11 ms·

Homeless in Seattle: The roots of a crisis

130 points by erentz 10y ago

smaili 10y ago
At last count, there were 4,500 people living on the streets of Seattle and King County. It wasn’t always this way Couldn't this be said about San Francisco, New York, and every other major city? Homelessness is certainly an issue in Seattle, but I would be more interested to look at it holistically and what as a country and world we can do to help solve this problem.
- adrenalinelol 10y ago
  Not all solutions are best when it's one size fits all. What may cause homelessness in one area may not be the root cause in another. Also people local to the community have a vested interest in fixing it vs. bureaucrat who will be treating it as a number on a balance sheet(i.e. not have to experience the problem themselves).
- giaour 10y ago
  My understanding is that the homelessness crisis facing Seattle is more pronounced and more rapidly worsening than similar issues in other major urban areas. I recently relocated to Seattle from New York and never saw anything like Seattle's tent cities and encampments back in Manhattan.
  - sjg007 10y ago
    Also happening in Portland.
  - thematt 10y ago
    It is rapidly getting worse. It doesn't help that many cities are shipping their homeless people to Seattle. Literally buying them bus tickets. http://www.kiro7.com/news/local/portland-begins-sending-homeless-people-to-other-cities-including-seattle/296353382 http://www.kiro7.com/news/local/portland-begins-sending-home...
    - RhodesianHunter 10y ago
      > Literally buying them bus tickets. This is one of those stories that I've heard or read everywhere I've lived or been (Austin, Honolulu, Seattle, San Fran) that I just assume it's an urban legend used to obfuscate the real issues.
  - dmoy 10y ago
    Part of the reason is that in the Pacific NW, the elements don't threaten death in the summer and/or winter. You can sleep outside without dying to subzero frost, or heat stroke in the day.
  - dmoy 10y ago
    Part of the reason is that in the Pacific NW, the elements don't threaten death in the summer and/or winter. You can sleep outside without dying to subzero frost, or heat stroke in the day.
  - plandis 10y ago
    Well to be fair the police in Seattle are a lot more hands off with the homeless than in NYC. You probably didn't perceive the problem because it was out of sight, out of mind as police routinely will move the homeless to less desirable areas. Contrast that to Seattle where, for example, there is a homeless camp about 2 blocks from the Ballard farmers market.
- brandur 10y ago
  Agreed. San Francisco, for example, still has many SROs in operation, and it's not even remotely clear whether they're a net benefit. That said, I think they might be onto something with respect to affordable places to live. I'm not sure that SROs and the like are the answer, but it doesn't seem quite right that your lowest cost option to live near the core of any major city is a studio that costs on the order of thousands a month to rent.
- tantivy 10y ago
  You're not wrong, but the impulse to recontextualize responsibility on a larger scale probably gets in the way of exploring what communities can do to alleviate the problem locally. It also assumes that the causes are the same in all cases where the symptoms appear similar, and that all communities or cities have equivalent resources they can marshal to address homelessness.
VLM 10y ago
Coming soon to a demographic group near you. Homelessness, not just for day laborers and factory employees anymore. People ask what our plan will be when middle class jobs are eliminated by automation and robots. As if things can't happen without a plan. And a good plan at that. Well, lack of plan never stopped anything in the 70s.
- tomjen3 10y ago
  Why not retry the work progress administration? Worst case we will end up with a bunch of cabins in national parks and a bunch of people who have learned that they are not total failures but can, in fact, make something both of themselves and their environment.
  - douche 10y ago
    This makes entirely too much sense. Bring back the CCC. I had one of the better summers of my life doing something similar working for an Appalachian trail club.
    - politician 10y ago
      This solution would immediately be denounced as a forced labor camp.
- jknoepfler 10y ago
  I would encourage you to look at the actual national data around homeless rates and public investment into programs to fight and prevent homelessness. As a matter of fact, care for the homeless is something that people do invest in (although not enough). Although I don't disagree that we have structural economic challenges to overcome, and sooner rather than later (I happen to favor some kind of UBI), nothing will be improved by glib doom-saying. Getting public policy right is extremely difficult, but it would be made easier if the quality of discussion surrounding it were improved.
  - VLM 10y ago
jknoepfler 10y ago
I found this article to be very thin on data to support its thesis that: a. there is a homeless crisis in Seattle in particular b. this crisis was caused in part by a systematic erosion of infrastructural support for affordable housing and mental health care. For some background, there was a spike in the homeless count in the Seattle-Tacoma area over the last three years (http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/count-of-seattle-king-county-homeless-finds-4505-people-sleeping-outside/ http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/count-of-s...), but I don't know how noisy the data gathering technique is (it sounds like it's super noisy), and I gather that the linked article isn't talking about something that happened over the last three years. I found the reports at http://www.endhomelessness.org http://www.endhomelessness.org (direct link to 2016 report: http://www.endhomelessness.org/page/-/files/2016%20State%20Of%20Homelessness.pdf