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As someone living there right now the article really doesn't properly cover the discontent in the city. There is an overwhelming sense that Seattle has done to

As someone living there right now the article really doesn't properly cover the discontent in the city. There is an overwhelming sense that Seattle has done too much to encourage homelessness (particularly with the expansion of policies like this one). "Tent City" has spread so far that it's getting into the suburbs and from a residents perspective it's getting far worse not better. I have routinely seen people shooting up and smoking glass pipes (not marijuana) in broad daylight in the Downtown and Pioneer Square areas. There's shouting, theft, property crime at all hours of the night near my apartment (Though strangely compared to SF I know very few people who have had their cars broken into). Regardless of the tone of this article, Seattle is not a model to follow, it's a cautionary tale.

CodeMage 7y ago
Could someone please explain what it means to "encourage homelessness"? At a first glance, it looks like a passive aggressive implication that homeless people, if they just tried harder, wouldn't be homeless. Can anyone help me see what I'm missing?
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  Maybe attracting homeless would be a better way of putting it. Homeless people aren't inherently irrational. Given an option, many of them will choose a place they like better than one they don't. Add in politicians who see a chance to solve the issue by encouraging the homeless to move somewhere better for them (which lets them even sell the measure as a benefit for the homeless), it means that places that make it much better to be homeless see homeless from other areas moving in.
  - missingcolours 7y ago
    The King County homeless census[1] found the overwhelming majority of homeless in the area were living in the area before becoming homeless. [1] http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/ http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/
    - rdtwo 7y ago
      That data is highly disputed. The question had a significantly lower response rate, and living could mean on a couch etc.
      - russdpale 7y ago
        80% of our population lives paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford a 400 dollar car repair bill. That is instant homelessness for a lot of people. So much wealth is hoarded in so few hands that we are squandering vast amounts of economic potential.
        jdminhbg 7y ago
        This is a myth: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-400-emergency-expense-story-is-wrong https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40...
        kelnos 7y ago
        Thanks for posting this. I've been repeating this stat quite a bit lately without knowing that it's misleading. However, I still think we're in pretty dire straits: > The report finds, in 2018, that 61% of adults would cover a $400 unexpected expense using cash (or its equivalent). Politicians and many in the media seem to be subtracting 61 from 100, and concluding that 39% of people, to use Warren’s phrase, “can’t come up with” the money they’d need to handle this situation. > Instead, as the Fed report makes clear, though “the remaining 4 in 10 adults” “would have more difficulty covering such an expense,” many of them would be able to make it work by carrying a credit card balance or borrowing from friends and family." That's still really bad. 39% of people can't cover an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing money from someone else, or effectively taking out a loan at 20%+ interest. And the 12-14% figure for people who actually would be unable to come up with that $400 via any means is also troubling.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- dogmatic_di 7y ago
  I can elaborate. Enforcement of basic car camping and drug possession/use laws has basically gone to zero and as a result there is a sense that Seattle has opened itself up as a "Risk Free Zone" for homelessness. Stories like https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/just-sickening-man-accused-of-raping-a-woman-in-restroom-of-ballard-car-dealership/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/just-sickeni... have created a sentiment that people are moving to Seattle because of this. While I can't speak to the truth of the belief that people are actively moving to Seattle, I can say that there's little incentive for someone to follow basic property or drug laws in this city. EDIT: To your point on how this differs from "Homeless people are lazy" I guess the idea is that we've created a situation where there are even more factors pushing homeless individuals to the streets and suburbs of Seattle, that Seattle has made homelessness more attractive in a sense.
  - shaki-dora 7y ago
    It's a bit cynical to call homelessness "risk free" in any sense of the term. You seem to be arguing for criminalising poverty. That's going to work just as well as criminalising stupidity, short-sightedness, death, or losing your car keys.
  - notJim 7y ago
    > To your point on how this differs from "Homeless people are lazy" I guess the idea is that we've created a situation where there are even more factors pushing homeless individuals to the streets and suburbs of Seattle, that Seattle has made homelessness more attractive in a sense. I'm sorry, but this makes no sense to me. The best data we have indicates that most homeless people are from the area, so I don't think there's any evidence to support the idea that people are moving here from elsewhere. The idea that homelessness is "attractive" is even more absurd. Do you seriously believe that if we just criminalized people a bit more, they'd simply stop choosing to be homeless?
  - CodeMage 7y ago
    > Enforcement of basic car camping and drug possession/use laws has basically gone to zero and as a result there is a sense that Seattle has opened itself up as a "Risk Free Zone" for homelessness. Again, I find this logic to be extremely confusing. How related is "car camping" to Seattle's homeless? Is there some implication that the majority of them have cars they sleep in? Or am I missing something there? As for the incentive to follow basic property or drug laws, again, how does that encourage homelessness? I could understand if you argued it encourages crime, but why homelessness? The only remaining argument is basically "this encourages already homeless people to move to Seattle", which I can see being a problem, but of a different kind. It shares certain aspects with the immigration-related problems: in both cases, it's an effect of a deeper underlying problem that acts as a root cause and should be solved.
