Bellingham residents are right to care about housing costs and the character of their city. However, they should be careful about Ballot Initiative 26-01, which would ban data-driven rental pricing tools citywide.
This is the familiar pattern. Treat a housing shortage as a pricing problem. Ban a tool. Promise lower rents. Watch the opposite happen.
Olympia and local activists keep making the same mistake. When you choke off new housing, rents rise. When you pile restrictions on the people who own and operate apartments, fewer units get built, existing buildings get less investment, and the next renter pays more, or never finds a unit at all.
The City of Berkeley already ran this experiment. Activists blamed rental pricing software for high rents, and the city passed one of the country’s most aggressive bans. Officials sold it as a crackdown on “price-fixing” and as a result, a technology provider sued, arguing its products were legally compliant. After months of expensive litigation, Berkeley’s own city attorney conceded the ordinance had legal problems. Taxpayers paid for a fight the city then walked back, replacing the blanket ban with narrower rules.
That is the cautionary tale for Bellingham. Initiative 26-01 invites the same lawsuit, the same drain on city staff and legal budgets, and the same result: more time spent defending a poorly drafted ordinance than building housing.
Washington has long sold itself as a place that builds and uses technology effectively. Guardrails on data use already exist at the federal level. A local ban on lawful market analytics would tell employers, investors and small property owners that Bellingham is in the business of picking which software they may use. That is not how you attract housing capital.
Housing for Bellingham put it more plainly, affordability requires adequate supply. Using software to recommend rent for a handful of apartments is not proof of collusion. A San Francisco court recently made a similar point about hotel pricing tools, getting information from the same source does not eliminate the incentive to compete.
Many smaller owners still have to price units and without any guidance on market rates will guess high, so they do not leave money on the table. That means longer vacancies and fewer competitively priced listings. Large real estate firms can hire analysts. Independent landlords cannot. A ban tilts the field toward the biggest operators.
The campaign’s own website answers, “Is algorithmic price fixing common in Bellingham?” with “It’s hard to tell!” That is not a finding. It is an admission the supporters do not have the data to justify a citywide prohibition.
The Bellingham initiative is a solution in search of a problem. Discouraging the housing investment that’s needed to make rents more affordable is hardly the way to go. It’s not worth risking a costly legal battle that won’t move the needle on rents and will drain resources needed to improve the community. Bellingham should protect property values by avoiding Berkeley’s mistake.