http://www.endhomelessness.org/page/-/files/2016%20State%20O...) to be very helpful to get a better quantitative view of homelessness. The 2015 report has comparative data by city. Seattle ranked 6th worst in terms of per capita homeless rates, but I haven't found a good Seattle specific breakdown of rates by demographic/cause over time yet. The overall national (USA) trendline for homelessness is negative from 2007-2016. This is not at all to say that there isn't a problem (there is), but I find the narrative of crisis (which implies something coming to a head, reaching a point of no return, etc.) to be counterproductive. We have systematic structural and infrastructural problems in the USA broadly and Seattle, WA in particular that create unjust and inhumane conditions for a significant percentage of the population. We're slowly getting better, but we don't have very good safeguards against regressing, and we're not getting better as quickly as we'd like. That's what a brief foray into the data says (minus the evaluative bits). Is there something that has caused a huge spike in homelessness in Seattle in particular? I don't honestly know. Does it have deep roots in the erosion of public support for homelessness? I don't know that either, but my tiny and imperfect window into the data says "probably not." Also interesting, the Seattle Human Services "Homeless Investment Analysis" from 2015 (http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/HumanServices/Reports/HomelessInvestmentAnalysis.pdf http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/HumanServices/R...). TL;DR "we're ramping up spending on the problem but it could be done better and more efficiently."
- jseliger 10y ago
  I found this article to be very thin on data to support its thesis Yeah. I'm a grant writing consultant, and virtually every large municipality has a group of organizations that receive HUD Continuum of Care funding to deal with homelessness. There are problems with this system (see http://seliger.com/2012/11/11/huds-confusing-continuum-of-care-coc-program-explained/ http://seliger.com/2012/11/11/huds-confusing-continuum-of-ca...) but it exists and the lack of even mentioning it is a red flag. I don't know about Seattle's specific situation because we haven't worked for any of Seattle's CoC organizations or its public housing authority, but I do know in general that a lot of funding for homelessness organizations exists. (Seattle also has a powerful NIMBY lobby, which likely exacerbates homelessness and drug treatment issues.) There is a term, the name of which I forget, that is named for a physicist who used to read the newspaper and who was always annoyed by the science reporting, which got essential facts / ideas wrong. One day he realized that if the newspaper was getting essential facts / ideas wrong about science, the other sections probably weren't much better; he just didn't know enough about the topics to know what was wrong. That's how I feel reading the article.
techsupporter 10y ago
I live in Seattle. I also live in one of the "lesser" areas of the city. One of the things that frustrates me the most about our local homeless crisis--if that's what it is, or maybe it's just become more visible--is how lacking the regional response to it is. Seattle seems to be the only city in the north King County/south Snohomish County area that is actually trying to do anything about homelessness versus shuffling the problem off to another city. This is frustrating for two reasons: one, it puts all of the burden on the backs of the Seattle taxpayers. All the surrounding 'burbs need to do is come up with enough to pay their police departments to round up the "troublemakers"--because that's usually how someone sleeping on a bench in Bellevue or Redmond[0] is deemed--and then ship them off to the King County Jail, conveniently located in downtown Seattle. Once the "miscreant" (in quotes because, usually, their only crime is sleeping on a bench or maybe smelling of pot) sleeps it off, that person walks out into the drizzly daylight of now being in Seattle, so he or she heads to Pioneer Square or Ballard or Lake City or Rainier Valley and begins anew. Two, and this is where I get selfish, as a result of this the suburbs "get to" (more like create a situation) enjoy things like clean parks, outdoor bathroom facilities that aren't overused to the point of despair, streets and other public spaces unencumbered by tents and other makeshift encampments...all the while, their residents cluck their tongues about how dirty and run down and depressing Seattle is and aren't their cities so much nicer for not having all of the street people around? But Seattle, for all of the money we residents pour into housing programs and social services, are the bad people if we try to insist that tents not be located on public property or broken-down RVs move every 72 hours. To continue my rant, speaking of money we pour into all of these things, now I turn to what I've been told by homeless people and their advocates about our broken shelter system. A big problem is that such services are concentrated into a couple of small areas (Pioneer Square and Ballard) and there's neither the funding nor the will to integrate them into surrounding neighborhoods so any new siting proposal meets significant resistance. On top of that, our shelters are unattractive for a laundry list of reasons (security, insufficient storage for personal goods, deliberately separating couples into same-sex housing, disallowing pets) that, while are good for efficient operation of dormitories, don't account for the humans who are trying to exist--or choosing not to exist--in them. So yeah, it's frustrating all the way around, for the housed and the unhoused. While I'll still vote yes on the housing levy in August--because what does voting no accomplish? Cuts in public services to those who need it most and no impetus to build better facilities--I wish our response, our regional response would be better. 0 - I pick on Bellevue and Redmond but they're not the only ones, just the most recent target of my ire. Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, Kirkland, Bothell, Kenmore, Woodinville...they're all just as complicit in "oh no, we can't possibly build any more public facilities but if you dare take a nap on the grass in one of our parks off to 5th and James you go."