- dahdum 7y ago
  One example is decriminalizing possession of heroin / crack, which makes it far easier and safer for dealers (who can hold below the limits and resupply frequently), which then increases the availability and drives down the price (less risk) of those drugs. Ignoring petty crime increases it as well. Important to note that it’s often a funnel, homelessness -> addiction, so you have to work on both sides. I don’t have the perfect solution, nobody seems to, but Seattle and a few other cities seem to be going down the wrong path with vigor.
  - mrnobody_67 7y ago
    Canada prescribes Heroin to some addicts... costly, $24K/year, but potentially ROI positive given the break-ins, petty crime, and cost of responding to it (police, insurance costs, etc.)
    - Scoundreller 7y ago
      With methadone programs being about 1/4 the cost. Probably lots of room to cut costs too.
- sdfsafsafas 7y ago
  If you permit the assumption that homeless are more likely to engage in criminal activity [0], the city of Seattle has significantly reduced enforcement of crime, including violent crime. Therefore, ppl who would otherwise being in jail for crimes are living on the streets. There was a documentary about this done by a local Seattle TV station. I don't know how reliable it is, but at the end it actually gave fairly humanitarian and progressive solution to the problem, despite spending most of the show arguing lax and progressive policing attitudes created the problem to begin with [1] [0] by, a criminal being more likely to become homeless, or by desperation driving the homeless to crime [1] Their proposed solution, inspired by a program in RI (? maybe ME), is to treat drug addiction as a disease to be treated by having effective programs.
  - seniorsassycat 7y ago
    'Seattle is Dying' was produced by KOMO, which is owned by Sinclair, the largest broadcast company in the USA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
- moduspol 7y ago
  We had a post here last week about soda taxes in Philadelphia and it seemed like common sense that by making sugary drinks more expensive, you are encouraging people to consume it less, which results in fewer people drinking it. We can discuss this with no implication that there's a static amount of soda consumption in the world, or that people want to be obese from consuming it. We understand life is a series of choices, "when to consume sugary drinks" makes up some of them, and that by disincentivizing that choice, people are more likely to choose a different beverage. Nobody "chooses" homelessness, but like anything else, becoming / staying homeless often is the result of numerous choices, some of which are easier than others for various reasons. When you artificially remove bad consequences from some of those choices, it is not surprising that those choices are made more often.
  - threwawasy1228 7y ago
    You are missing the point, it isn't that simple. Doing the opposite might keep cities cleaner or reduce crime but the cost is significantly higher to maintain. A prison population is a social service that is incredibly expensive, the more enforcement there is, the more expensive it is per body. This doesn't solve the problem it just costs the taxpayer more for another non-solution.
    - moduspol 7y ago
      My argument didn't even address costs. Did you mean to respond to another comment? This does seem to be a topic that is (for whatever reason) very difficult to have a straightforward conversation about.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    The big difference is, you can simply stop consuming soda drinks if the habit becomes too expensive, but if you are a homeless person, you cannot really just stop being homeless.
    - moduspol 7y ago
      The claim isn't that you can "just stop being homeless." > Nobody "chooses" homelessness, but like anything else, becoming / staying homeless often is the result of numerous choices, some of which are easier than others for various reasons. When you artificially remove bad consequences from some of those choices, it is not surprising that those choices are made more often. Consuming soda is just one way people can become obese. The problem is obesity. If you are an obese person, you may not really be able to "just stop" being obese, but if policy leads to people choosing healthier beverages, it helps fight obesity. ...and the opposite is true, too. It would not be difficult to imagine what might happen if we subsidized soda until it was free, for example. Except we probably wouldn't have advocates claiming that because nobody wants to be obese, the incentives can't possibly be affecting the increase in soda consumption.
- notJim 7y ago
  This is right-wing rhetoric from people who seem to think the solution to homelessness is to throw them all in jail. Wait sorry, they don't have the "perfect solution," but they're certain it involves police and jail. And they're sure all the homeless people moved here from elsewhere, despite the data to the contrary.
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  There are different approaches here. One approach includes both reward / consequence. In this model, things like theft, various forms of violence particularly in shelter or public housing violence, even taking over extremely large areas of public space (ie, 3-4 tents plus dogs plus...) results in consequences, while avoiding issues along the above lines results in rewards (ie, eligibility for service or additional service). In addition, these approaches tend to also consider impact on the non-homeless (ie, prison time linked arguably with a reduced risk of property crime) Other models are focused primarily on making life as bearable as possible for the homeless - basically the straight service model. Under this model, resources are provided and consequences are reduced in the event to solve homelessness. Some folks going through the tougher love systems (ie, jail vs rehab etc) say good things, other folks ask how can homelessness be criminalized and focus primarily on reducing risk of govt involvement (this can also save money in some cases - prison is expensive, rehab is expensive etc).
- malandrew 7y ago
