Seattle Is Dying (and it's not alone)

[Pedestrian]

• Video Link

[Steely Dan]

^ video link isn't working for me.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^ video link isn't working for me.

I added the full youtube link so it can be watched on their site. Incidentally, I'm not trying to pick on Seattle. Everything in this video applies in spades to San Francisco. It's just that we don't have a TV station brave enough to make such a video which probably means we're in more serious trouble than Seattle is.

[mhays]

It's dying from exploding resident, worker, and tourist populations?

I haven't seen the video, but headlines like that are written for clicks only.

[James Bond Agent 007]

Wasn't this already posted a few months ago?

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by mhays

It's dying from exploding resident, worker, and tourist populations?

I haven't seen the video, but headlines like that are written for clicks only.

Don't comment on what you haven't seen. And the problem isn't peculiar to Seattle though it seems especially severe on the left coast. It's just that a Seattle media outlet seems to recognize it more acutely than others even if you aren't interested.

Originally Posted by James Bond Agent 007

Wasn't this already posted a few months ago?

If so, I missed it . . . but the problem is certainly no better.

Anybody got anything to say about the issue rather than the messenger? It is a long video but you only have to watch 10 or 15 minutes to get the idea.

[mhays]

Oh that. It had a lot of truth, but the headline was written for clicks...obviously a city that's currently booming isn't "dying."

I doubt you've heard the local chatter about the report (obviously!)...glad you're speaking up without knowing about that.

[chris08876]

Yeah Seattle is not dying by any means. Biggest boom town on the West Coast and continuing strong.

[Nouvellecosse]

I watched the whole thing when it first came out. At first I had concerns in the sense that from the tone it seemed like it was going to be a gish gallop of general unrelated grievances meant to give a sky is falling type message, but they actually did a fairly good job of focusing onto the thesis that there's a poor mental health and substance abuse strategy. It seems there's a genuine conflict caused by the desire of public officials to avoid funneling too many people into the prison system which tends to be an issue in the US. But in this case the strategy is incomplete because it manages to avoids excessive criminalization but doesn't provide an alternative for people who do need more attention than to just be let be. They do suggest some possible alternatives, (although I don't remember a lot of details since I watched it months ago) and whether or not the suggestions are as effective as they suggest, I did find the presentation quite persuasive.

[dubu]

at the end he says that everyone built the city by working and everything, I doubt that. everyone wanted money and they said ill take money and you do whatever you want with the city. every city is built the same, if everyone living in the city built it then cities would look different. that's the only thing I didn't agree with, it was off topic but this is a city forum.

[pdxtex]

this is a west coast phenomenon only as far i can tell. east coast and southern cities are mean to homeless people. west coast cities seem more tolerant but its to our detriment. the street scene is portland is out of control right now.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by pdxtex

this is a west coast phenomenon only as far i can tell. east coast and southern cities are mean to homeless people. west coast cities seem more tolerant but its to our detriment. the street scene is portland is out of control right now.

I don't know if it's to the detriment of the west coast. Seattle, and Portland have lower violent crime rates than any major metro located east of the Mississippi. San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well, have lower rates than almost all of them.

The western states, in general, tilt more towards libertarianism than authoritarianism. The southeast is probably the most authoritarian region of the country. The Midwest and Mid-Atlantic also tilt more toward authority/law and order. New England seems to tilt a little more towards libertarianism.

[James Bond Agent 007]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

And the problem isn't peculiar to Seattle though it seems especially severe on the left coast.

I was in Grant's Pass, OR recently and noticed, for a city its size, it had a large number of homeless people. There were homeless people hanging out in suburban shopping centers, walking along the freeway, hanging out downtown, and you name it.

Grant's Pass is a conservative area so it's hardly a "left" coast thing. But if you look at a map of homeless rates by state you notice it's definitely a west coast thing. Even Alaska, which can hardly be called a bastion of liberalism, has high homelessness rates.

When I was noticing all the homeless people in Grant's Pass I got the impression a sizable percentage of the homeless were simply vagabond types. I think the combination of the gentle climate and the nice scenery encourages free-spirited vagabonds to concentrate on the west coast. If you tried that in Kansas City, for example, you'd have to put up with blistering cold in the winter and hot and muggy weather in the summer.

Though I suspect the easy availability of drugs on the west coast contributes to it. You get to be a vagabond AND get stoned, too. Even in Grant's Pass there were marijuana stores everywhere.

[James Bond Agent 007]

BTW I fixed the Youtube link.

[austlar1]

Originally Posted by pdxtex

this is a west coast phenomenon only as far i can tell. east coast and southern cities are mean to homeless people. west coast cities seem more tolerant but its to our detriment. the street scene is portland is out of control right now.