joeblau 10y ago
This is very interesting. I recently moved from San Francisco to Pittsburgh and I've noticed that there aren't as many homeless people in this city (Although to be fair; Coming from San Francisco, I feel you can say that about almost any major city in the US). Two things that do exist in Pittsburgh are a ton abandoned homes as well as a declining city population[1]. If the pattern of what is described in these articles are true, I'm wondering if some of the city residents are taking advantage of old buildings as dwellings? What also throws another question my curiosity is that the city of Pittsburgh a number of tax abatement programs to spur on growth to rebuild many areas. I'm wondering if these programs will trigger a similar effects as the orders put in place in Seattle? [1] - https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=population&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country&idim=place:4261000&ifdim=country&tstart=646977600000&tend=1404360000000&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_#...
- munificent 10y ago
  > Pittsburgh and I've noticed that there aren't as many homeless people in this city The sounds callous, but part of it is the climate. Winters in Seattle rarely get below freezing, which means the truly homeless can still survive here even when sleeping outside. Most Midwestern or Atlantic Seaboard cities are just too cold during the winter, so Seattle gets a disproportionate number of homeless.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Man those homeless guys in Chicago.... they are tough. Few blankets and sleeping under the overpass. I think the worst few nights they pull most into shelters , but plenty sleep there when it is 20F outside. That said if I ever want to be homeless its SF or Hawaii.
    - hueving 10y ago
      SF weather sucks compared to the south bay, socal, Hawaii, or even central cali. Weather is surprisingly not that important to homeless people.
ben_jones 10y ago
Do we give homeless people money to help them or because we want them to go away? I feel like society puts up a facade of "social justice" trying to help the homeless with one arm while taking away from them and dehumanizing them with the other. Some examples of taking away from them: health care and criminal laws that indirectly make their lives harder over time, the VA, and societies continued criminalizing views on mental health issues such as substance abuse.
jmspring 10y ago
In a few of the threads, the mention of SROs and need for housing come up. Gentrification, affordable housing, etc. But, one question I fail to see answered well is, why should a city that isn't affordable be required to find and provide housing for individuals in said city? I can't afford to live in Carmel, Los Altos, etc, but I live where I can afford. California has places like Modesto, Stockton, etc. that have available housing that is not expensive. I'm sure there are places in rural washington as well. Why not have the city partner with neighboring (affordable) municipalities and establish housing, maybe jobs and recovery programs, etc. at a fraction of the cost of trying to wedge the same into places like Seattle or Washington? A UC Santa Cruz / Civinomics study for homeless in Santa Cruz found roughly 2/3 of the individuals arrived here either on the edge or already homeless. At what point do municipalities say "enough" and put their own first? I have friends locally going back generations that can't afford to live here and move, yet I am told that someone living in their RV has every right to camp on the street and demand local services, yet arrived here recently.
- intopieces 10y ago
  > I can't afford to live in Carmel, Los Altos, etc, but I live where I can afford. Have you ever considered that maybe you should be able to afford to live in those places? That the wealthiest nation in the history of humanity ought to cultivate a society that encourages freedom of movement? That cordoning off sections exclusively for the rich leads to a decrease in empathy for the less fortunate? That safe housing and access to the amenities of a city ought not to be exclusively for those who happened to have the lucky combination of skills and money? Have you considered that the people you hope to exclude are people no different from you?
  - microcolonel 10y ago
    The wealthiest nation in the history of humanity had the guts to build things they couldn't afford to give everyone. Some day everyone gets those things, and somebody like you will say: have you ever considered that maybe you should have a private aircraft? Inequalities like this only apply in the current frame of reference. Also, from the basic market perspective, it is entirely impossible for everyone to live in Carmel; and if everyone lived there, you'd want to live somewhere else.
habosa 10y ago
Pardon my threadjacking, but I know a lot of people reading this are in the SF Bay Area and would like to do something to help with SF's homelessness problem (which is similar in scale to Seattle's). Consider a donation to a local organization like Larkin Street Youth Services (http://larkinstreetyouth.org/ http://larkinstreetyouth.org/). It's not just a band-aid, these organizations can actually turn life around for a homeless person and help people get off the streets for good. There are ~10,000 homeless people in San Francisco. It's a huge number, but there is more than enough money in this city for private citizens to do something about it. You don't have to wait for politicians to think up a plan.