  Human beings are motivated both intrinsically and extrinsically. Adding support for an activity provides extrinsic motivation for doing something. Basically, cities get what they pay for. If you pay for homelessness you get it. That said, I'm not saying we shouldn't help people, but that we should make sure that whatever support we provides guides people towards self sufficiency and not dependence. “The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber, ... To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.” – FDR 1935
- itslennysfault 7y ago
  You're not missing anything. A lot of people just want the problem gone and somehow think that being tougher on the already downtrodden is a viable solution. You can fine and jail the homeless and it's not going to make them any less homeless. The only solution is exactly the kind of thing this article is talking about. Providing consoling / rehab services and helping people turn their lives around one by one. There is no blanket solution.
CaptainZapp 7y ago
Sounds a bit like Zurich in the 80s and 90s[1] The problem was, while not solved, massively improved by providing heroin to hardcore addicts[2] The only argument against it, really, is that it's morally wrong to hand out drugs to addicts. Leaving this argument aside the approach was (and is) widely successful. Not only for the city, as such, but also for the addicts who get a chance to stabilize their lifes, are much healthier and actually can hold down appartments and jobs. [1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/extern/storytelling/needletrauma/chapter1/ https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/extern/storytelling/needletraum... [2] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-12/us-can-learn-lot-zurich-about-how-fight-its-heroin-crisis https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-12/us-can-learn-lot-zuri...
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  Further <https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/05/the-case-for-prescription-heroin/> https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/05/the-case-for-prescriptio... A short read, a couple of pages. Extract: " The [heroin] addicts on prescriptions, by contrast, looked like the nurses or receptionists or Dr Marks himself. As a group, you couldn’t tell. Faced with this evidence, Marks was beginning to believe that many ‘of the harms of drugs are to do with the laws around them, not the drugs themselves’. In the clinic, as Russell Newcombe tells me, they started to call the infections and abscesses and amputations ‘drug war wounds’. So Dr Marks began to wonder: if prescription is so effective, why don’t we do it more? He expanded his heroin prescription programme from a dozen people to more than 400. The first people to notice an effect were the local police. Inspector Michael Lofts studied 142 heroin and cocaine addicts in the area, and he found there was a 93 per cent drop in theft and burglary. ‘You could see them transform in front of your own eyes,’ Lofts told a newspaper, amazed. ‘They came in in outrageous condition, stealing daily to pay for illegal drugs; and became, most of them, very amiable, reasonable law-abiding people.’ He said elsewhere: ‘Since the clinics opened, the street heroin dealer has slowly but surely abandoned the streets of Warrington and Widnes.’ One day a young mother called Julia Scott came into Dr Marks’s surgery and explained she had been working as a prostitute to support her habit. He wrote her a prescription, and she stopped sex work that day. " Just a perspective, not saying right or wrong. Edit: added this: " And something nobody predicted took place. The number of heroin addicts in the area actually fell. Research published by Dr Marks in the Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh compared Widnes, which had a heroin clinic, to the very similar Liverpool borough of Bootle, which didn’t — and found Widnes had 12 times fewer addicts. "
docbrown 7y ago
If homelessness is a problem, why should the alternative be to put them in jail or prison? For something as simple as car camping, it seems like an unjustifiable punishment for a simple offense. Without getting into much of a semantics argument, this post itself puts off a sense of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” attitude when it comes to homelessness. In a city that has a GDP of $231 billion in 2010[1], it seems ineffective to punish the homeless instead of trying to rid the city of the problem in a more productive manner than hauling offenders away. While public consumption of drugs should still be a citational offense, the simple possession of a drug should not be a jail sentence. There are many users that have deeper issues that need to be worked out to rid them of their addiction and putting them into confinement is not always the most effective way. Seattle needs to invest in safe injection sites, public health programs, and they need to build more shelters for their homeless. In today’s society, homeless are looked at as the bottom of the feeder chain, but when we do that, we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance. 1: http://www.greyhilladvisors.com/gross-metropolitan-product/ http://www.greyhilladvisors.com/gross-metropolitan-product/
- briffle 7y ago
  I agree with you in principal, but at the same time: > we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance. Where I live, the groups of car campers (or often times falling apart RV's) seem to attract crime, drug use, theft, vandalism, etc. I stopped going to one park in the middle of a city with a large group of car campers, when I found a used syringe in the fenced in dog play area, and saw two different heroin deals go down while playing with my dog. (one of them involved prostitution right in the back seat of the car in the middle of a city park)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- drak0n1c 7y ago
  Intervention and interning street addicts in rehab centers is a very effective program for Rhode Island. They prosecute drug crimes and misdemeanors, and offer a choice between prison or rehab. Many people who go through the program say it saved their life. West coast states have similar alternative drug courts and rehab available, but they are underutilized, because there is no prosecution in the regular court system and therefore no incentive.
opwieurposiu 7y ago