Austin just made it LEGAL for homeless people to sleep in the street, parks, or public property as long as they are not obstructing traffic. It is a boneheaded move. For the past year or two, tent communities of varying size have been showing up underneath freeways and in vacant nearby land. There are people flying signs at every busy intersection. The population is not your old school skid row crowd. It is a mix of young and middle aged people who seem to have a host of substance abuse and mental health issues. I predict that Austin will have a set of problems similar to those found in West Coast cities in the near future. The decision to make this behavior legal seems motivated by the fact that it was already happening, and there is a strong desire to encourage the highly visible homeless population in a certain corner of downtown to gravitate further out away from downtown. Most homeless services are still downtown and draw a large crowd that sleeps on the sidewalks and underpasses nearby.

[Chef]

Half crazy addicts have always existed. In the past they generally lived in the cheapest apartments in the worst neighborhoods. What has changed is that they can't afford those places anymore. There is a strong correlation between high rents and people living on the fringes being homeless. Part of the reason it seems like a west coast problem is that the cities of the west coast are expensive.

One of the perverse things about modern America that we have become numb to is that generally our wealthiest cities are the ones with the worst homelessness. Something has become fundamentally broken in our housing markets. All of our more prosperous cities are slowly turning into San Francisco.

[LosAngelesSportsFan]

Originally Posted by austlar1

Austin just made it LEGAL for homeless people to sleep in the street, parks, or public property as long as they are not obstructing traffic. It is a boneheaded move. For the past year or two, tent communities of varying size have been showing up underneath freeways and in vacant nearby land. There are people flying signs at every busy intersection. The population is not your old school skid row crowd. It is a mix of young and middle aged people who seem to have a host of substance abuse and mental health issues. I predict that Austin will have a set of problems similar to those found in West Coast cities in the near future. The decision to make this behavior legal seems motivated by the fact that it was already happening, and there is a strong desire to encourage the highly visible homeless population in a certain corner of downtown to gravitate further out away from downtown. Most homeless services are still downtown and draw a large crowd that sleeps on the sidewalks and underpasses nearby.

It's not going to go well, trust me. Once they get established, it's extremely difficult to get rid of em. LA settled a lawsuit allowing this in 2009 and it has been getting exponentially worse every year. Seattle, SF, SD, LA, Portland, Vegas, Austin... It's our new normal

[Chef]

The alternative is making it illegal to be so poor that you don't have a place to live. That isn't something a moral society would do. A better idea would be to expand the Section 8 program. Right now in most cities there is a waiting list to get housing vouchers, in the Twin Cities the wait list is so long that it is generally closed. They opened 2,000 new slots this spring and had 36,000 households apply for a lottery for the new slots on the wait list.

We don't really do housing for the poor in American cities anymore. That is the real problem.

[mhays]

It's a really complex issue. Housing prices, lack of street-level enforcement, lack of state-level mental health treatment, drug issues...

Seattle and Washington are doing some significant things, including these that come to mind:

--City voters vote every seven years for a housing levy. It's currently $290m over seven years. The largest component is grants to nonprofits to build new low-income and affordable housing, often specifically for mentally ill or homeless.

--The City is piling fees on new construction. This makes most housing more expensive, but it also results in some new LI/A housing.

--The State just voted funding to design a new University of Washington behavioral health teaching hospital (with a major treatment element), to be funded for construction in the 2021-23 biennium.

--Design will start soon for a 250-350-bed wing at Western State, the largest public mental hospital in the region.

--Periodic crackdowns and infusion of large residential towers have helped tone down the worst intersection for street disorder, Third & Pike (or it's the worst because it's also very busy with tourists etc.).

--Encampments in the urban core tend to get cleaned up after a while. This includes a couple near where I live, both of which have been gone for most of a year I think.

[llamaorama]

Originally Posted by Chef

The alternative is making it illegal to be so poor that you don't have a place to live. That isn't something a moral society would do.

But it's exactly what a culture like ours, which has religious and moral views descended from those held by a bunch of scraggly low class settlers from the British Isles, would do.

Not a history expert, but IIRC starting in the middle age, England had poor houses and in some eras even had the death penalty for "vagabonds". In the 1700s and 1800s because of economic changes creating mass migrations of peasants they got even more strict and people were pressed into manual labor at these institutions if they were found to not be employed or living outside the area they had residency in. The design of modern prisons owes a lot to these places. The panopticon concept, the striped prisoner clothes, etc. Those were invented by "liberals" of the era like Jeremy Bentham. The term used for people who lived in the poor houses was literally "inmates". Their living conditions were deliberately meant to be as punitive and unpleasant as possible. Families were broken up and children were institutionalized too.

Sometimes when I argue online with very conservative people here in 21st century USA I get the feeling that if they had their way this old system would come back. If you ask them where should homeless or poor people go, they have no answer, but they don't want to see them. If you say we should help people they say they don't deserve it. All they really want is for people they see as scum to punished.