RHAWA Regent Steve Corker: Spokane Cooling Ordinance Could Displace Affordable Housing Op-Ed

For decades I have rented homes in Spokane to people most of the market has given up on. Familie1s on housing vouchers. Refugees resettling through World Relief. Tenants coming out of crisis through the Spokane Housing Authority and rapid rehousing programs. I keep my rents below market on purpose because housing is not only a business. It is a place where someone who has fallen through the cracks gets a chance to stand back up. It does not always work. But that is the choice I have made, and I am still making it at 84.

So, when I read about the proposed Renters’ Right to Cooling Ordinance, I did not read it as an opponent of tenant safety. I read it as someone who has spent his life housing the people this ordinance names. And I am worried it will hurt them.

Let me say clearly what I think too much of this debate has obscured. No one is arguing against tenants being safe, or against tenants having access to cooling. The 2021 heat dome was a tragedy, and the instinct to act is a good one. When I served on the Spokane City Council, and in every housing conversation since, I started from the same place the council is starting from: We all want to keep people housed and safe. The disagreement is not about the goal. It is about whether this ordinance reaches it.

The state has already answered the core question. This spring the governor signed a statewide right to be cooling, effective in June, which guarantees every tenant in Washington the right to install and use a portable cooling device of their choosing. It is flexible. It costs the tenant a modest amount, it requires no permission, and it works in an old building and a new one alike. The state chose a path that protects renters without putting the housing itself at risk. The responsible move now is to let that law take effect before layering a stricter local mandate on top of it.

Because the local mandate, as written, asks something Spokane’s housing cannot deliver. It would require every bedroom of every rental to hold 80 degrees by 2031. The median Spokane home was built in 1961. More than 60% of our rentals predate 1980, with electrical panels never sized for that kind of cooling load. Bringing one of those buildings into compliance can cost $9,000 to $15,000 a unit, sometimes more, sometimes more than the work can even achieve. This in a city that averages 21 days a year above 90 degrees. The ordinance would set a standard stricter than Phoenix, stricter than Tucson, stricter than Dallas, cities where extreme heat is an unpleasant fact for half the year.

Here is the part that keeps me up. If I must put thousands of dollars into each of my older units, I have two choices. Raise rents on the very tenants I have kept below market for years or stop. And I am one of the steady hands. What happens across the city to the larger affordable buildings running on margins thinner than mine? When those operators cannot pay, the tenants are the ones who lose their homes. Where do they go? This housing stock is not incidental to Spokane’s safety net. It is the safety net. An ordinance that shrinks housing availability does not protect vulnerable residents – it displaces them.

Even the research the ordinance cites concedes this. Its own supporting fact sheet warns that cooling mandates “can contribute to increased energy burdens,” and that the burden falls hardest on low-income and affordable units. The ordinance would also brand a home that cannot hold 80 degrees as “imminently hazardous to life,” the same legal category as a gas leak or a collapsing structure. Homes that were not dangerous yesterday would be dangerous on paper tomorrow. And it would repeal the portable cooling ordinance this council passed unanimously just two years ago.

I have spent my life finding common ground with people I disagree with, because the work demands humility and humanity. So, I will end where I began: Keep tenants safe. Let the state’s new law do its job. Help the families who need cooling through rebates and weatherization. But do not pass a mandate that prices the most vulnerable renters out of the homes that are keeping them housed.

This is the city where my children and grandchildren will live. I am not walking away from that. I am asking the council not to either.

Steve Corker is a former Spokane City Council member, a longtime Spokane rental housing provider, and a Rental Housing Association of Washington regent.