130 points by erentz 10y ago

At last count, there were 4,500 people living on the streets of Seattle and King County. It wasn’t always this way Couldn't this be said about San Francisco, New York, and every other major city? Homelessness is certainly an issue in Seattle, but I would be more interested to look at it holistically and what as a country and world we can do to help solve this problem.

adrenalinelol 10y ago
Not all solutions are best when it's one size fits all. What may cause homelessness in one area may not be the root cause in another. Also people local to the community have a vested interest in fixing it vs. bureaucrat who will be treating it as a number on a balance sheet(i.e. not have to experience the problem themselves).
giaour 10y ago
My understanding is that the homelessness crisis facing Seattle is more pronounced and more rapidly worsening than similar issues in other major urban areas. I recently relocated to Seattle from New York and never saw anything like Seattle's tent cities and encampments back in Manhattan.
- sjg007 10y ago
  Also happening in Portland.
- thematt 10y ago
  It is rapidly getting worse. It doesn't help that many cities are shipping their homeless people to Seattle. Literally buying them bus tickets. http://www.kiro7.com/news/local/portland-begins-sending-homeless-people-to-other-cities-including-seattle/296353382 http://www.kiro7.com/news/local/portland-begins-sending-home...
  - RhodesianHunter 10y ago
    > Literally buying them bus tickets. This is one of those stories that I've heard or read everywhere I've lived or been (Austin, Honolulu, Seattle, San Fran) that I just assume it's an urban legend used to obfuscate the real issues.
- dmoy 10y ago
  Part of the reason is that in the Pacific NW, the elements don't threaten death in the summer and/or winter. You can sleep outside without dying to subzero frost, or heat stroke in the day.
- dmoy 10y ago
  Part of the reason is that in the Pacific NW, the elements don't threaten death in the summer and/or winter. You can sleep outside without dying to subzero frost, or heat stroke in the day.
- plandis 10y ago
  Well to be fair the police in Seattle are a lot more hands off with the homeless than in NYC. You probably didn't perceive the problem because it was out of sight, out of mind as police routinely will move the homeless to less desirable areas. Contrast that to Seattle where, for example, there is a homeless camp about 2 blocks from the Ballard farmers market.
brandur 10y ago
Agreed. San Francisco, for example, still has many SROs in operation, and it's not even remotely clear whether they're a net benefit. That said, I think they might be onto something with respect to affordable places to live. I'm not sure that SROs and the like are the answer, but it doesn't seem quite right that your lowest cost option to live near the core of any major city is a studio that costs on the order of thousands a month to rent.
tantivy 10y ago
You're not wrong, but the impulse to recontextualize responsibility on a larger scale probably gets in the way of exploring what communities can do to alleviate the problem locally. It also assumes that the causes are the same in all cases where the symptoms appear similar, and that all communities or cities have equivalent resources they can marshal to address homelessness.

