8 ms·

At least part of the cause of the visible squalor we see in Seattle is that the tough-on-crime crowd has consistently opposed safe injection, harm reduction, tr

At least part of the cause of the visible squalor we see in Seattle is that the tough-on-crime crowd has consistently opposed safe injection, harm reduction, trash pickup, housing-first, and other evidence-based policies in favor of expensive, inhumane, and pointless measures like sweeps and incarceration. Any measure the city government takes that is not overtly cruel gets slammed as coddling the homeless or "attracting" homeless to the city, despite the fact that the data show this trope to be a fiction.

refurb 7y ago
Tough on crimes folks oppose trash pick-up? Really?
- xenocyon 7y ago
  Yep, the argument I've heard is that it legitimizes encampments. Additionally I suspect people are outraged by the notion that homeless people could get trash pickup for free from the city when housed people have to pay for theirs - even though it would be a lot cheaper than sweeps.
- rdtwo 7y ago
  I think it’s more of a liability problem. Once the city starts garbage cleaning the city becomes exposed to liability from the encampment because it can be argued that its sanctioned now.
- lacker 7y ago
  I imagine a conversation like: Q: What should we do about this homeless encampment? The options are: 1. Provide it with free trash pickup so that it's a slightly nicer place to live and to be around 2. Shut it down, remove the tents as well as the trash, make the inhabitants move elsewhere And then I would expect the "tough on crimes" crowd would prefer option #2 to option #1.
  - refurb 7y ago
    That makes more sense. I read it as “opposed to trash pick-up in general” and then thought “who the hell would be opposed to that?”
ianai 7y ago
“some would prefer to see the police cart drug users off to jail to get them out of the way” (article) It seems like creating housing projects for these people would be cheaper and more beneficial to society than increasing the prison population. I’d like to see something like dorms with shared restrooms, cafeterias, and such facilities. It’d create work and demand locally while keeping the streets clean.
- ericfrenkiel 7y ago
  As long as it is outside city limits, but operated as a city extension, in something like a rural environment, I think this is a great idea.
  - moate 7y ago
    Why is removing this from the city central to your support?
    - rdtwo 7y ago
      Probably because the neighboring cities aren’t doing their fair share. Need to spread the pain to all the local cities and counties
    - ericfrenkiel 7y ago
      To effectively clean up the city. You can’t have tent encampments in cities, which leads to refuse build up, which brings the rats, which spread typhoid. Yes, this is a fact, and yes this is right now a current problem facing Los Angeles. If resources can be distributed outside city limits which are paid for by city taxpayers, city residents can see a return on their taxes with cleaner, safer neighborhoods. For those who are not drug addicts or bums, but need help to get back on their feet, those are the individuals who should be offered beds and resources in the city.
- npo9 7y ago
  I am anti housing projects. To me, creating a housing projects is like sweeping the problem under the rug. It concentrates poverty and crime into the area in/around the projects.
rayiner 7y ago
I'm anti-incarceration for moral reasons, but it's not clear to me that there is a definitive consensus that incarceration does not work. See: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan02/w8489.html https://www.nber.org/digest/jan02/w8489.html > "Annual expenditures of approximately $10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity attributable to illegal drug use, even ignoring any crime reductions associated with such incarceration." (The above is from a study conducted by a prominent U Chicago economist and another economist who is now at Princeton.) It’s really very complicated. One of the macro trends over the last few decades is a massive increase in crime from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, then a decrease since then. Incarceration started increasing in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to that increase in crime. When crime started coming down in the 1990s, incarceration started coming down about ten years behind that in the 2000s. Nobody really knows why crime started dropping in the 1990s. Some people think that the reduction is attributable to the banning of leaded gasoline. Maybe. But I don’t think studied have ruled out the notion that the reduction is attributable to putting a large number of people in prison. See: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/089533004773563485 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/089533004773563485 > Crime fell sharply and unexpectedly in the 1990s. Four factors appear to explain the drop in crime: increased incarceration, more police, the decline of crack and legalized abortion. It’s not an area where you can point to a definitive consensus, and everyone interprets the data to fit their own political views.
- lacker 7y ago
  I'm anti-incarceration for moral reasons There is also a middle ground, where you can think that drugs should generally be legalized, but incarcerating people for non-drug crimes is a good idea. The problem isn't really people doing drugs. It's people breaking into cars, damaging property left in public, trespassing, assaulting other people, leaving big public piles of trash, things that fall into the "harming other people" category of crime.
  - anaisbetts 7y ago
    At the end of the day though, the people breaking into cars are usually doing so because they have no other reasonable means to sustain themselves, or they are compelled to do so because of drug addiction. The long-term _solution_, is to remove these obstacles. In other words, middle-class employed people who are safe in their environment don't really commit crimes - why would they? The best way to solve crime In General is to make more people like that. Now granted, there are some people that would _still_ commit crimes even though they don't need to - this is the place where punitive solutions are appropriate, to make it not worth their while.
jyrkesh 7y ago
I had a conversation with someone the other day who made many of the same arguments as you. I agreed with some of it--namely that around safe injection, harm reduction, methadone (et al) clinics, etc.--but I had a hard time stomaching the idea that "housing first" was a good idea, in that if you take a drug addict and put them in a home, they're still a drug addict who can't contribute meaningfully to society. Would you mind pointing to some of those studies/evidence so I can be a little more informed about the whole thing? EDIT: Found one further down, but would love to see any others you have: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.94.4.651 https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.94.4...
- adt2bt 7y ago
  On the flip side, I have a hard time imagining how a homeless drug addict will be able to kick drugs while on the street and then somehow find a house and then become a 'meaningful' member of society without support. They basically have two problems: no house and a drug addiction. Fixing the 'no house' problem without tying it to drug addiction is a step towards normalcy.
