> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rangemedia.co/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Other Way People Are Losing Their Homes In The Fires - URL: https://www.rangemedia.co/spokane-fires-evictions/ - Published: 2026-09-03T23:50:34.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-04T00:17:26.000Z - Description: Tenant rights lawyer warns of impending eviction crisis as renters face long-term repercussions of the Spokane Complex fires - Author: Erin Sellers - Tags: Housing Hannah Swenson needs more time. A tenants’ rights lawyer, she’s well put together, her hair tied back in a neat bun and her suit jacket unwrinkled. But the exhaustion of 16-hour days is starting to creep into her voice. It’s been a little over two weeks since the most destructive wildfires in Washington’s history began roaring along the northwest edge of Spokane. By Monday, August 17, the fires were [mostly contained](https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/spokane-wildfires-contained?ref=rangemedia.co), but for Swenson, the crisis is just beginning. If this were an average week, Judge Candie Dibble’s unlawful detainer docket would receive around 40 eviction filings. But this week, 138 eviction cases are set to be heard in her courtroom. The sharp increase in hearings is a direct result of the Spokane Complex fires, causing hearings slated for the worst days of the fires to be automatically rescheduled for the third week of August. The cases will just keep piling up, Swenson said. “ There's no moratorium on filing new evictions, and there's no change in timeline as far as how quickly they could be heard by the court. It's just all getting smashed in.” She will be in court every morning this week, providing free eviction defense services to low-income tenants on behalf of the King County Bar Association Housing Justice Project — one of two law firms in Spokane offering this assistance. It’s a protection granted to tenants by [Washington’s right-to-counsel law](https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/jan/07/washingtons-right-to-counsel-law-alters-the-evicti/?ref=rangemedia.co) — [the first in the nation](https://www.rangemedia.co/arlin-jordin-eviction-trial/). They can’t screen people to check if they qualify for assistance quickly enough — instead, representatives from the two firms that provide free legal help set up a screening process just outside the courtroom, hoping to find any tenant who made it to court without a lawyer. Calls to her law firm were coming in so fast the firm had to launch a hotline just for tenants impacted by the fires. There are people slipping through the cracks. Swenson is already overworked, but she tries to find them, checking addresses on the eviction docket against evacuation zones and sending letters to tenants she thinks may be about to miss their eviction hearing. Each morning in the courtroom, she’s poised as she stands before the judge repeatedly. Dozens of the tenants originally scheduled to appear before Dibble that week are packed in with those added to the docket at the last minute. Over and over again, Swenson asks for just one thing: more time. Swenson is overwhelmed. The system is overwhelmed. The tenants who faced down fires and potential evictions in the span of less than two weeks are overwhelmed. It’s only going to get worse. The loss of more than [800 homes](https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/aug/21/spokane-fire-damages-will-exceed-1-billion/?ref=rangemedia.co) in the blaze collided with Spokane’s [already-stressed](https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/aug/10/wildfires-threaten-to-further-strain-spokane-areas/?ref=rangemedia.co) [housing market](https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/spokane-complex-fires-impact-rental-real-estate-market/293-88591f6c-70e9-46da-8fb8-95fc23f1f422?ref=rangemedia.co). The city administration says that at least 11 rental properties have been confirmed as damaged or destroyed, and estimates the full total of rental units impacted could be nearly 90\. A RANGE analysis found 43 units listed on the city’s long-term rental registry fell within the burn area. Even more structures have been damaged or [rendered toxic](https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/aug/14/a-false-sense-of-security-residents-return-to-unda/?ref=rangemedia.co) by lead, asbestos and soot. The number of pre-eviction notices served on tenants throughout Spokane County in August is triple the average. Renters balancing on tightrope budgets may stumble, unable to make September payments due to unexpected evacuation costs. Governor Bob Ferguson tried to address the potential stress on the rental market, including provisions in an emergency order that “eviction-related actions” should be prohibited until August 24 — a move that stopped the sheriff from evicting people for a few weeks. The Spokane City Council is working on an ordinance that would allow renters who lost income due to emergencies like the fires to use that as a legal defense in eviction proceedings. But Ferguson’s order failed to stop eviction proceedings from piling up in the courts, and the city council didn’t move quickly enough for the tenants with hearings scheduled in August. “A new wave of evictions is coming,” Swenson said. ### ‘ Bizarro times’ From August 17 to August 20, RANGE watched the full week of the unlawful detainer docket, where lawyers from the King County Bar Association Housing Justice Project and Northwest Justice Project took turns representing clients in eviction proceedings. It’s Monday, and Judge Dibble has 53 eviction cases scheduled that morning. “I know it’s been bizarro times,” Dibble says. In order to speed up proceedings, she’s signed all the proposed orders that have no opposition, she adds. They barrel through cases. Tenants, some a little rumpled, some dressed in their Sunday best, are sent to the hallway to complete a screening to see if they qualify for free legal representation. In most cases, they do, and their cases are deferred a week or two to give their new lawyers time to prepare. One woman waits patiently. When her name hasn’t been called by the end of the two-hour docket, she raises her hand. Her original court hearing was