VLM 10y ago

Coming soon to a demographic group near you. Homelessness, not just for day laborers and factory employees anymore. People ask what our plan will be when middle class jobs are eliminated by automation and robots. As if things can't happen without a plan. And a good plan at that. Well, lack of plan never stopped anything in the 70s.

tomjen3 10y ago
Why not retry the work progress administration? Worst case we will end up with a bunch of cabins in national parks and a bunch of people who have learned that they are not total failures but can, in fact, make something both of themselves and their environment.
- douche 10y ago
  This makes entirely too much sense. Bring back the CCC. I had one of the better summers of my life doing something similar working for an Appalachian trail club.
  - politician 10y ago
    This solution would immediately be denounced as a forced labor camp.
jknoepfler 10y ago
I would encourage you to look at the actual national data around homeless rates and public investment into programs to fight and prevent homelessness. As a matter of fact, care for the homeless is something that people do invest in (although not enough). Although I don't disagree that we have structural economic challenges to overcome, and sooner rather than later (I happen to favor some kind of UBI), nothing will be improved by glib doom-saying. Getting public policy right is extremely difficult, but it would be made easier if the quality of discussion surrounding it were improved.
- VLM 10y ago

jknoepfler 10y ago

I found this article to be very thin on data to support its thesis that: a. there is a homeless crisis in Seattle in particular b. this crisis was caused in part by a systematic erosion of infrastructural support for affordable housing and mental health care. For some background, there was a spike in the homeless count in the Seattle-Tacoma area over the last three years (http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/count-of-seattle-king-county-homeless-finds-4505-people-sleeping-outside/ http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/count-of-s...), but I don't know how noisy the data gathering technique is (it sounds like it's super noisy), and I gather that the linked article isn't talking about something that happened over the last three years. I found the reports at http://www.endhomelessness.org http://www.endhomelessness.org (direct link to 2016 report: http://www.endhomelessness.org/page/-/files/2016%20State%20Of%20Homelessness.pdf http://www.endhomelessness.org/page/-/files/2016%20State%20O...) to be very helpful to get a better quantitative view of homelessness. The 2015 report has comparative data by city. Seattle ranked 6th worst in terms of per capita homeless rates, but I haven't found a good Seattle specific breakdown of rates by demographic/cause over time yet. The overall national (USA) trendline for homelessness is negative from 2007-2016. This is not at all to say that there isn't a problem (there is), but I find the narrative of crisis (which implies something coming to a head, reaching a point of no return, etc.) to be counterproductive. We have systematic structural and infrastructural problems in the USA broadly and Seattle, WA in particular that create unjust and inhumane conditions for a significant percentage of the population. We're slowly getting better, but we don't have very good safeguards against regressing, and we're not getting better as quickly as we'd like. That's what a brief foray into the data says (minus the evaluative bits). Is there something that has caused a huge spike in homelessness in Seattle in particular? I don't honestly know. Does it have deep roots in the erosion of public support for homelessness? I don't know that either, but my tiny and imperfect window into the data says "probably not." Also interesting, the Seattle Human Services "Homeless Investment Analysis" from 2015 (http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/HumanServices/Reports/HomelessInvestmentAnalysis.pdf http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/HumanServices/R...). TL;DR "we're ramping up spending on the problem but it could be done better and more efficiently."

