PLF CLIENT KELLY LYLES, a Seattle artist, epitomizes many of the values of her city—vibrant, quirky, creative. She used to cruise around in “Leopard Bernstein,” her leopard-print sedan festooned with plastic figures of safari animals. Her house is like an alternate dimension where the artwork adorning every surface seems to be observing you, rather than the other way around. Kelly is quintessential Seattle.
But Kelly and others in the city she encapsulates have become the victims of overzealous rulers. Kelly is a small-time landlord who pays most of her living expenses from income she receives from a single rental home in West Seattle. And the Seattle City Council doesn’t like landlords.
Kelly openly wept when city officials passed a “first-in-time” rule prohibiting landlords from choosing their own tenants. Under this rule, a landlord had to rent to whomever walked in the door first with an adequate application. Kelly was terrified that she couldn’t decide who would live on her property for years to come.
Then it got worse: the city passed another law that prohibited landlords from looking into a rental applicant’s criminal history. Suddenly, Kelly’s safety—and her livelihood—were to be staked on a roll of a die.
PLF represents Kelly and other landlords to challenge these excesses. In March, a judge held that the “first-in-time” rule violated four constitutional guarantees. And in May, we sued the city over its ban on criminal background checks.
But PLF hasn’t stopped there. In recent years, the Seattle City Council has unleashed a flurry of “progressive” experiments in city ordinances, including the first-in-time rule, the ban on criminal background checks, snooping in garbage cans to find food scraps, a city income tax, dubious campaign finance reforms, and even a ban on harmless rent-bidding websites. Each of these autocratic dalliances generated a common response: a PLF lawsuit representing Seattle citizens who simply want to live unmolested by an avowedly socialist city council. And to fight Seattle is to keep its progressive regulations from replication around the country.
PLF’s persistence and effectiveness have not gone unnoticed. A Seattle Times columnist took note of PLF’s work, and since these cases fall under my purview, he even went so far as to call me “the sharpest pin around to the council’s liberal bubble.”
The Seattle City Council’s “liberal bubble” blinds it to people like Kelly, who represent the core of the city they purport to rule. Until city leaders grant Kelly and others the dignity, trust, and respect they deserve, as guaranteed by the federal and state constitutions, PLF will keep popping their bubble.