By Rev. Charles Reginald Johnson
Washington’s housing affordability crisis is real, and Black families are among those paying the highest price.
Across our state, rising rents have made it harder for working families to save for a home, build wealth, and remain in the communities they’ve called home for generations. When policymakers look for ways to address those challenges, they deserve commendation.
Only about 36% of Black families own homes in Washington, compared to 67% of White families. Black renters spend more of their income on housing. than White renters do Every year that new homes are not built is another year that these families fall further behind building wealth and security for their children.
As cities like Bellingham, as well as lawmakers around the state, consider restrictions on algorithmic rent-pricing software, they should resist the temptation to ban every use of housing data. Instead, they should follow the lead of jurisdictions like Rockville, Maryland, and Berkeley, California, which have drawn an important distinction between public information and nonpublic competitor data. For protecting affordable housing across our state, that difference means a lot.
Some competing landlords are sharing confidential information that isn’t available to the public. Governments have every reason to scrutinize that practice. Consumers deserve competitive markets. Private information-sharing, which leads to collusion and higher prices, is anything but competitive. But lawmakers should make sure their ban doesn’t extend to publicly available information, as some measures, like Bellingham Initiative 26-01, would do if not modified soon.
Apartment listings, advertised rents, neighborhood vacancy rates, census data, construction trends, and local market conditions are available to everyone. They are used not only by landlords, but also by developers deciding whether to build new housing, lenders evaluating projects, affordable housing organizations, researchers, and local governments themselves. As such, banning the use of this data could end up hurting the very people it’s intended to help.
Treating public information as though it were part of an anticompetitive conspiracy doesn’t solve the housing shortage. If anything, it risks making it worse. This is because, if affordable housing developers have less data, they have less confidence that now is the right time to build. This leads to fewer units constructed. Fewer units mean higher prices for the ones that are currently standing (because prospective residents begin to bid each other up).
At the same time, corporate landlords that are secretly sharing private competitor information that no one else should see must be stopped — and soon. This inexcusable collusion is doing serious damage to the cause of affordable housing, and it’s encouraging to see our elected officials taking action against it.
But while this is a step in the right direction, the truth is that Washington doesn’t have a rent algorithm problem nearly as much as it has a housing supply problem. For years, our state has failed to build enough homes to keep pace with demand. The result has been higher rents, fewer vacancies, and fewer opportunities for first-time homebuyers to enter the market. Those pressures fall especially hard on Black communities.
Fortunately, our political leaders understand this and are making significant progress in getting more affordable units online. As former Washington State Senator Kevin Van De Wege recently put it, “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 four-plexes 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.”
This progress matters because every year that housing remains scarce is another year that many families are forced to delay building equity and passing wealth on to the next generation.
The families struggling most with housing costs need more homes, more choices, and more opportunities to build wealth. Let’s protect competition and renters. But let’s also protect the public market information that helps make new housing possible. Washington can do both at the same time.
Rev. Charles Reginald Johnson is Senior Pastor, Mt. Zion Baptist Church
Seattle, Washington. The church was established in 1890, shortly after Washington became a state, reflecting the growing African American community in Seattle. He is also a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Urban League.