My modest proposal: A homeless man and a deer are about the same weight, and of similar nutritional value. When either deer or homeless overpopulate an area they cause damage in similar ways. Feces, fur, needles, shed antlers littering the parks. Public fighting among the males esp during the rut. A hazard to traffic is created by incautious walking in the roadways. Deer populations are successfully managed by selling hunting licenses, let us do the same with hobos. I can assure you hobo tongue is quite a delicacy (brine for 1hr to remove tobacco taste). Let us once and for all legalize the sport of hunting the deadliest game!
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't do this here. Imagine if Swift had had internet comments on his pamphlet.
rolltiide 7y ago
Northwest and West coast governments have acknowledged that the current legal deterrents and consequences do more harm than good: fines being impossible to collect alongside being inadequate deterrent, jail and prison exacerbating the situation and not resulting in holding people for very long anyway. Costing taxpayers even more when they do hold people for long. They have not reached consensus on what to replace the deterrents with, so now there is a void and no oxygen to even criticize the outcome.
weeksie 7y ago
You guys could also build some shelters.
loeg 7y ago
Also a Seattle resident; I don't think you speak for all Seattlites.
- StudentStuff 7y ago
  Ditto, there is a certain subset that feels unsafe in the city (like the cop that did an AMA on Reddit about how he doesn't feel safe on 3rd avenue without his gun) despite its relative safety. Some of these people, like the aformentioned cop, are a danger to those around them due to this mindset. As a kid I caught busses every day on 3rd Ave without a problem, and yes, the same open drug dealing still happens at 3rd & Pine (by the crackDonalds), but that has been going on since before I moved here in 2003. When I transfer there now, not much has changed in terms of the people you'll see. The level of danger hasn't changed, but the homelessness crisis has worsened and become much more visible as we fenced off the underside of bridges, replaced parking in the inner suburbs with bike lanes (in large part to push the van dwellers out) and rent has increased. We have an opioid crisis that is going untreated, high rents and few middle income jobs. Our society is stratifying badly between the 90% that is getting poorer every year (and feels no hope) and the 10% that are able to afford rent in prime cities.
  - Klonoar 7y ago
    I live a block away from 3rd and am amazed anytime people think it's that bad - I legit walk my dogs there every night from 11 - 3AM. It just feels like a neutered version of any other city, the police presence there is always intense due to the tourists at Pike Place. Pioneer Square, however... whole different story.
    - StudentStuff 7y ago
      If anything, Seattle cleans up during the night. Its safer to walk and wander around at night as compared to the daytime.
  - qvrjuec 7y ago
    I'm sorry, but if you feel safe around places like 3rd and Pine you are being ignorant and I think you are minimizing in bad faith the danger that exists in these places. See this: https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/5-people-shot-2-seriously-injured-in-downtown-seattle-shooting/281-350611854 https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/5-people-shot-2-ser... Indiscriminately firing a gun into a crowd of people seems like something that a reasonable person should be wary of.
russdpale 7y ago
This sounds like something right out of the "Seattle is dying" propaganda documentary that released lately. Living in White Center, I don't experience any of this. People act like its the lower 9th ward or chiraq or the walking dead around here, and it just isn't. Seattle, by itself, cannot solve the homeless problem, we can only hope to maintain it to some extent, many of its root causes are far outside of our city limits. 80% of our nation is paycheck to paycheck, until that changes neither will homelessness. We need more housing of all kinds immediately, even if it means imminent domain, and we need clean needle facilities. We also need to give the wealthiest employers in king county a choice, pay better wages or get taxed, and ownership and investors must take the pay cut and the cost cannot be passed to the consumer. Landlords need to have some limits, they are driving the costs up enormously. Free markets were supposed to be free from usury and rentiering, not protections for them.
- max76 7y ago
  I live in Seattle, and have for years. I’ve lived in several different cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and South. King County has one of the highest minimum wages in the United States. There are several organizations giving out clean needles in King County. We are building new housing at a very rapid rate and many areas of the county were upzoned just this year so we can build even more housing. To me your comment is asking for us to do more of what we are already doing, even though what we are doing is barely slowing the growth of homelessness. There is no amount of taxation on businesses the city, county and state can impose that will provide a home for everyone that needs it. This approach will not produce positive change.
  - russdpale 7y ago
    I have no idea how you got that from my comment. No where did I say we need to shuffle people around the city forever as we currently do. The city can only do so much (the up-zoning was badly needed), the state won't act, the federal government obviously won't act primarily because of attitudes such as yours, so the problem persists meanwhile you wonder why nothing changes. Our national economy is a ponzi scheme, and our homeless are its primary victims. Until we solve the scheming, the homeless problem will only get worse.
xenocyon 7y ago
It's not OK to oppose drug legalization merely because one wishes to find ways to criminalize homelessness.
Klonoar 7y ago
I live here too, and I disagree with you - this is a symptom of an entirely different problem. We should not be screwing people's lives over for simple possession, the rest is the same homeless problem that every city has nowadays.
itslennysfault 7y ago
What do you propose? Cracking down on homeless people. Heavy fines and jail time? Is that somehow going to make them less homeless? The only viable answer is programs like what this article is talking about. Providing consoling/rehab services and helping people turn their lives around one at a time. There is no blanket solution. These are individuals that are suffering and trapped in a cycle. If you think violently oppressing the already downtrodden is a good solution please leave and go to another city. This is probably not the place for you.

