenants. Keeping someone housed who can’t afford it doesn’t solve the underlying problem.”
Knab pushes back against the narrative he often hears from landlords and lawyers who represent them that the eviction process is too slow and that the Right to Counsel program is to blame. “They will say, ‘You used to be able to give a five-minute pitch and get your writ,’” he said, referring to the formal name of an eviction notice. “And it’s like, well, that’s not how courts are supposed to work.
“If you look at consumer credit or foreclosures, you’re talking years here,” said Knab, who previously worked as a public defender and spent nearly a decade representing low-income tenants in New York City before moving to the Pacific Northwest. “We’re talking not even months, we’re talking weeks (for evictions).”
Early in 2025, Knab’s office started having to triage cases in King County because his office couldn’t keep up with the flood of evictions being filed by landlords. Each eviction filing represents a household, so it can include multiple people.
Priority was given to cases involving disabled tenants, those with language access issues or households with children. “Everyone still got to talk to a lawyer, but the numbers just got too high,” Knab said. “We’re hoping to get back to a place where we can represent everyone.”
He said the long eviction timelines in King County, which at times were as long as 40 weeks, were unacceptable, but he said the flood of eviction filings was to blame, not the Right to Counsel program.
To try to address landlords’ concerns, Knab’s office worked with King County to create an expedited docket for cases where landlords believe tenants pose a health and safety concern. But the “flood of cases” that was alluded to never materialized. Fewer than 10 cases have been expedited under those conditions, he added.
Flynn said the small number of health and safety cases is not because they don’t exist, but because the definition for those cases is too narrow. “We’d like to see that expanded,” he said.
Eviction crisis felt around the state
Hannah Swensen, the managing attorney for the Spokane Housing Justice Project, said the two small firms that represent tenants who qualify for the Right to Counsel program have been able to serve everyone there who’s eligible so far. But it’s become more challenging.
Spokane County saw a 30% increase in eviction filings from fiscal 2023 to 2024, with 1,544 evictions being filed in the first nine months of this fiscal year. The county has the fourth-highest number of eviction filings in the state, behind King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.
Last year, Swensen’s team of four full-time lawyers represented 590 eviction-related cases, often hearing between 12-30 cases a day, four days a week.
To resolve more issues before they land in the courts, they opened an eviction prevention clinic out of the downtown Spokane library.
Twice a month, a tenant can come and get legal advice regarding their housing and learn about the resources that could help stave off an eviction notice, such as disability support or rental assistance.
An eviction filing, even if a person wins their case, still shows up on a person’s rental history and makes it harder to find housing in the future. The experience can be life-altering, especially for low-income households that receive support from the federal Housing Choice Voucher Program, formerly known as Section 8, Swensen said. Getting an eviction boots them from the program and can make them ineligible for the benefits in the future.
In Washington, 21% of renters are considered extremely low income, with the number of available rental units for this income bracket falling short by 166,912 homes, according to data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Renée Rooker, the executive director of the Walla Walla Housing Authority for 33 years, said evictions increased after pandemic-era eviction protections expired and property managers were able to “get rid of the bad actors who just wouldn’t behave and wouldn’t go to the resources in the community that could help them with the rent,” Rooker said.
The Walla Walla Housing Authority recently stopped taking applications for its Housing Choice Voucher Program for low-income renters because the waitlist was too long. In 2024, only a “handful” of families were pulled off the waitlist, according to Rooker. “We already have a waitlist of 1,200, and when we can’t get to you for three, four or five years, to me, that’s unfair,” she said.
Rooker, whose organization provides housing to around 2,000 households through various subsidized housing programs, said that since the onset of the pandemic, tenants have continued to struggle paying their rent.
“I don’t know if it’s a mentality of ‘We don’t have to pay the rent or someone will bail us out, or we can live here long enough and we get to live rent free,’” said Rooker, noting that a few local nonprofits offer rental assistance, but there isn’t enough to meet the need. “I don’t know the rationale, but it’s not that they don’t have the income or we wouldn’t have housed them.”
Swensen said she’s never come across a case where a tenant simply didn’t want to pay the rent. It’s one of the many misconceptions she often hears that is far from her typical client.
“It’s vets with disabilities who struggle to get in touch with the resources they need. It’s single moms with kids who have missed only one or two months of rent cause they didn’t get their child support or because of an injury,” Swensen said. “It’s elderly residents who can’t keep up with rent increases because it’s more than their social security can handle.”
“These are the faces of eviction,” she said.
New rent stabilization law
Deb Wilson, the president of the Leisure Manor Tenants Association, was part of a group of mobile home residents that helped push for passage of the rent stabilization bill.
For years, the owner of the mobile home park in Aberdeen had been increasing the rent and pricing residents out, often referred to as an “economic eviction.” At one point, residents at the mobile home park were faced with a 55% rent increase.
“We had several people, probably six or seven, that left within a few months of getting that first rent increase,” recalled Wilson, who has lived in the park since 2015. “They just couldn’t afford it.”
Wilson and her neighbors started meeting regularly in February 2022 to push back against their landlord, ultimately filing hundreds of complaints with the state Attorney General’s Office. Their efforts led to the Attorney General’s Office requiring the owner of the park, Hurst & Son, to reimburse tenants $5.5 million, following a yearslong investigation from Cascade PBS. The results helped inform the rent stabilization bill that lawmakers passed this year, which was hotly debated and ultimately whittled down.
The law includes a handful of situations where a landlord is exempt, including in owner-occupied housing situations, where the owner lives on-site; if the unit is already subsidized as affordable housing through a state or federal program; or if the apartment was recently built. (The unit remains exempt for 12 years.)
“We needed stability, because older folks, especially on fixed income, or young families on fixed incomes, you can’t live day by day, going, ‘Oh my gosh, what is the next rent increase going to be?’” Wilson said.
Since the bill passed, Wilson and her husband have decided to get a dog. They lost theirs in 2016. “Now we know how much the rent might increase every year, we think we can make it work,” she said.
She said it seems like a small thing, but those things add up.
“It’s the difference between being able to buy one more medication that you were supposed to be taking, but you couldn’t because you couldn’t afford it,” she said. “It’s going to make a huge difference.”
Flynn, who lobbied against the rent stabilization bill, fears the new law will have unintended consequences for property owners and the overall housing market, leading to a “slow bleed” of small to medium-sized landlords getting out of the rental business because it’s no longer as profitable.
He also believes the new law will drive down housing quality because landlords will be less able to keep up with maintenance costs if they aren’t able to increase rents by more than 10% each year. The law might also disincentivize developers from building if the profit margins are decreased too low while expenses, including insurance and construction costs, continue to increase.
Jeffrey Gustaveson, a staff member with the Aberdeen-based nonprofit Firelands Workers United, is grateful the rent stabilization bill passed, but he says even the 7% rent increase plus inflation allowed under the cap would be crippling for a family living paycheck to paycheck.
“That can be a couple thousand dollars a year for a family living on the edge,” Gustaveson said, whose organization focuses on improving access to health care, affordable housing, child care and good-paying jobs in Grays Harbor and Pacific counties.
“The drum I’m beating right now is that these rent caps are a serious win and will actually prevent eviction, which was the whole point of the policy,” he said. “It’s not a perfect policy, and no one at any point said that it was going to be the solution to the housing crisis.”
This story has been updated to correct the location of the Leisure Manor mobile home park.
Moe K. Clark is a collaborative investigative reporter at InvestigateWest, covering Washington’s criminal justice system and other topics.
This story was originally published by InvestigateWest, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to change-making investigative journalism. Sign up for their Watchdog Weekly newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
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