postponed due to the fires, and the order she got from her landlord told her it had been rescheduled “to the week of August 17 at 10 am.” The judge tells the woman to come back later that week. “It's better that you showed up early than show up late,” Dibble says. “ We will see you back here on Thursday at 10 am.” Twenty-two hours later, court is back in session. On Tuesday, August 18, there are 33 eviction cases to churn through. Six of those are for tenants who live in evacuation zones. One man, wild-eyed on the video call screen, only learned he had an eviction hearing scheduled through one of the frantic letters sent by Swenson’s firm. He has late rent that’s been accruing since December of 2025, but this is the first he’s learned of his right to legal representation. His case is deferred so he can get counsel. Another set of tenants, a couple, also learned of their hearing from one of Swenson’s letters. They haven’t completed an intake yet, but they came to court, mail in hand. They’re given more time, too. A renter from the evacuation zone with back rent he couldn’t pay due to a health scare and medical bills asks for an interpreter — he doesn’t understand the legal paperwork he’s been given. His case is continued until they can schedule an interpreter fluent in Sudanese Arabic. Some tenants don’t show up. Swenson worries some of them may not have even known their hearings were rescheduled for this week. Most are automatically evicted, a default judgement entered in favor of their landlords. On Wednesday, there are 26 cases to be heard. Things move fast. There’s one moment of tension — lawyers for the different landlords claim none of the rentals were located in an evacuation zone, which was supposed to require personal services of notices. Swenson disagrees. She’s mapped the rental addresses on the docket against the evacuation zones. Two of the tenants that morning who were given default evictions because they didn’t come to court were evacuated, Swenson says. Dibble promises to double-check the addresses before she actually signs the eviction orders. At the close of court, they call the names of those who missed their court time. One is the woman who mistakenly came on Monday. She isn’t here; Dibble had told her to come back Thursday. Unfortunately, her actual court date was the day before. It takes less than a half-hour to hear the 26 cases scheduled for Thursday morning. It would have finished faster, but one woman has questions for the court. The late rent is her fault, she says, but she has the money to pay for it now. If she does that, do eviction proceedings stop? Dibble tells her she would need to reach an official agreement with her landlord, and that she should sit down for a screening in the hallway to see if she qualifies for legal assistance. Another eviction is delayed a week — the tenant qualifies for rental assistance, and it just hasn’t been distributed yet. A few tenants didn’t know they could get free legal help; Dibble continues their cases out too, giving them time to connect with lawyers. Every day, people were evicted for failing to show up to court. Every day, tenants showed up to court solely because they’d received the last-ditch effort letters Swenson's firm sent out. “\[This\] showed that people displaced were not getting their mail, that there needed to be extra protections and assistance in place for them to be able to appear and not have the fires result in their evictions just purely by lack of notice given during the emergency,” Swenson said. “That was pretty telling for me.” All of the tenants the court saw in the week we watched court had ongoing proceedings, evictions initiated before the fires began. The backlog of cases and continuances has continued to push into September. Meanwhile, new cases are coming, Swenson warned. ### ‘One thing after another’ The fires created unplanned emergency expenses for people living in razor-thin margins. Spending extra gas money to evacuate or dropping a couple hundred dollars to secure a hotel could mean the difference between being able to make rent or not. One tenant told Swenson they’d spent their rent money on a U-Haul to evacuate their grandparents. “If your bottom line is so tight, you’re spending money on helping your grandparents escape instead of paying your rent by the fifth,” Swenson said. “ Secondarily, we're seeing a lot of tenants are required to pay rent to property management offices through certified funds. Banks weren't open, roads were closed. There's all of these barriers to timely payment while our community was literally on fire, and those are things that we are seeing people have accrued late fees for.” Those cases are already starting to cross her desk as more tenants receive the 30-day pay-or-vacate notices mandatory in Washington state. When RANGE met with Katelyn outside of a coffee shop on a Friday morning, she shook slightly throughout the interview, a tremor wracking her shoulders every so often. It was chilly out, but she was “shaken up” and scared, she said. Katelyn, who asked to only use her first name to avoid damaging her ability to get housing in the future, is staring down the barrel of an eviction, hoping Swenson’s firm can help her family. The mother of a baby and a medically-fragile four-year-old, Katelyn can’t work. Because of her son’s asthma, allergies and autism, she stays home to care for him while her husband is the sole breadwinner. Before the fires, they were a little behind on rent and were given a 30-day notice to pay July’s rent or leave their North Spokane apartment. Her husband worked extra hours, and they’d qualified for rental assistance through Catholic Charities, Katelyn said, and they had the money to pay for both July and August’s rents. With the fires came smoke, and her son’s asthma worsened. They weren’t in the evacuation zone yet, but to stave off a hospital visit, they fled the smog, heading to camp in a family member’s yard 36 miles away in Sprague. When the smoke followed them there, too, they drove 50 miles Newport and stayed with her uncle. “ I just kind of assumed, ‘Okay, we're gonna be out maybe two days worth of food. I can go donate plasma. It'll be okay.’” Katelyn said. “That was not the case at all.” On top of the unexpected food and gas costs, they