CodeMage 7y ago

Could someone please explain what it means to "encourage homelessness"? At a first glance, it looks like a passive aggressive implication that homeless people, if they just tried harder, wouldn't be homeless. Can anyone help me see what I'm missing?

SkyBelow 7y ago
Maybe attracting homeless would be a better way of putting it. Homeless people aren't inherently irrational. Given an option, many of them will choose a place they like better than one they don't. Add in politicians who see a chance to solve the issue by encouraging the homeless to move somewhere better for them (which lets them even sell the measure as a benefit for the homeless), it means that places that make it much better to be homeless see homeless from other areas moving in.
- missingcolours 7y ago
  The King County homeless census[1] found the overwhelming majority of homeless in the area were living in the area before becoming homeless. [1] http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/ http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/
  - rdtwo 7y ago
    That data is highly disputed. The question had a significantly lower response rate, and living could mean on a couch etc.
    - russdpale 7y ago
      80% of our population lives paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford a 400 dollar car repair bill. That is instant homelessness for a lot of people. So much wealth is hoarded in so few hands that we are squandering vast amounts of economic potential.
      - jdminhbg 7y ago
        This is a myth: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-400-emergency-expense-story-is-wrong https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40...
        kelnos 7y ago
        Thanks for posting this. I've been repeating this stat quite a bit lately without knowing that it's misleading. However, I still think we're in pretty dire straits: > The report finds, in 2018, that 61% of adults would cover a $400 unexpected expense using cash (or its equivalent). Politicians and many in the media seem to be subtracting 61 from 100, and concluding that 39% of people, to use Warren’s phrase, “can’t come up with” the money they’d need to handle this situation. > Instead, as the Fed report makes clear, though “the remaining 4 in 10 adults” “would have more difficulty covering such an expense,” many of them would be able to make it work by carrying a credit card balance or borrowing from friends and family." That's still really bad. 39% of people can't cover an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing money from someone else, or effectively taking out a loan at 20%+ interest. And the 12-14% figure for people who actually would be unable to come up with that $400 via any means is also troubling.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
dogmatic_di 7y ago
I can elaborate. Enforcement of basic car camping and drug possession/use laws has basically gone to zero and as a result there is a sense that Seattle has opened itself up as a "Risk Free Zone" for homelessness. Stories like https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/just-sickening-man-accused-of-raping-a-woman-in-restroom-of-ballard-car-dealership/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/just-sickeni... have created a sentiment that people are moving to Seattle because of this. While I can't speak to the truth of the belief that people are actively moving to Seattle, I can say that there's little incentive for someone to follow basic property or drug laws in this city. EDIT: To your point on how this differs from "Homeless people are lazy" I guess the idea is that we've created a situation where there are even more factors pushing homeless individuals to the streets and suburbs of Seattle, that Seattle has made homelessness more attractive in a sense.
- shaki-dora 7y ago
  It's a bit cynical to call homelessness "risk free" in any sense of the term. You seem to be arguing for criminalising poverty. That's going to work just as well as criminalising stupidity, short-sightedness, death, or losing your car keys.
- notJim 7y ago
  > To your point on how this differs from "Homeless people are lazy" I guess the idea is that we've created a situation where there are even more factors pushing homeless individuals to the streets and suburbs of Seattle, that Seattle has made homelessness more attractive in a sense. I'm sorry, but this makes no sense to me. The best data we have indicates that most homeless people are from the area, so I don't think there's any evidence to support the idea that people are moving here from elsewhere. The idea that homelessness is "attractive" is even more absurd. Do you seriously believe that if we just criminalized people a bit more, they'd simply stop choosing to be homeless?
- CodeMage 7y ago
  > Enforcement of basic car camping and drug possession/use laws has basically gone to zero and as a result there is a sense that Seattle has opened itself up as a "Risk Free Zone" for homelessness. Again, I find this logic to be extremely confusing. How related is "car camping" to Seattle's homeless? Is there some implication that the majority of them have cars they sleep in? Or am I missing something there? As for the incentive to follow basic property or drug laws, again, how does that encourage homelessness? I could understand if you argued it encourages crime, but why homelessness? The only remaining argument is basically "this encourages already homeless people to move to Seattle", which I can see being a problem, but of a different kind. It shares certain aspects with the immigration-related problems: in both cases, it's an effect of a deeper underlying problem that acts as a root cause and should be solved.
dahdum 7y ago
One example is decriminalizing possession of heroin / crack, which makes it far easier and safer for dealers (who can hold below the limits and resupply frequently), which then increases the availability and drives down the price (less risk) of those drugs. Ignoring petty crime increases it as well. Important to note that it’s often a funnel, homelessness -> addiction, so you have to work on both sides. I don’t have the perfect solution, nobody seems to, but Seattle and a few other cities seem to be going down the wrong path with vigor.
- mrnobody_67 7y ago
  Canada prescribes Heroin to some addicts... costly, $24K/year, but potentially ROI positive given the break-ins, petty crime, and cost of responding to it (police, insurance costs, etc.)