  - daseiner1 7y ago
    Offering a choice of jail time or compulsory residence in drug treatment facility seems like a good compromise
- tehjoker 7y ago
  I don't like the framing of this premise that you need to "contribute to society" in order to not be exposed to the elements and have a safe place to retreat. Do people working on ads contribute to society? What about middle managers of middle managers? What about the people on golf courses that basically spend money to make other people do shit for them? Furthermore, we cannot dehumanize our fellow humans even if they use drugs. The result of such framing is vicious savagery as is seen in America, the Philippines, and other places around the world.
  - joenot443 7y ago
drak0n1c 7y ago
Having both the serious possibility of prosecution while offering the alternative of entering a drug treatment facility and emerging with a cleared history is a good compromise. People who committed petty crimes due to addiction and were compelled by the state of Rhode Island to go through such a program say that it saved their life. Intervention works and it can be done humanely.
nsxwolf 7y ago
The King County Needle Exchange is why there's needles absolutely everywhere. Safe injection won, and now you can't walk anywhere barefoot.
- LocalH 7y ago
  Needle exchange isn't safe injection btw
- seattle_spring 7y ago
  Where were you walking barefoot before that you no longer can?
blackflame7000 7y ago
What data are you talking about? Because there sure is a strong correlation between drug use and homelessness. While I think it's insane to punish people for ingesting substances that might harm them, I still don't think we should just look the other way and silently condone its use when it's actively destroying people's lives.
reallydude 7y ago
> "attracting" homeless to the city, despite the fact that the data show this trope to be a fiction. This is incorrect and I think it's constructive to address it. People talk about numbers, but it's mostly just whatever justifies their bias. Where you draw a line AND when matters when talking about this, so I believe somewhere just under 40% are from outside Seattle. I measure that if you're not from King County (for at least 1 year) before you lost your home, you've moved to it (re: http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/ http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/). Either way, homeless people do not move away to cheaper locales, but are drawn toward the city center. This is primarily due to existing support networks, convenient mobility, drug availability, tolerance, and available disposable wealth. Seattle is not special in this regard, as this behavior is see in many metropolitan centers around the world. Does it matter? No. Where people come from isn't the issue as you can't really control for the conditions...what is WA gonna do, prevent global warming from sending climate refugees up the coast? Good luck Inslee. I have observed how various cities have approached handling the homeless. I spent 5 years in Santa Cruz, CA and a decade in Santa Ana, CA where these same "issues" had been handled differently from Seattle. I'm not an expert, but I have an opinion, and I recognize that's all it is. You know who doesn't have a homeless problem? Irvine, CA. If you have a car with a bunch of caked mud on it and some dents or a blown out window, you get status-profiled (they don't admit to it, and it's not racial, but it's demonstrable) and pulled over. The Irvine Company (a family who owns most of Irvine) leverages or ships undesirables from the city and it stays that way (mostly in Costa Mesa, Laguna, etc) same as Santa Cruz did in the 90s where they would drop repeat offenders on a train to Santa Clara. Luckily(?) when a few people ended up freezing to death in their cars and the streets (over a few winters) in Santa Cruz, it came out as an official public safety policy. Draconian measures work to a degree, it seems, but mostly moving people CONSISTENTLY works. Mixing unrestricted support systems into metropolitan areas has been applied for over half a century. It sifts those who can be helped, out until you have those who cannot or will not be helped. As unpopular as it seems, I think that a city/county being allowed to export people to unincorporated areas if they break a city/county law and have no residence and aren't able to complete a work program, would solve homelessness in a more humane manner. If you don't want to participate in society, homestead the land or run your way back and start over. Either way, it doesn't fill more jail cells. Yes people may die, just as people die now, but without putting residents at risk.
cavisne 7y ago
Who is this "crowd". Seattle politics has been absolutely dominated by people who support all these things. Last week I saw 2 people shooting up on the brand new deck of pike place market, essentially the biggest tourist attraction in Seattle. Are you honestly claiming that if only they had a safe injection site and some housing that allowed drug use that that wouldn't happen? Drug addicts don't care about any of that stuff, they want to get it in their veins asap, and now that its effectively legal they can do this 24/7.
amscanne 7y ago
> At least part of the cause of the visible squalor we see in Seattle is that the tough-on-crime crowd has consistently opposed safe injection, harm reduction, trash pickup, housing-first, and other evidence-based policies in favor of expensive, inhumane, and pointless measures like sweeps and incarceration. Any measure the city government takes that is not overtly cruel gets slammed as coddling the homeless or "attracting" homeless to the city, despite the fact that the data show this trope to be a fiction. What data are you referring to? Governments in the Seattle area manage to spend over a billion dollars each year on the homeless problem. With about 10,000 people, that’s about $100,000 per person per year (both numbers are 2017). And they only house about 50%, which means $200,000 per person housed in temporary or permanent housing. Somehow New York City houses 80% of a larger homeless population (60,000) for around $50,000 per person. They are three times more effective with their money. People should be yelling. The data does suggest that policies on the west coast are expensive and ineffective. They aren’t good for anyone. I think the author of this post [1] makes greats points about the problems of unlimited compassion. Looking at the numbers really changes how I feel about the tent city down the street from me. [1] https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness
asdff 7y ago
There are people who are mentally ill, addicted to drugs, and/or abused. The streets are no place to heal these wounds, they are a place for them to fester. Modern asylums and rehab centers should be built, along with shelter space with counseling and medical services. Leaving people to rot on the street for even an instant longer is abhorrently inhumane, and the local government officials in charge of our west coast cities should just resign, since they so clearly lack any empathy or rational thinking.