jseliger 10y ago
I found this article to be very thin on data to support its thesis Yeah. I'm a grant writing consultant, and virtually every large municipality has a group of organizations that receive HUD Continuum of Care funding to deal with homelessness. There are problems with this system (see http://seliger.com/2012/11/11/huds-confusing-continuum-of-care-coc-program-explained/ http://seliger.com/2012/11/11/huds-confusing-continuum-of-ca...) but it exists and the lack of even mentioning it is a red flag. I don't know about Seattle's specific situation because we haven't worked for any of Seattle's CoC organizations or its public housing authority, but I do know in general that a lot of funding for homelessness organizations exists. (Seattle also has a powerful NIMBY lobby, which likely exacerbates homelessness and drug treatment issues.) There is a term, the name of which I forget, that is named for a physicist who used to read the newspaper and who was always annoyed by the science reporting, which got essential facts / ideas wrong. One day he realized that if the newspaper was getting essential facts / ideas wrong about science, the other sections probably weren't much better; he just didn't know enough about the topics to know what was wrong. That's how I feel reading the article.

techsupporter 10y ago

I live in Seattle. I also live in one of the "lesser" areas of the city. One of the things that frustrates me the most about our local homeless crisis--if that's what it is, or maybe it's just become more visible--is how lacking the regional response to it is. Seattle seems to be the only city in the north King County/south Snohomish County area that is actually trying to do anything about homelessness versus shuffling the problem off to another city. This is frustrating for two reasons: one, it puts all of the burden on the backs of the Seattle taxpayers. All the surrounding 'burbs need to do is come up with enough to pay their police departments to round up the "troublemakers"--because that's usually how someone sleeping on a bench in Bellevue or Redmond[0] is deemed--and then ship them off to the King County Jail, conveniently located in downtown Seattle. Once the "miscreant" (in quotes because, usually, their only crime is sleeping on a bench or maybe smelling of pot) sleeps it off, that person walks out into the drizzly daylight of now being in Seattle, so he or she heads to Pioneer Square or Ballard or Lake City or Rainier Valley and begins anew. Two, and this is where I get selfish, as a result of this the suburbs "get to" (more like create a situation) enjoy things like clean parks, outdoor bathroom facilities that aren't overused to the point of despair, streets and other public spaces unencumbered by tents and other makeshift encampments...all the while, their residents cluck their tongues about how dirty and run down and depressing Seattle is and aren't their cities so much nicer for not having all of the street people around? But Seattle, for all of the money we residents pour into housing programs and social services, are the bad people if we try to insist that tents not be located on public property or broken-down RVs move every 72 hours. To continue my rant, speaking of money we pour into all of these things, now I turn to what I've been told by homeless people and their advocates about our broken shelter system. A big problem is that such services are concentrated into a couple of small areas (Pioneer Square and Ballard) and there's neither the funding nor the will to integrate them into surrounding neighborhoods so any new siting proposal meets significant resistance. On top of that, our shelters are unattractive for a laundry list of reasons (security, insufficient storage for personal goods, deliberately separating couples into same-sex housing, disallowing pets) that, while are good for efficient operation of dormitories, don't account for the humans who are trying to exist--or choosing not to exist--in them. So yeah, it's frustrating all the way around, for the housed and the unhoused. While I'll still vote yes on the housing levy in August--because what does voting no accomplish? Cuts in public services to those who need it most and no impetus to build better facilities--I wish our response, our regional response would be better. 0 - I pick on Bellevue and Redmond but they're not the only ones, just the most recent target of my ire. Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, Kirkland, Bothell, Kenmore, Woodinville...they're all just as complicit in "oh no, we can't possibly build any more public facilities but if you dare take a nap on the grass in one of our parks off to 5th and James you go."