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    With methadone programs being about 1/4 the cost. Probably lots of room to cut costs too.
sdfsafsafas 7y ago
If you permit the assumption that homeless are more likely to engage in criminal activity [0], the city of Seattle has significantly reduced enforcement of crime, including violent crime. Therefore, ppl who would otherwise being in jail for crimes are living on the streets. There was a documentary about this done by a local Seattle TV station. I don't know how reliable it is, but at the end it actually gave fairly humanitarian and progressive solution to the problem, despite spending most of the show arguing lax and progressive policing attitudes created the problem to begin with [1] [0] by, a criminal being more likely to become homeless, or by desperation driving the homeless to crime [1] Their proposed solution, inspired by a program in RI (? maybe ME), is to treat drug addiction as a disease to be treated by having effective programs.
- seniorsassycat 7y ago
  'Seattle is Dying' was produced by KOMO, which is owned by Sinclair, the largest broadcast company in the USA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
moduspol 7y ago
We had a post here last week about soda taxes in Philadelphia and it seemed like common sense that by making sugary drinks more expensive, you are encouraging people to consume it less, which results in fewer people drinking it. We can discuss this with no implication that there's a static amount of soda consumption in the world, or that people want to be obese from consuming it. We understand life is a series of choices, "when to consume sugary drinks" makes up some of them, and that by disincentivizing that choice, people are more likely to choose a different beverage. Nobody "chooses" homelessness, but like anything else, becoming / staying homeless often is the result of numerous choices, some of which are easier than others for various reasons. When you artificially remove bad consequences from some of those choices, it is not surprising that those choices are made more often.
- threwawasy1228 7y ago
  You are missing the point, it isn't that simple. Doing the opposite might keep cities cleaner or reduce crime but the cost is significantly higher to maintain. A prison population is a social service that is incredibly expensive, the more enforcement there is, the more expensive it is per body. This doesn't solve the problem it just costs the taxpayer more for another non-solution.
  - moduspol 7y ago
    My argument didn't even address costs. Did you mean to respond to another comment? This does seem to be a topic that is (for whatever reason) very difficult to have a straightforward conversation about.
- filoleg 7y ago
  The big difference is, you can simply stop consuming soda drinks if the habit becomes too expensive, but if you are a homeless person, you cannot really just stop being homeless.
  - moduspol 7y ago
    The claim isn't that you can "just stop being homeless." > Nobody "chooses" homelessness, but like anything else, becoming / staying homeless often is the result of numerous choices, some of which are easier than others for various reasons. When you artificially remove bad consequences from some of those choices, it is not surprising that those choices are made more often. Consuming soda is just one way people can become obese. The problem is obesity. If you are an obese person, you may not really be able to "just stop" being obese, but if policy leads to people choosing healthier beverages, it helps fight obesity. ...and the opposite is true, too. It would not be difficult to imagine what might happen if we subsidized soda until it was free, for example. Except we probably wouldn't have advocates claiming that because nobody wants to be obese, the incentives can't possibly be affecting the increase in soda consumption.
notJim 7y ago
This is right-wing rhetoric from people who seem to think the solution to homelessness is to throw them all in jail. Wait sorry, they don't have the "perfect solution," but they're certain it involves police and jail. And they're sure all the homeless people moved here from elsewhere, despite the data to the contrary.
privateSFacct 7y ago
There are different approaches here. One approach includes both reward / consequence. In this model, things like theft, various forms of violence particularly in shelter or public housing violence, even taking over extremely large areas of public space (ie, 3-4 tents plus dogs plus...) results in consequences, while avoiding issues along the above lines results in rewards (ie, eligibility for service or additional service). In addition, these approaches tend to also consider impact on the non-homeless (ie, prison time linked arguably with a reduced risk of property crime) Other models are focused primarily on making life as bearable as possible for the homeless - basically the straight service model. Under this model, resources are provided and consequences are reduced in the event to solve homelessness. Some folks going through the tougher love systems (ie, jail vs rehab etc) say good things, other folks ask how can homelessness be criminalized and focus primarily on reducing risk of govt involvement (this can also save money in some cases - prison is expensive, rehab is expensive etc).
malandrew 7y ago
Human beings are motivated both intrinsically and extrinsically. Adding support for an activity provides extrinsic motivation for doing something. Basically, cities get what they pay for. If you pay for homelessness you get it. That said, I'm not saying we shouldn't help people, but that we should make sure that whatever support we provides guides people towards self sufficiency and not dependence. “The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber, ... To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.” – FDR 1935
itslennysfault 7y ago
You're not missing anything. A lot of people just want the problem gone and somehow think that being tougher on the already downtrodden is a viable solution. You can fine and jail the homeless and it's not going to make them any less homeless. The only solution is exactly the kind of thing this article is talking about. Providing consoling / rehab services and helping people turn their lives around one by one. There is no blanket solution.

