Renters across Washington are getting squeezed, and they deserve leaders who take that seriously.
Ed.: The essays, analyses and opinions presented as Community Voices express the perspectives of their authors on topics of interest and importance to the community and are not intended to reflect perspectives on behalf of Salish Current.
As Bellingham considers a ballot measure to ban algorithmic rent software, well-meaning city officials risk making the problem worse.
Bellingham’s Initiative 26-01, which would bar landlords from using algorithmic rent software, has now qualified for the ballot. Community First Whatcom, the group behind the measure, turned in roughly 5,700 signatures and the Whatcom County Auditor’s Office certified the count on July 2. That puts the decision in the city council’s hands: by July 27, members can adopt the initiative outright, send it to voters this November or reject it and propose their own alternative measure. If the council doesn’t act by that deadline, the initiative goes on the ballot automatically.
It’s fair to worry about corporate landlords having too much power over renters. That’s a real concern, and it deserves real scrutiny. But banning software that tells them what the rental market is currently bearing doesn’t address that concern. It just takes away one tool while leaving landlords, motivated the same way they’ve always been, to set prices on their own.
Bellingham’s proposal won’t build a single new apartment or lower a single rent check. It will just swap software for a leasing agent’s gut, guessing at the same numbers with less data and less accountability.
What this software actually does is fairly ordinary: it looks at vacancies, seasonal trends and local demand and adjusts rent recommendations accordingly. One widely cited study found that landlords who adopted this kind of pricing software during the 2009–2010 recession actually lowered rents and filled more units than comparable landlords who didn’t.
None of this means Washington’s affordability crisis isn’t real — it is. Rents here run well above the national average, and the legislature itself has said the state needs more than a million new homes by 2044 just to keep up with demand. That crisis deserves real solutions, not a symbolic ban on a piece of software that has nothing to do with why homes are scarce in the first place.
Washington lawmakers have actually been leading on this. Last year, the legislature passed HB 1217, capping annual rent increases statewide and giving tenants new protections against junk fees and short notice. In 2023, it passed HB 1110, legalizing duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes in neighborhoods that used to allow only single-family homes — a real, supply-side answer to a supply-side crisis. Both were the right calls, and both deserve to be built on, not overshadowed.
Banning rent-pricing software doesn’t fit that pattern. It doesn’t add a single home to the market, and it doesn’t lower a single family’s rent bill. If anything, it risks letting officials claim they’ve “done something” about affordability when the real work — permitting reform, zoning, construction costs, and continued enforcement against illegal price-fixing — still lies ahead.
Whatever the Bellingham City Council decides, renters deserve honesty. And the truth is that this vote won’t lower anyone’s rent. Building more homes, and enforcing the laws already on the books, will.
—By Kevin Van De Wege
Kevin Van De Wege served in the Washington State Legislature for 18 years, in the Senate from 2017 to 2024 and in the House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017.