joeblau 10y ago

This is very interesting. I recently moved from San Francisco to Pittsburgh and I've noticed that there aren't as many homeless people in this city (Although to be fair; Coming from San Francisco, I feel you can say that about almost any major city in the US). Two things that do exist in Pittsburgh are a ton abandoned homes as well as a declining city population[1]. If the pattern of what is described in these articles are true, I'm wondering if some of the city residents are taking advantage of old buildings as dwellings? What also throws another question my curiosity is that the city of Pittsburgh a number of tax abatement programs to spur on growth to rebuild many areas. I'm wondering if these programs will trigger a similar effects as the orders put in place in Seattle? [1] - https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=population&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country&idim=place:4261000&ifdim=country&tstart=646977600000&tend=1404360000000&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_#...

munificent 10y ago
> Pittsburgh and I've noticed that there aren't as many homeless people in this city The sounds callous, but part of it is the climate. Winters in Seattle rarely get below freezing, which means the truly homeless can still survive here even when sleeping outside. Most Midwestern or Atlantic Seaboard cities are just too cold during the winter, so Seattle gets a disproportionate number of homeless.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Man those homeless guys in Chicago.... they are tough. Few blankets and sleeping under the overpass. I think the worst few nights they pull most into shelters , but plenty sleep there when it is 20F outside. That said if I ever want to be homeless its SF or Hawaii.
  - hueving 10y ago
    SF weather sucks compared to the south bay, socal, Hawaii, or even central cali. Weather is surprisingly not that important to homeless people.

ben_jones 10y ago

Do we give homeless people money to help them or because we want them to go away? I feel like society puts up a facade of "social justice" trying to help the homeless with one arm while taking away from them and dehumanizing them with the other. Some examples of taking away from them: health care and criminal laws that indirectly make their lives harder over time, the VA, and societies continued criminalizing views on mental health issues such as substance abuse.

jmspring 10y ago

In a few of the threads, the mention of SROs and need for housing come up. Gentrification, affordable housing, etc. But, one question I fail to see answered well is, why should a city that isn't affordable be required to find and provide housing for individuals in said city? I can't afford to live in Carmel, Los Altos, etc, but I live where I can afford. California has places like Modesto, Stockton, etc. that have available housing that is not expensive. I'm sure there are places in rural washington as well. Why not have the city partner with neighboring (affordable) municipalities and establish housing, maybe jobs and recovery programs, etc. at a fraction of the cost of trying to wedge the same into places like Seattle or Washington? A UC Santa Cruz / Civinomics study for homeless in Santa Cruz found roughly 2/3 of the individuals arrived here either on the edge or already homeless. At what point do municipalities say "enough" and put their own first? I have friends locally going back generations that can't afford to live here and move, yet I am told that someone living in their RV has every right to camp on the street and demand local services, yet arrived here recently.

intopieces 10y ago
> I can't afford to live in Carmel, Los Altos, etc, but I live where I can afford. Have you ever considered that maybe you should be able to afford to live in those places? That the wealthiest nation in the history of humanity ought to cultivate a society that encourages freedom of movement? That cordoning off sections exclusively for the rich leads to a decrease in empathy for the less fortunate? That safe housing and access to the amenities of a city ought not to be exclusively for those who happened to have the lucky combination of skills and money? Have you considered that the people you hope to exclude are people no different from you?
- microcolonel 10y ago
  The wealthiest nation in the history of humanity had the guts to build things they couldn't afford to give everyone. Some day everyone gets those things, and somebody like you will say: have you ever considered that maybe you should have a private aircraft? Inequalities like this only apply in the current frame of reference. Also, from the basic market perspective, it is entirely impossible for everyone to live in Carmel; and if everyone lived there, you'd want to live somewhere else.

habosa 10y ago

Pardon my threadjacking, but I know a lot of people reading this are in the SF Bay Area and would like to do something to help with SF's homelessness problem (which is similar in scale to Seattle's). Consider a donation to a local organization like Larkin Street Youth Services (http://larkinstreetyouth.org/ http://larkinstreetyouth.org/). It's not just a band-aid, these organizations can actually turn life around for a homeless person and help people get off the streets for good. There are ~10,000 homeless people in San Francisco. It's a huge number, but there is more than enough money in this city for private citizens to do something about it. You don't have to wait for politicians to think up a plan.