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Evictions spike in Pierce County, around the state

Posted on July 3rd, 2025 By: Conor Wilson

Near the end of her pregnancy, LB took a getaway trip to Victoria, British Columbia. It was the first time she had ever left the country.

After months living in a van and motel with her long-term partner and children, the family had stable housing. A federal subsidy provided by the Bremerton Housing Authority allowed them to afford an apartment. It covered enough costs that some of her income working as a medical assistant went toward savings.

After that trip, though, her security began to unravel. LB – who is being identified by her initials to protect her identity – went to a Canadian hospital with high blood pressure. Doctors did not want her to travel home. She gave birth prematurely.

Back home, the Bremerton Housing Authority asked LB for her newborn’s Social Security card to stay in compliance with her housing subsidy. But because the baby was born in Canada, the child didn’t yet have one. More than a year later, without a card and unable to navigate the complex process to produce one, BHA terminated her subsidy.

The termination notice came only a day after LB re-signed her lease. But the housing authority mailed its notice to the wrong address, and LB’s family didn’t know it lost the subsidy. Rental debt piled up. By February 2025, her debt around $23,000, a Kitsap County Superior Court Judge ordered the couple and their five young children to vacate the apartment.

“They kicked me off because I couldn’t provide them something, even though I tried my hardest to get it,” LB said. “Nobody told me how. It was just me trying to figure it out.”

Record-setting eviction levels

Evictions have skyrocketed across the Kitsap Peninsula over the past two years. They show little sign of relenting amid soaring rental costs and sunsetting of pandemic-era safety nets. Vulnerable tenants are left teetering on the brink, a single life event removed from being unable to make rent.

The entire state has seen record-setting levels of evictions following the pandemic. After two years of virtually no evictions under a state-imposed moratorium, filings increased last year and continue to rise in 2025, according to reporting by the news site InvestigateWest.

In some jurisdictions, growing demand has overwhelmed right-to-counsel programs, a first-in-the nation law requiring an attorney for qualified low-income individuals in eviction cases.

That has not happened on the Kitsap Peninsula, say staff from Kitsap Legal Aid and Tacomaprobono, which handle right-to-counsel cases here. Everyone who qualifies has received legal representation.

Yet alarming numbers of people are still facing eviction. There were 601 eviction cases filed in Kitsap County Superior Court during 2024, according to data from the state Office of Civil Legal Aid, up from 327 a year earlier. Through May, the county was on pace for another increase this year.

Pierce County had 3,568 evictions in 2024, a 22% jump from the prior year. Evictions were up 33% from pre-pandemic levels and are on pace to set another record this year.

Lack of affordable housing

The damage caused by evictions can be long ranging, particularly for children. Research has found associations between evictions and worse mental and physical health outcomes, job loss and lower educational attainment, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.

Reasons why someone gets evicted are typically complex. Economic conditions and a lack of affordable housing are often the main culprit.

According to the latest data from the Washington Center for Real Estate Research, the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Pierce County is $1,432; in Kitsap County, it is $1,540. Both figures are nearly double what they were a decade earlier and up about 20% compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Families would need to earn household incomes above $61,000 a year to afford that rent without being cost burdened, defined as when a household spends more than 30% of their income on housing costs.

“People just aren’t earning enough to make ends meet,” said Mindy Belhiba-Rovira, executive director of Kitsap Legal Aid. “They don’t have a lot of wiggle room.”

There is hope a new state law capping annual rent increases for most units at 7% plus inflation, up to 10%, will prevent price gouging and keep people housed. Yet the policy, adopted this year, is untested.

COVID-era assistance ends

Tony Ives, the executive director of Kitsap Community Resources, says the lack of affordability is a supply and demand issue and the long term solution is to build more housing.

“We try to keep people housed,” he said. “But there’s a lack of housing here.”

Fewer dollars are available for rental assistance after the end of the pandemic, Ives said. KCR is the county’s main provider of rental assistance, short-term, temporary funding to pay someone’s rental debts.

Kitsap County gave more than $36 million in rental assistance to 4,200 households between 2020 and 2023, according to a Kitsap County summary. Much of that pandemic-era money is now gone.

Ives described the funding situation as “nothing like it was before.” Rental assistance and eviction prevention assistance is about a third of what it was at the height of the pandemic, he said.

Eviction protections enacted during the pandemic have also lapsed. Aside from a moratorium on evictions between 2020 and 2021, state landlords were also required to offer repayment agreements for those behind on rent, prior to filing to evict someone. That rule ended in 2023.

