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Just for context, this article was written by Christopher Rufo, a very conservative politician who ran for the Seattle City Council against Mike O'Brien (distri

Just for context, this article was written by Christopher Rufo, a very conservative politician who ran for the Seattle City Council against Mike O'Brien (district 6, Ballard, Loyal Heights, Crown Hill) for roughly two weeks until Rufo dropped out while accusing "O'Brien activists" of "extreme harassment." Rufo's platform, just before he enter-exited the race, can best be described as "arrest them all and do it enough times that they move to Eugene." He's only one in a long line of brief candidates who want to immediately ramp up all kinds of law enforcement activity while we "consider proper funding levels" for social services, with no professed idea for what happens when the people we've arrested for vagrancy walk out of the King County Jail in downtown Seattle. The one thing he and I agree on is that the outputs for our inputs are not at all acceptable but I don't agree at all with what little he proposed to do about it.

abernard1 8y ago
Ad hominems aside, do you think spending $100K a year per homeless person--and having a dramatically increasing homeless population--is reasonable? Might there be some logic to that article?
- techsupporter 8y ago
  Yes? No? I don't know; I'm not an expert in these matters. It is entirely possible that spending $100k/year per homeless person and still having an increase in the homeless population is reasonable if the costs are staggeringly high and the underlying problems still exist--perhaps even at an increasing rate--that drive people into homeless. I didn't say that Mr. Rufo was incorrect in his numbers; I said I vehemently disagreed with the proposals he made in his brief campaign. I agree with Mayor Durkan that we need a comprehensive understanding of what the money is being spent towards and the results it is having, something her office is supposed to be working on. But we can't just say "spending is paused until we figure that out." We also can't continue with Seattle being the only government entity spending appreciable money on the problem while surrounding cities and counties cluck their tongues in disdain. This is also the State of Washington's and King County's problem, if nothing else. They should act like it. One last bit, I did not engage in any ad hominems against Rufo; I called him no names (unless you mean "very conservative," which is a label he adopted for himself in his campaign). I denigrated his policy proposals and related an observer's view of what happened to his campaign.
  - abernard1 8y ago
    I think your "Just for context" provided no context at all to the statistic provided or anything to do with my observation that tech workers' treatment of themselves is different than that they advocate for the homeless. You brought the character of the person making a claim about a statistic into a tangent that had nothing to do with my comment. That's an ad hominem. With respect to the $100K a homeless person, I quite frankly find that absurd. If it was a spending problem, you could pay them the money directly and they'd be richer than most Americans.
    - akiselev 8y ago
      Have you really thought about that $100k number? I live in Seattle and I can tell you from a close friend's experience that an uninsured ambulance ride and emergency visit for a serious condition is ridiculously expensive, even after negotiating the cost down with the healthcare providers. We're talking tens of thousands for a concussion and I don't even want to know what the costs are for drug over doses, psychiatric holds, and the multitude of medical problems that result from roughing it in Washington winters. Throw in the cost of police responding to reports of vagrants, social workers, and all the other infrastructure and 100k a year seems very reasonable. We're talking about less than 1% of the population in the most extreme living circumstance that usually find themselves in that spot because all other systems have failed. Of course it's going to be crazy expensive helping that last (quite literally) marginalized group. Thats why Utah just started paying for housing. They figured out that the follow on costs to homelessness were huge and for many subgroups of the homeless population it's much cheaper to just pay for their shelter than to pay for all the other things that are certain to go wrong that will require state intervention anyway.

abernard1 8y ago

Ad hominems aside, do you think spending $100K a year per homeless person--and having a dramatically increasing homeless population--is reasonable? Might there be some logic to that article?

techsupporter 8y ago
Yes? No? I don't know; I'm not an expert in these matters. It is entirely possible that spending $100k/year per homeless person and still having an increase in the homeless population is reasonable if the costs are staggeringly high and the underlying problems still exist--perhaps even at an increasing rate--that drive people into homeless. I didn't say that Mr. Rufo was incorrect in his numbers; I said I vehemently disagreed with the proposals he made in his brief campaign. I agree with Mayor Durkan that we need a comprehensive understanding of what the money is being spent towards and the results it is having, something her office is supposed to be working on. But we can't just say "spending is paused until we figure that out." We also can't continue with Seattle being the only government entity spending appreciable money on the problem while surrounding cities and counties cluck their tongues in disdain. This is also the State of Washington's and King County's problem, if nothing else. They should act like it. One last bit, I did not engage in any ad hominems against Rufo; I called him no names (unless you mean "very conservative," which is a label he adopted for himself in his campaign). I denigrated his policy proposals and related an observer's view of what happened to his campaign.
- abernard1 8y ago
  I think your "Just for context" provided no context at all to the statistic provided or anything to do with my observation that tech workers' treatment of themselves is different than that they advocate for the homeless. You brought the character of the person making a claim about a statistic into a tangent that had nothing to do with my comment. That's an ad hominem. With respect to the $100K a homeless person, I quite frankly find that absurd. If it was a spending problem, you could pay them the money directly and they'd be richer than most Americans.
  - akiselev 8y ago
    Have you really thought about that $100k number? I live in Seattle and I can tell you from a close friend's experience that an uninsured ambulance ride and emergency visit for a serious condition is ridiculously expensive, even after negotiating the cost down with the healthcare providers. We're talking tens of thousands for a concussion and I don't even want to know what the costs are for drug over doses, psychiatric holds, and the multitude of medical problems that result from roughing it in Washington winters. Throw in the cost of police responding to reports of vagrants, social workers, and all the other infrastructure and 100k a year seems very reasonable. We're talking about less than 1% of the population in the most extreme living circumstance that usually find themselves in that spot because all other systems have failed. Of course it's going to be crazy expensive helping that last (quite literally) marginalized group. Thats why Utah just started paying for housing. They figured out that the follow on costs to homelessness were huge and for many subgroups of the homeless population it's much cheaper to just pay for their shelter than to pay for all the other things that are certain to go wrong that will require state intervention anyway.