GUEST POST: RUBS IS A CREEPY ACRONYM AND A LANDLORD SCAM

Rent in Seattle has spiked 20% since 2021, and landlords have found a clever way to raise the rent without raising the rent. In April 2025 Cornell & Associates switched tenants from paying a flat rate utility bill of $50 to up to $429 through Ratio Utility Billing System (RUBS). One year later, Metropolitan Management charged a single tenant over $700 for the first RUBS bill.

RUBS is more than a creepy acronym. RUBS is a price-setting tool that landlords use to drive up housing costs by charging tenants for utilities based on a formula created by the landlord. Typically, landlords send a building’s master utility bill over to a third party billing company, then the company divides the bill among tenants using landlord math, factoring the number of tenants on a lease and square footage. Once the billing company divides the bill, they charge tenants a service fee on top of the RUBS bill. 

Landlords and their third party billing companies advertise RUBS as an “equitable” way to bill utilities, but in practice tenants are charged for utilities outside of our control and not based on our actual usage and are often denied required transparency for bills that vary every month. For example, the electricity, water, and heat in common spaces are shouldered by tenants, and when there are more vacancies in a building, the RUBS bill increases because the master bill is split among fewer people. In older buildings with uncontrollable heat, landlords tell tenants to “open the window” when units are overheated, which is both a waste and an additional cost that tenants must pay for. 

 A water leak created a hole in the ceiling at the Porter.  A towel on the floor soaks up the water. This tenant pays $200 in RUBS for a studio.

When RUBS is implemented, the landlord only has to provide 30 days’ notice of the change and is not required to provide the estimated costs that tenants will have to pay. Once RUBS is implemented, buildings could have inefficient or damaged utility infrastructure, but landlords are not incentivized to maintain or repair because tenants pay the extra costs of burst pipes and overworked boilers. Tenants are paying for the heat running through vacant units, which are vacancies that could be housing people. Even if a tenant is out of town for 2 months, they still pay the full cost of utilities.

Tenants are also paying for the utilities powering shared laundry machines on top of extra laundry fees for pay-per-use washers and dryers. 

A $3.50 charge for the washing machine.

The Seattle Ban RUBS campaign was started by a group of Cornell & Associates tenants organizing against RUBS in their buildings. The tenant-led campaign has connected to tenants in over 80 buildings across different property management portfolios in Seattle. Through social events, Know Your Rights workshops, and strategy meetings, tenants learn from each other how to organize against RUBS. Tenants are organizing “tenant associations” in their buildings, coordinating maintenance request submissions and online “review bombs", flyering in their buildings to warn future tenants, and even organizing a RUBS strike. 

Some tenants have filed complaints with the Seattle Hearing Examiner, which oversees the Third Party Billing Ordinance and RUBS. Although tenants have been able to win back some money, the Hearing Examiner has no real teeth and cannot proactively enforce or investigate RUBS violations. Each tenant must file and have their hearings individually, which can take months. At The Qualman, where RUBS began in April 2025, 4 tenants filed complaints and all received different results even though they were in the same building with the same landlord. 

Seattle City Council and staff have seemed sympathetic with tenants so far, but there is concern that landlords will retaliate if the city bans RUBS by raising rents even higher. Tenants know that landlords can already raise rents on top of RUBS increases. 

We as tenants intimately know what it’s like to fear and experience landlords retaliating against us for taking action. Landlords treat tenants like nuisances when we file maintenance requests then blame us for disrepair. Landlords refuse to send tenants information about our own living arrangements. Landlords manipulate the truth about our homes and our bills. Landlords hold housing, our human right, over our heads. We should no longer accept landlords’ deception and abuse to be a normal part of living.

The reality for tenants is that landlords raise our costs no matter what we do. Landlords are not interested in keeping rents affordable, they are interested in raising their profits. RUBS has already pushed tenants out of their homes followed by landlords spiking the rent on newly vacant units by over 10%. At the Qualman, rents in vacated units increased by 17%.

Seattle’s growing trend of RUBS is landlords’ retaliation to the state’s 2025 rent stabilization law that caps rent hikes to 10% annually (an amount that is still too high!) When landlords charge for utilities through a flat rate, it is considered a part of rent and is subjected to rent stabilization. However, RUBS is not considered rent, creating exploitative loopholes that landlords have explicitly named on LinkedIn.

Arboreal Management LinkedIn article about how RUBS is not subject to state rent control.

Landlords claim they have no choice because utility costs are generally rising, but we believe that the affordability solution cannot be to increase the pressure on those of us at the bottom to keep everyone else afloat when there are plenty of people and corporations at the top who landlords can pressure instead.

Tenants in three different buildings under two different management companies recently received water shut off notices because landlords are still not paying the utility bills despite tenants paying higher RUBS bills. Working class people cannot afford to live in a Seattle where landlords get away with deceiving us, exploiting us, worsening the quality of our homes, and driving out our neighbors who can no longer afford to live in the communities they call home. 

We are stronger and safer when we take action together. We have the right to ask questions, we have the right to repair, and we have the right to organize. It will take a lot of tenants coming together to improve what it’s like to live in Seattle as a renter, but it’s possible!

TENANTS:

Email your council members and tell them about your experience renting with RUBS. They can’t represent us if they don’t know what we’re experiencing. More importantly, talk to your neighbors and connect with our tenant-led campaign. 

SEATTLE CITY COUNCIL:

Renters elected council members to represent us and our experiences in our city. We remain committed to solving problems as a community, and we ask the City of Seattle to stand with us as neighbors and Ban RUBS in Seattle. 

Come to our next event!