refurb 7y ago

Tough on crimes folks oppose trash pick-up? Really?

xenocyon 7y ago
Yep, the argument I've heard is that it legitimizes encampments. Additionally I suspect people are outraged by the notion that homeless people could get trash pickup for free from the city when housed people have to pay for theirs - even though it would be a lot cheaper than sweeps.
rdtwo 7y ago
I think it’s more of a liability problem. Once the city starts garbage cleaning the city becomes exposed to liability from the encampment because it can be argued that its sanctioned now.
lacker 7y ago
I imagine a conversation like: Q: What should we do about this homeless encampment? The options are: 1. Provide it with free trash pickup so that it's a slightly nicer place to live and to be around 2. Shut it down, remove the tents as well as the trash, make the inhabitants move elsewhere And then I would expect the "tough on crimes" crowd would prefer option #2 to option #1.
- refurb 7y ago
  That makes more sense. I read it as “opposed to trash pick-up in general” and then thought “who the hell would be opposed to that?”

ianai 7y ago

“some would prefer to see the police cart drug users off to jail to get them out of the way” (article) It seems like creating housing projects for these people would be cheaper and more beneficial to society than increasing the prison population. I’d like to see something like dorms with shared restrooms, cafeterias, and such facilities. It’d create work and demand locally while keeping the streets clean.

