How King County plans to speed up some evictions (2024)

Certain eviction cases will soon move more quickly through King County Superior Court as the court strains under a monthslong backlog of cases.

The court adopted an emergency rule last week allowing landlords to seek a trial more quickly when they can show evidence that a tenant’s behavior is “substantially” affecting other tenants’ health and safety or increasing fire or accident hazards. Landlords welcomed the change, but tenant advocates warned the move could hurt vulnerable renters.

The new rule, which takes effect immediately, comes on the heels of a surge in eviction filings that has nearly pushed the court to a breaking point.

A confluence of factors is contributing to the backlog: State and local governments have lifted pandemic-era eviction limits and spent down much of their funding for rent assistance, landlords have filed more cases, housing costs remain high and the court has a limited number of commissioners who can hear eviction cases. Some cases can also take longer now that low-income tenants have the right to an attorney to help them navigate the eviction process.

The backlog is significant: More than 2,100 cases were in the queue at the end of March, five times as many as at the end of 2019, according to data from the court.

That has created a straightforward resources problem for King County.

“We fundamentally believe in the rule of law and allowing people who have disputes to come to our court. The problem is we don’t have enough bodies,” said Presiding Judge Ketu Shah.

Long waits frustrate market-rate and nonprofit landlords who say they’re struggling to operate apartment buildings when resolving eviction cases for unpaid rent or behavioral issues can take months. Some have called for local and state governments to roll back renter protections.

Tenant advocates counter that renters who face the loss of their homes in King County’s brutally expensive housing market are most often financially struggling and need legal protections to avoid becoming homeless.

Known as unlawful detainer cases, evictions today go through the Superior Court’s Ex Parte and Probate Department, where cases are heard by commissioners — attorneys who work under the direction of a judge to hear certain types of cases. Some cases are resolved before a commissioner and others eventually end up before a judge. The state constitution limits counties to just three commissioners who can handle constitutional issues, including evictions.

The court’s new rule would allow eviction cases with health and safety risks to go before one of the court’s dozens of judges, bypassing the commissioners’ clogged calendar and resolving those cases more quickly.

Landlords welcomed the news. “If you’ve got an issue with a tenant that’s creating a hazard or a danger to other tenants, you want that resolved as soon as possible for the safety of your tenants,” said Sean Flynn, executive director of the Rental Housing Association of Washington.

But Edmund Witter, whose organization provides legal help for tenants, believes the change could be confusing for tenants and could push eviction cases before judges who are unfamiliar with complex landlord-tenant law.

“These safety cases often involve a behavioral health care issue or a mental health issue, and we’re just shifting the burden to the most vulnerable [tenants], as far as I’m concerned,” said Witter, senior managing attorney at the Housing Justice Project.

The court’s decision is “actually overcorrecting the other way,” Witter said, calling the rule a “dangerous gamble” that could benefit landlords at the expense of tenants.

While some cases may reach a faster resolution, the change may have only a minor effect on King County’s total eviction backlog because the majority of eviction cases deal with unpaid rent rather than dangerous behavior. More than 60% of King County eviction cases last year cited unpaid rent while 3% cited waste, nuisance, health or safety issues, according to state data from cases in which tenants had an appointed attorney.

Given the share of cases that will remain in the existing system, improvements from the new rule are likely to be “very marginal,” Witter said.

Even so, landlords welcome“anything that can be changed to move the process along more quickly,” Flynn said. “The commissioners are clearly overwhelmed by the workload at this point.”

To try to address the backlog, King County Superior Court has increased the number of days commissioners hear eviction cases and moved some other work away from commissioners, hoping to free up more of their time. But cases can still take as long as eight months to reach a hearing, Shah said.

The new process will be “substantially faster” for cases that qualify, he said.

More efforts could be coming. Shah said the court is meeting with landlord and tenant groups about further changes, though he declined to share details. The court backed an unsuccessful proposal in the state Legislature this year to increase the number of commissioners who can hear eviction cases, and plans to try again next year.

“We have been trying all different kinds of ways to triage these cases…,” Shah said. “It’s just the numbers are so high and so daunting.”