With a tenant strike on 15th Ave, Seattle Ban RUBS campaign leads push for fairer utility billing for renters

(Image: @seattlebanrubs)

By Brenna Gauchat

On January 1, more than half of the tenants living in 15th Ave’s Qualman Apartments refused to pay their utility bills. As February begins, they plan to continue withholding these payments.

The New Year’s strike comes nearly a year after Cornell & Associates —  the property management company that oversees more than 200 apartment buildings in Seattle — sent a notice that Qualman renters would no longer be paying a flat rate utility fee, but a fluctuating bill calculated monthly using the ratio utility billing system, RUBS.

“At the time, we didn’t really know what that meant, but we learned pretty quickly that that was going to mean a dramatic increase in our utility costs,” Rosie Cullen, a decade-long Qualman resident and co-lead of the Seattle Ban RUBS campaign, told CHS.

A flat rate utility bill charges a fixed fee for services regardless of the renter’s usage. But RUBS allows landlords — or a third party billing company in Qualman’s case — to split the entire building’s master utility bill among tenants.

Allocation is based on factors like the number of tenants in a unit or its square footage, but there is no cap on how much one unit may be charged or a way for renters to predict what their bill may look like at the end of the month. In addition to the system’s inherent unpredictability, many buildings, including those managed by Cornell & Associates, refuse to disclose a specific breakdown of these calculations.

When reached earlier this week, a Cornell & Associates representative declined to provide a comment on the issue and the campaign’s efforts.

The debate is happening anyway. Last week, CHS reported as Mayor Katie Wilson launched her Mayoral Renter’s Survey along with a vow to dig in on “rising rents, messed up utility billing systems, and junk fees.”

“I know landlords are an important part of the conversation, too, and I am sure I will be hearing from them. But to win a city that truly works for renters, we need to hear more from you,” Wilson said in the announcement.

Seattle is a tenant-majority city with an estimated 56% of housing in the city renter-occupied.

Lexy Salas of the “Seattle Ban RUBS” campaign moved into her unit at Qualman in 2023.

She said living in this apartment has been the longest she’s rented in a single building, but the switch to RUBS last spring pushed her to join her neighbors in talking about how this change had been affecting them.

“We compared our bills to each other. We compared the information we had received. And once we did that, we saw that the formulas that the landlord gave us were not matching what we were all paying,” Salas said. “We saw that people who were living in the same occupancy level were paying different amounts. So that was a red flag to us.”

“I used to pay a $50 flat rate fee, my first bill [after the switch] was over $400,” Cullen said about how the residents’ bills not only differed from each other, but wildly from month to month. “They’re kind of all over the place. My bills now are in the $200 plus range every month.”

These bills only get higher when the building has maintenance issues – including those outside of an individual tenant’s control or occur in common use spaces – and when a building has vacancies requiring the master bill to be split among fewer residents.

“For us [at Qualman], we have no control over the heat usage. We have an old boiler and radiator system and during the winter time, our units overheat,” Salas said. “We’re just always told to keep the window open, which is a complete waste that we now have to pay for.”

As newer apartment buildings are regularly implementing submetering measures, giving landlords a gauge of a single unit’s service usage, the switch to RUBS has primarily affected residents of older buildings, originally built to rely on a single meter for the entire building and tend to have more frequent maintenance issues.

The Seattle Ban RUBS campaign has attracted residents at more Cornell & Associates properties and across the Capitol Hill area.

A resident at Sovereign Apartments, an 101-year-old building between First and Capitol Hill and home to many long-term residents, said their neighborly summer potlucks were essential in building camaraderie when the building switched to RUBS early last year as well.

The Sovereign resident said this switch was covered in their new lease and a “flyer by the mailboxes”, but the information provided by management was vague and did not accurately  cover how it would affect current residents. Like the renters at Qualman, it took organizing and educating themselves for Sovereign Apartments’s residents to understand why and how the switch to RUBS was increasing their monthly bills.

At Qualman, both Cullen and Salas have seen neighbors pushed out of their apartments due to both rent increases and the new billing system.

“Affordability is not just the price, but it’s also the predictability,” Salas said. “Capitol Hill is full of a lot of people who work in the service industry and what we’re seeing is that the winter time is when we’re paying these really high heat bills. And that’s also the time for service workers where there’s less shifts available, there’s more precarity.”

Cullen and Salas are also having ongoing discussions with council members to update utility billing legislation with urgency.

“The key proposal that we’re pushing for in this moment is that if a building is not submetered for any of these utilities, then the landlord must include the cost of utilities in the cost of rent,” Cullen said. “And now, because there is a state rent cap law in place, those rental changes would need to fall within the state rent cap limits.”

“I think they [current council members] are surprised that the city hasn’t done anything about it in over 20 years,” Cullen said, referring to the Third Party Billing Ordinance passed in 2003 which still serves as Seattle’s primary legislation regulating master metered or other unmetered utility services in multi-unit buildings.

Complaints against a landlord with the Hearing Examiner’s Office are one way to dispute charges. Salas said complaints filed by Qualman renters last year produced results but didn’t fix the problem.

“There was some money that was refunded, but overall, Cornell just got a really small slap on the wrist and was told to update our lease addendums, and that was about it,” Salas said.

The campaign also sent a letter to Cornell & Associates last June which was followed by minor concessions and a new lease addendum from the property’s management in the following months. But believing the company’s compromises did not adequately fulfill the residents’ requests, the campaign sent a second letter in December which was responded to by Qualman’s portfolio manager who issues refunds and established a new billing system.

As for their January utility bill strike, which included a rally on January 5 at the Cornell & Associates headquarters in Eastlake, Salas said participating residents have not heard anything from their landlords but “the usual ‘you have an unpaid balance’ notice.”

Support for the campaign is growing. In January, the Seattle Renters’ Commission issued a letter (PDF) for the Seattle City Council and Mayor Wilson calling for a ban on RUBS:

Currently SMC 7.25 only requires transparency about bill calculations, notice to tenants about changes, and a formal process through the Hearing Examiner’s Office to dispute charges. SMC 7.25 does not proactively protect tenants through investigations conducted by the Hearing Examiner, does not set utility price caps, and does regulate how RUBS charges interact with WA State’s Rent Stabilization law.

“If the Council is committed to protecting tenants, ensuring affordability, and uplifting tenant ideas for reform then we encourage you to ban RUBS in Seattle,” the letter concludes.

“Look at your utility bills and try to understand, how is your landlord charging for utilities? And if they’re just basing it off of a RUBS estimate, that is not an accurate or fair way for you to be billed for your utilities,” Salas said, her advice to any Capitol Hill tenant.

The Seattle Ban RUBS Campaign will be hosting a tenant meet-up for residents to join the conversation about renters rights on Thursday, February 19, 6 to 8 PM at Vermillion on Capitol Hill.

Follow @seattlebanrubs for updates.

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