ericfrenkiel 7y ago
As long as it is outside city limits, but operated as a city extension, in something like a rural environment, I think this is a great idea.
- moate 7y ago
  Why is removing this from the city central to your support?
  - rdtwo 7y ago
    Probably because the neighboring cities aren’t doing their fair share. Need to spread the pain to all the local cities and counties
  - ericfrenkiel 7y ago
    To effectively clean up the city. You can’t have tent encampments in cities, which leads to refuse build up, which brings the rats, which spread typhoid. Yes, this is a fact, and yes this is right now a current problem facing Los Angeles. If resources can be distributed outside city limits which are paid for by city taxpayers, city residents can see a return on their taxes with cleaner, safer neighborhoods. For those who are not drug addicts or bums, but need help to get back on their feet, those are the individuals who should be offered beds and resources in the city.
npo9 7y ago
I am anti housing projects. To me, creating a housing projects is like sweeping the problem under the rug. It concentrates poverty and crime into the area in/around the projects.

rayiner 7y ago

I'm anti-incarceration for moral reasons, but it's not clear to me that there is a definitive consensus that incarceration does not work. See: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan02/w8489.html https://www.nber.org/digest/jan02/w8489.html > "Annual expenditures of approximately $10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity attributable to illegal drug use, even ignoring any crime reductions associated with such incarceration." (The above is from a study conducted by a prominent U Chicago economist and another economist who is now at Princeton.) It’s really very complicated. One of the macro trends over the last few decades is a massive increase in crime from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, then a decrease since then. Incarceration started increasing in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to that increase in crime. When crime started coming down in the 1990s, incarceration started coming down about ten years behind that in the 2000s. Nobody really knows why crime started dropping in the 1990s. Some people think that the reduction is attributable to the banning of leaded gasoline. Maybe. But I don’t think studied have ruled out the notion that the reduction is attributable to putting a large number of people in prison. See: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/089533004773563485 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/089533004773563485 > Crime fell sharply and unexpectedly in the 1990s. Four factors appear to explain the drop in crime: increased incarceration, more police, the decline of crack and legalized abortion. It’s not an area where you can point to a definitive consensus, and everyone interprets the data to fit their own political views.

lacker 7y ago
I'm anti-incarceration for moral reasons There is also a middle ground, where you can think that drugs should generally be legalized, but incarcerating people for non-drug crimes is a good idea. The problem isn't really people doing drugs. It's people breaking into cars, damaging property left in public, trespassing, assaulting other people, leaving big public piles of trash, things that fall into the "harming other people" category of crime.
- anaisbetts 7y ago
  At the end of the day though, the people breaking into cars are usually doing so because they have no other reasonable means to sustain themselves, or they are compelled to do so because of drug addiction. The long-term _solution_, is to remove these obstacles. In other words, middle-class employed people who are safe in their environment don't really commit crimes - why would they? The best way to solve crime In General is to make more people like that. Now granted, there are some people that would _still_ commit crimes even though they don't need to - this is the place where punitive solutions are appropriate, to make it not worth their while.

jyrkesh 7y ago

I had a conversation with someone the other day who made many of the same arguments as you. I agreed with some of it--namely that around safe injection, harm reduction, methadone (et al) clinics, etc.--but I had a hard time stomaching the idea that "housing first" was a good idea, in that if you take a drug addict and put them in a home, they're still a drug addict who can't contribute meaningfully to society. Would you mind pointing to some of those studies/evidence so I can be a little more informed about the whole thing? EDIT: Found one further down, but would love to see any others you have: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.94.4.651 https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.94.4...

adt2bt 7y ago
On the flip side, I have a hard time imagining how a homeless drug addict will be able to kick drugs while on the street and then somehow find a house and then become a 'meaningful' member of society without support. They basically have two problems: no house and a drug addiction. Fixing the 'no house' problem without tying it to drug addiction is a step towards normalcy.
- daseiner1 7y ago
  Offering a choice of jail time or compulsory residence in drug treatment facility seems like a good compromise
tehjoker 7y ago
I don't like the framing of this premise that you need to "contribute to society" in order to not be exposed to the elements and have a safe place to retreat. Do people working on ads contribute to society? What about middle managers of middle managers? What about the people on golf courses that basically spend money to make other people do shit for them? Furthermore, we cannot dehumanize our fellow humans even if they use drugs. The result of such framing is vicious savagery as is seen in America, the Philippines, and other places around the world.
- joenot443 7y ago

drak0n1c 7y ago

Having both the serious possibility of prosecution while offering the alternative of entering a drug treatment facility and emerging with a cleared history is a good compromise. People who committed petty crimes due to addiction and were compelled by the state of Rhode Island to go through such a program say that it saved their life. Intervention works and it can be done humanely.

nsxwolf 7y ago

The King County Needle Exchange is why there's needles absolutely everywhere. Safe injection won, and now you can't walk anywhere barefoot.