Vouchers and rental assistance

Benjamin Ramm, a staff attorney for Kitsap Legal Aid, started working on eviction cases in Los Angeles 17 years ago. He has seen his share of tragic situations that led to someone losing their home.

One of his clients, a pregnant woman from Kitsap County, was evicted after she was fired from her job. He alleges it was likely workplace discrimination. In the Tri-Cities, he met a woman unable to work after a cancer diagnosis. In these instances, he admits, there is not much he can do.

Instead, he has turned his focus to something he believes he can fix. A small number of cases are happening in Kitsap where someone is evicted after losing their housing subsidy. These cases are uncommon, he says, but also appear to be the most avoidable.

“Those cases bother me the most,” he said “They are so damaging and preventable.”

Housing vouchers – unlike rental assistance – are a virtually permanent rental subsidy, including the Housing Choice Voucher, formerly known as Section 8. Typically, tenants pay 30% of their income towards rent, and the voucher covers the rest.

People have to reapply for these subsidies annually. Ramm has noticed during that process, for various reasons, people who are still eligible lose that subsidy and are unable to get it back. During that lapse, all or part of their rent goes unpaid for months. They end up in an overwhelming amount of debt that makes eviction virtually inevitable.

Complex application process

Jill Staton, executive director of the Bremerton Housing Authority, said she had seen a significant decline in rental assistance – short-term relief for folks behind on their rent – since the pandemic but questioned whether people were losing housing vouchers.

About 1,700 people participate in the Housing Authority’s traditional housing voucher program, Staton said. An additional 38 clients are on emergency vouchers, which were given out during the pandemic as temporary relief.

Applying for subsidies is “ridiculously complex” and requires people to annually submit documentation proving income requirements, she said, but added they had not seen a larger than normal number of people losing their subsidies.

“Losing rental assistance that’s administered through Kitsap Community Resources is that possibly could be an issue,” she said. “But as far as losing a subsidy through our housing authority subsidy programs, no, that’s not what we’re seeing at all.”

Kitsap Community Resources

Cecily Jurman, an assistant managing attorney for Tacomaprobono, said her clients from Kitsap often seem to have a more difficult time obtaining subsidies and vouchers than residents from neighboring Pierce and Thurston Counties.

“The difficulty in obtaining subsidies and getting vouchers in Kitsap County, it seems to be a lot more difficult than, for example, Pierce County,” she said. “We have a lot of tenants who have subsidies and are able to maintain them. Even if they’re facing eviction, we can usually work something to try and let them keep their voucher. It’s a lot more difficult in Kitsap County.”

The need for rental assistance or subsidies outweighs what is available virtually everywhere. Yet there seems to be a barrier of accessibility in Kitsap, she said. Reaching out to Kitsap Community Resources is difficult.

Ives, KCR’s executive director, said he could not compare themselves to other agencies but denied that his agency had an accessibility problem.

“I’ve never heard that,” he said. They work closely with attorneys, he said. “When they need something from us we’re always present in the courtroom or with clients and even trying to negotiate with landlords.”

Conflict between agencies

In LB’s case, she went to KCR for help. They offered to pay her back rent, according to a January 2025 letter included in court documents. Housing Kitsap refused.

Jennifer Di Vitto, regional director of property management for Housing Kitsap, wrote in a declaration that she had sent the documents to KCR, “as requested,” but had heard nothing from them related to an offer of payments. Housing Kitsap also “decided that it will not accept any payment agreements with KCR for these tenants due to prior problems with KCR,” she wrote.

Those problems were “related to on-time payments and the excessive conditions that they place on us related to future actions when they fail to pay on time and the tenants don’t continue to pay their rent.”

Asked to elaborate on that decision, Housing Kitsap Director Heather Blough wrote in a follow-up email that Housing Kitsap’s “reasons for choosing not to work with KCR are explained in the continuation of Ms. Di Vitto’s statement.”

‘All of this for what’

LB says her family is in a better place, although challenges remain.

After getting evicted. She moved almost immediately into a privately-owned apartment complex, which agreed to accept payments from KCR. She is thankful, but concedes it has not been perfect.

KCRs payments can be irregular, she said. After the family moved in last February, KCR did not make its first payment until April, and has not submitted one since. Her landlord has threatened to evict them over the delayed payments, she said.

Her daughter, now 3, finally got her Social Security card earlier this year.

The eviction from the last place remains on her record. She owes somewhere around $20,000 in back rent. She has applied, with the help of a lawyer, to restore her housing choice voucher.

“We’re probably getting our voucher back and it’s just like, all of this for what?” she said. “We have an eviction on our record, nobody’s gonna ever want to rent to us.”