CaptainZapp 7y ago

Sounds a bit like Zurich in the 80s and 90s[1] The problem was, while not solved, massively improved by providing heroin to hardcore addicts[2] The only argument against it, really, is that it's morally wrong to hand out drugs to addicts. Leaving this argument aside the approach was (and is) widely successful. Not only for the city, as such, but also for the addicts who get a chance to stabilize their lifes, are much healthier and actually can hold down appartments and jobs. [1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/extern/storytelling/needletrauma/chapter1/ https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/extern/storytelling/needletraum... [2] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-12/us-can-learn-lot-zurich-about-how-fight-its-heroin-crisis https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-12/us-can-learn-lot-zuri...

tempguy9999 7y ago
Further <https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/05/the-case-for-prescription-heroin/> https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/05/the-case-for-prescriptio... A short read, a couple of pages. Extract: " The [heroin] addicts on prescriptions, by contrast, looked like the nurses or receptionists or Dr Marks himself. As a group, you couldn’t tell. Faced with this evidence, Marks was beginning to believe that many ‘of the harms of drugs are to do with the laws around them, not the drugs themselves’. In the clinic, as Russell Newcombe tells me, they started to call the infections and abscesses and amputations ‘drug war wounds’. So Dr Marks began to wonder: if prescription is so effective, why don’t we do it more? He expanded his heroin prescription programme from a dozen people to more than 400. The first people to notice an effect were the local police. Inspector Michael Lofts studied 142 heroin and cocaine addicts in the area, and he found there was a 93 per cent drop in theft and burglary. ‘You could see them transform in front of your own eyes,’ Lofts told a newspaper, amazed. ‘They came in in outrageous condition, stealing daily to pay for illegal drugs; and became, most of them, very amiable, reasonable law-abiding people.’ He said elsewhere: ‘Since the clinics opened, the street heroin dealer has slowly but surely abandoned the streets of Warrington and Widnes.’ One day a young mother called Julia Scott came into Dr Marks’s surgery and explained she had been working as a prostitute to support her habit. He wrote her a prescription, and she stopped sex work that day. " Just a perspective, not saying right or wrong. Edit: added this: " And something nobody predicted took place. The number of heroin addicts in the area actually fell. Research published by Dr Marks in the Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh compared Widnes, which had a heroin clinic, to the very similar Liverpool borough of Bootle, which didn’t — and found Widnes had 12 times fewer addicts. "

docbrown 7y ago

If homelessness is a problem, why should the alternative be to put them in jail or prison? For something as simple as car camping, it seems like an unjustifiable punishment for a simple offense. Without getting into much of a semantics argument, this post itself puts off a sense of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” attitude when it comes to homelessness. In a city that has a GDP of $231 billion in 2010[1], it seems ineffective to punish the homeless instead of trying to rid the city of the problem in a more productive manner than hauling offenders away. While public consumption of drugs should still be a citational offense, the simple possession of a drug should not be a jail sentence. There are many users that have deeper issues that need to be worked out to rid them of their addiction and putting them into confinement is not always the most effective way. Seattle needs to invest in safe injection sites, public health programs, and they need to build more shelters for their homeless. In today’s society, homeless are looked at as the bottom of the feeder chain, but when we do that, we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance. 1: http://www.greyhilladvisors.com/gross-metropolitan-product/ http://www.greyhilladvisors.com/gross-metropolitan-product/

briffle 7y ago
I agree with you in principal, but at the same time: > we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance. Where I live, the groups of car campers (or often times falling apart RV's) seem to attract crime, drug use, theft, vandalism, etc. I stopped going to one park in the middle of a city with a large group of car campers, when I found a used syringe in the fenced in dog play area, and saw two different heroin deals go down while playing with my dog. (one of them involved prostitution right in the back seat of the car in the middle of a city park)
- deleted 7y ago
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drak0n1c 7y ago
Intervention and interning street addicts in rehab centers is a very effective program for Rhode Island. They prosecute drug crimes and misdemeanors, and offer a choice between prison or rehab. Many people who go through the program say it saved their life. West coast states have similar alternative drug courts and rehab available, but they are underutilized, because there is no prosecution in the regular court system and therefore no incentive.

opwieurposiu 7y ago

My modest proposal: A homeless man and a deer are about the same weight, and of similar nutritional value. When either deer or homeless overpopulate an area they cause damage in similar ways. Feces, fur, needles, shed antlers littering the parks. Public fighting among the males esp during the rut. A hazard to traffic is created by incautious walking in the roadways. Deer populations are successfully managed by selling hunting licenses, let us do the same with hobos. I can assure you hobo tongue is quite a delicacy (brine for 1hr to remove tobacco taste). Let us once and for all legalize the sport of hunting the deadliest game!

dang 7y ago
Please don't do this here. Imagine if Swift had had internet comments on his pamphlet.

rolltiide 7y ago

Northwest and West coast governments have acknowledged that the current legal deterrents and consequences do more harm than good: fines being impossible to collect alongside being inadequate deterrent, jail and prison exacerbating the situation and not resulting in holding people for very long anyway. Costing taxpayers even more when they do hold people for long. They have not reached consensus on what to replace the deterrents with, so now there is a void and no oxygen to even criticize the outcome.

weeksie 7y ago

You guys could also build some shelters.

loeg 7y ago

Also a Seattle resident; I don't think you speak for all Seattlites.

