It’s now likely more expensive than ever to evict someone in Clark County. Landlords see the high prices as problematic. Tenants see them as necessary. –
Landlords are shelling out thousands of dollars to evict tenants in Clark County, which has had the highest eviction filing rate per capita out of Washington counties the past two years.
Before 2020, evicting someone cost about $1,200, said Erin McAleer, a Vancouver attorney who represents landlords in eviction cases. Now, the process can cost $5,000 to $10,000, he said.
“Things have changed,” McAleer said. “(Evictions) are long and drawn out.”
Law changes
In 2021, Washington became the first state to give low-income tenants free legal representation in eviction cases. The decision was unusual because, historically, only defendants in criminal cases had the right to an attorney.
Before that change, evictions were a quick affair. They were the only kinds of lawsuits that would last just minutes, said Ben Moody, a managing attorney at Clark County Volunteer Lawyers Program.
Moody would volunteer to represent tenants in eviction cases before the 2021 law. But many tenants failed to show up at all, resulting in court-ordered evictions.
“We’d go in there, and most of the cases had already been defaulted,” Moody said. “No one would present a defense. No one would know their rights. There was essentially no accountability to make sure landlords were doing things right.”
Now, eviction cases can last dozens of hours, especially since Washington also passed its “just cause” eviction law in 2021, which protects tenants from being evicted without a legitimate reason, such as nonpayment of rent.
“It used to be a lot easier,” McAleer said. “You’d just go to a show-cause hearing and pitch for five minutes.”
After that, the judge would weigh the case and perhaps call one more hearing, he said.
But now that most tenants have attorneys, landlords are often saddled with the cost of paying a lawyer hundreds of dollars for each extra hour a case takes.
“They will fight tooth and nail on even a very straightforward nonpayment-of-rent case, and they will drag things out and make things more costly,” McAleer said. “Every dispute or fact that’s disputed takes time. So you go from three hours to maybe 30 to 50 hours, easy.”
Financial struggles
Having to pay thousands of dollars on top of court fees, which range from $85 to $197 for eviction filings, can financially ruin a small landlord, said Sue Denfeld, president of the Clark County Rental Association.
“That would put a smaller landlord out of business immediately. You can bet that,” Denfeld said. “Their side is covered. We’re sitting on the other side, waiting months.”
Nonpayment of rent is the most common reason for evictions, according to attorneys, meaning landlords could be missing out on months of rent on top of paying attorney fees.
Some landlords give up on eviction when the process takes too long, striking deals with tenants to leave on their own.
While it’s true that courts often order tenants to pay attorney fees if they lose their case, landlords don’t often get back their money, McAleer said.
“People who can’t pay their rent or get behind on their rent … don’t have that kind of money sitting around,” McAleer said. “It’s very difficult to collect, so it falls back on the landlord.”
Going after garnishment, which is often capped at 25 percent of a person’s weekly earnings in Washington, is often not worth the cost of hiring an attorney.
“They’ll pay me $1,000 to collect $1,000,” McAleer said.
Rising evictions
Moody, the volunteer lawyer, said he has very little sympathy for landlords paying more to evict people.
“Yeah, it’s more expensive. But we’re also seeing these hugely inflated numbers of evictions,” he said.
High prices haven’t stopped evictions from rocketing in Clark County and across the state. Since 2022, a few months after a pause on evictions lifted, eviction filing rates in Clark County have almost doubled.
“If we have a location … where rates of eviction for nonpayment of rent are going through the roof, that indicates that it’s not that people choose not to pay but that they can’t pay,” Moody said.
Moody believes landlords are charging more than the market can bear.
“If they’ve outpriced the market and that’s leading to an increased rate in evictions, and they have to pay the cost of doing business, like every other industry has to — yeah, I’m not sorry about that,” Moody said. “What (landlords) lose in almost every case is a bit of profit. What a tenant loses in almost every case is their home.”