came back to smoke damage in the apartment. They had to flush the water lines and replace their air filter, which “was black with soot,” Katelyn said. Their utility bill from Avista was $200 higher than usual. Then, their landlord wouldn’t accept the rental assistance payment, she said. “ I just feel like it's one thing after another this month,” Katelyn said. “I'm trying to get my kid ready so he can go to preschool this year, but I just don't know where I'm supposed to go from there.” Swenson’s firm is trying to negotiate a repayment plan for Katelyn’s family, to give them some breathing room to catch up while they still have a roof over their heads. “I just don't know what I'm gonna do moving forward if I can't continue to stay. We're gonna end up homeless, and I really fear that for my kid, especially with his medical issues,” Katelyn said. “ If I do get an eviction, no one's gonna rent to me. No one's gonna rent to my family. I just... I don't know what that means for us.” ### ‘Ash and soot and chemicals’ Many families returned to houses still standing and bank balances that weathered the initial storm. They were lucky: they had emergency savings to lean on and homes untouched by the blaze. No eviction court notices were left taped to their doors. And yet, they’re calling Swenson too. When Steph and her husband left their rented townhouse in North Spokane, they could see the flames out their window, creeping ever closer to their cozy subdivision. Their kids and pets had evacuated earlier, picked up by Steph’s mom, but she stayed as long as possible, trying to save what she could from their home. Steph, who asked to use her first name only because she fears retaliation from her landlord, was hopeful when she returned home for the first time after the evacuation orders lifted. But when she opened the door to her house, there was ash in the windows. The curtains were coated with soot. Particulates clung to the porch and the outside of the frames. The fences outside had been melted by the heat. Steph refused to bring her family back inside — both of her daughters were born premature and have underdeveloped lungs. She worried the air quality and smoke damage in the property could harm them. An independent restoration company Steph hired to analyze the property said there was over $60,000 worth of damage. Insulation and carpet needed to be replaced. Soft goods needed to be thrown out. The water in the house needed to be extracted and remediated. Her family moved into a place in Liberty Lake that had a move-in deal that included three months of free rent, and she ferries her children to and from their schools in Mead every day. It’s cost her over $18,000 so far, but they replaced bedding, clothing and furniture, using their savings and hoping to be reimbursed by their renter’s insurance. Washington law says that landlords cannot charge rent for periods in which a unit is unlivable. Steph asked for a rent credit and to be released from her lease, which has another eight months left. But despite the smoke damage, she’s still being charged rent at their North Spokane unit. Her townhome was managed by Greystar, the largest landlord in the nation, who recently [agreed to stop using](https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/dec/04/spokane-joins-cities-banning-use-of-price-fixing-a/?ref=rangemedia.co) algorithmic price-fixing software as part of a $7 million [lawsuit settlement](https://www.propublica.org/article/greystar-realpage-doj-settlement-landlords-apartments-software?ref=rangemedia.co). Representatives from Greystar told Steph that her home was habitable, per an assessment from a restoration company they hired, and that she just needed to run a hydroxyl generator to “address any persistent odors that may not dissipate,” according to emails reviewed by RANGE. “Based on the inspection and investigation by qualified professionals, we have no reason to believe the unit is uninhabitable, unsafe, or unreasonably unsanitary,” the [email](https://gyazo.com/d0717795b6cd0c144f0900a43d77ec09?ref=rangemedia.co) continued. “Therefore, we are unable to release you from your tenancy or provide you with a rent credit.” Steph, a social worker with two jobs, thinks renters like her family are being taken advantage of, forced to live in unsafe environments and pay for repairs that are a landlord’s responsibility. “ You either have to sit in this ash and soot and chemicals and live that way and just deal with the consequences for your health forever, or you have to fight them,” Steph said. “I just think it's really sickening to do to people. I think they're absolute monsters.” Hoping to push back, she called the Tenants Union of Washington, who connected her with Swenson’s firm. Steph’s case was the first of its kind to cross Swenson’s desk but “other people with that same set of facts are rolling in,” she said. In a short follow-up interview the first week of September, Swenson said her firm is “trying to prioritize all of this new representation for fire victims. They’re not in court being evicted, but their rights are being violated and they’re displaced and not safely back in their homes.” She’d hosted multiple pop-up legal clinics to help tenants impacted by the fires understand their rights. She’s personally representing 18 clients — seven with fire-related cases. On top of her regular legal work, she’d been spending nearly 30 hours a week doing policy work to advocate for tenant protections at the city level. Dealing with the aftermath of the crisis is both a marathon and a sprint, as the cases pile up and the potential Spokane City Council ordinance for emergencies faces opposition from landlords as it inches closer to passage. “It's gonna be an interesting test of the support of our most vulnerable in our community. I'm concerned about the narrative that's being pushed, that this crisis only affected homeowners,” Swenson said. “There are lots of tenants who deserve just as much help, who have been just as dramatically affected, and often are populations that have no safety net and their lives are gonna be changed and at risk.” In our last interview on Wednesday, September 2, there was a ragged edge to Swenson’s voice. She’d just left eviction court again. She would be back the next morning.