StudentStuff 7y ago
Ditto, there is a certain subset that feels unsafe in the city (like the cop that did an AMA on Reddit about how he doesn't feel safe on 3rd avenue without his gun) despite its relative safety. Some of these people, like the aformentioned cop, are a danger to those around them due to this mindset. As a kid I caught busses every day on 3rd Ave without a problem, and yes, the same open drug dealing still happens at 3rd & Pine (by the crackDonalds), but that has been going on since before I moved here in 2003. When I transfer there now, not much has changed in terms of the people you'll see. The level of danger hasn't changed, but the homelessness crisis has worsened and become much more visible as we fenced off the underside of bridges, replaced parking in the inner suburbs with bike lanes (in large part to push the van dwellers out) and rent has increased. We have an opioid crisis that is going untreated, high rents and few middle income jobs. Our society is stratifying badly between the 90% that is getting poorer every year (and feels no hope) and the 10% that are able to afford rent in prime cities.
- Klonoar 7y ago
  I live a block away from 3rd and am amazed anytime people think it's that bad - I legit walk my dogs there every night from 11 - 3AM. It just feels like a neutered version of any other city, the police presence there is always intense due to the tourists at Pike Place. Pioneer Square, however... whole different story.
  - StudentStuff 7y ago
    If anything, Seattle cleans up during the night. Its safer to walk and wander around at night as compared to the daytime.
- qvrjuec 7y ago
  I'm sorry, but if you feel safe around places like 3rd and Pine you are being ignorant and I think you are minimizing in bad faith the danger that exists in these places. See this: https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/5-people-shot-2-seriously-injured-in-downtown-seattle-shooting/281-350611854 https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/5-people-shot-2-ser... Indiscriminately firing a gun into a crowd of people seems like something that a reasonable person should be wary of.

russdpale 7y ago

This sounds like something right out of the "Seattle is dying" propaganda documentary that released lately. Living in White Center, I don't experience any of this. People act like its the lower 9th ward or chiraq or the walking dead around here, and it just isn't. Seattle, by itself, cannot solve the homeless problem, we can only hope to maintain it to some extent, many of its root causes are far outside of our city limits. 80% of our nation is paycheck to paycheck, until that changes neither will homelessness. We need more housing of all kinds immediately, even if it means imminent domain, and we need clean needle facilities. We also need to give the wealthiest employers in king county a choice, pay better wages or get taxed, and ownership and investors must take the pay cut and the cost cannot be passed to the consumer. Landlords need to have some limits, they are driving the costs up enormously. Free markets were supposed to be free from usury and rentiering, not protections for them.

max76 7y ago
I live in Seattle, and have for years. I’ve lived in several different cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and South. King County has one of the highest minimum wages in the United States. There are several organizations giving out clean needles in King County. We are building new housing at a very rapid rate and many areas of the county were upzoned just this year so we can build even more housing. To me your comment is asking for us to do more of what we are already doing, even though what we are doing is barely slowing the growth of homelessness. There is no amount of taxation on businesses the city, county and state can impose that will provide a home for everyone that needs it. This approach will not produce positive change.
- russdpale 7y ago
  I have no idea how you got that from my comment. No where did I say we need to shuffle people around the city forever as we currently do. The city can only do so much (the up-zoning was badly needed), the state won't act, the federal government obviously won't act primarily because of attitudes such as yours, so the problem persists meanwhile you wonder why nothing changes. Our national economy is a ponzi scheme, and our homeless are its primary victims. Until we solve the scheming, the homeless problem will only get worse.

xenocyon 7y ago

It's not OK to oppose drug legalization merely because one wishes to find ways to criminalize homelessness.

Klonoar 7y ago

I live here too, and I disagree with you - this is a symptom of an entirely different problem. We should not be screwing people's lives over for simple possession, the rest is the same homeless problem that every city has nowadays.

itslennysfault 7y ago

What do you propose? Cracking down on homeless people. Heavy fines and jail time? Is that somehow going to make them less homeless? The only viable answer is programs like what this article is talking about. Providing consoling/rehab services and helping people turn their lives around one at a time. There is no blanket solution. These are individuals that are suffering and trapped in a cycle. If you think violently oppressing the already downtrodden is a good solution please leave and go to another city. This is probably not the place for you.