Letter to the Editor: Protecting Ridgecrest - How Unregulated Short-Term Rentals Are Changing Our Neighborhood
Sunday, June 29, 2025
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I’m a long-term resident of Shoreline and have proudly owned a home in the Ridgecrest neighborhood for two years this week. As a local business owner and someone invested in our community’s health, I’m deeply concerned about recent changes quietly reshaping Ridgecrest.
Over the past three months, several nearby homes have been sold and swiftly converted into short-term rentals (STRs)--often without transparency or community input. These conversions threaten the stability, affordability, and connectedness that make Ridgecrest special.
I enthusiastically support housing growth, including duplexes, middle housing, accessory dwelling units, and long-term rentals that welcome new neighbors and maintain our community fabric. However, speculative use of housing stock for STRs removes homes from the long-term rental market, destabilizes affordability, and transforms neighborhoods into transient spaces.
Other municipalities similar to Shoreline have taken steps to balance housing needs and neighborhood integrity through regulations requiring owner residency, caps on rental days, and licensing. Shoreline can and should do the same.
I urge our city leaders to act quickly to introduce sensible STR regulations that preserve the character of Ridgecrest and support housing for residents, not just visitors.
Our neighborhood, and the city we call home, deserve policies that put people first.
Sally Anne Sadler
Shoreline
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3 comments:
Ridgecrest long time renter here - I had no idea. Where does one find this sort of info?
The business of being a landlord in our area has gotten a lot riskier in the last five years. It seems like every year, the state legislature passes a new policy to tilt the playing field even further toward tenants at the expense of landlords. This year it was a rent cap, which will paradoxically cause many landlords to raise rents every year when before they had not done so. Who knows what the legislature will come up with next year?
The COVID eviction moratorium was abused by tens of thousands of tenants who still had their jobs, but chose not to pay rent even though they were able. Landlords were denied due process to evict bad actors, but of course they received no moratorium on paying their property taxes. This was particularly hard on landlords of SFHs where there weren't other paying tenants in the building to help offset the burden. Even now, King County still has an eviction backlog.
Given that landscape, it makes sense that owners are choosing different ways to monetize their properties that don't involve putting all their eggs in one tenant. If people bemoan that this takes houses off the market for families to rent, they need to understand that that's a natural consequence of the policies we have voted for.
Perks of ownership.
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