LocalH 7y ago
Needle exchange isn't safe injection btw
seattle_spring 7y ago
Where were you walking barefoot before that you no longer can?

blackflame7000 7y ago

What data are you talking about? Because there sure is a strong correlation between drug use and homelessness. While I think it's insane to punish people for ingesting substances that might harm them, I still don't think we should just look the other way and silently condone its use when it's actively destroying people's lives.

reallydude 7y ago

> "attracting" homeless to the city, despite the fact that the data show this trope to be a fiction. This is incorrect and I think it's constructive to address it. People talk about numbers, but it's mostly just whatever justifies their bias. Where you draw a line AND when matters when talking about this, so I believe somewhere just under 40% are from outside Seattle. I measure that if you're not from King County (for at least 1 year) before you lost your home, you've moved to it (re: http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/ http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/). Either way, homeless people do not move away to cheaper locales, but are drawn toward the city center. This is primarily due to existing support networks, convenient mobility, drug availability, tolerance, and available disposable wealth. Seattle is not special in this regard, as this behavior is see in many metropolitan centers around the world. Does it matter? No. Where people come from isn't the issue as you can't really control for the conditions...what is WA gonna do, prevent global warming from sending climate refugees up the coast? Good luck Inslee. I have observed how various cities have approached handling the homeless. I spent 5 years in Santa Cruz, CA and a decade in Santa Ana, CA where these same "issues" had been handled differently from Seattle. I'm not an expert, but I have an opinion, and I recognize that's all it is. You know who doesn't have a homeless problem? Irvine, CA. If you have a car with a bunch of caked mud on it and some dents or a blown out window, you get status-profiled (they don't admit to it, and it's not racial, but it's demonstrable) and pulled over. The Irvine Company (a family who owns most of Irvine) leverages or ships undesirables from the city and it stays that way (mostly in Costa Mesa, Laguna, etc) same as Santa Cruz did in the 90s where they would drop repeat offenders on a train to Santa Clara. Luckily(?) when a few people ended up freezing to death in their cars and the streets (over a few winters) in Santa Cruz, it came out as an official public safety policy. Draconian measures work to a degree, it seems, but mostly moving people CONSISTENTLY works. Mixing unrestricted support systems into metropolitan areas has been applied for over half a century. It sifts those who can be helped, out until you have those who cannot or will not be helped. As unpopular as it seems, I think that a city/county being allowed to export people to unincorporated areas if they break a city/county law and have no residence and aren't able to complete a work program, would solve homelessness in a more humane manner. If you don't want to participate in society, homestead the land or run your way back and start over. Either way, it doesn't fill more jail cells. Yes people may die, just as people die now, but without putting residents at risk.

cavisne 7y ago

Who is this "crowd". Seattle politics has been absolutely dominated by people who support all these things. Last week I saw 2 people shooting up on the brand new deck of pike place market, essentially the biggest tourist attraction in Seattle. Are you honestly claiming that if only they had a safe injection site and some housing that allowed drug use that that wouldn't happen? Drug addicts don't care about any of that stuff, they want to get it in their veins asap, and now that its effectively legal they can do this 24/7.

amscanne 7y ago

> At least part of the cause of the visible squalor we see in Seattle is that the tough-on-crime crowd has consistently opposed safe injection, harm reduction, trash pickup, housing-first, and other evidence-based policies in favor of expensive, inhumane, and pointless measures like sweeps and incarceration. Any measure the city government takes that is not overtly cruel gets slammed as coddling the homeless or "attracting" homeless to the city, despite the fact that the data show this trope to be a fiction. What data are you referring to? Governments in the Seattle area manage to spend over a billion dollars each year on the homeless problem. With about 10,000 people, that’s about $100,000 per person per year (both numbers are 2017). And they only house about 50%, which means $200,000 per person housed in temporary or permanent housing. Somehow New York City houses 80% of a larger homeless population (60,000) for around $50,000 per person. They are three times more effective with their money. People should be yelling. The data does suggest that policies on the west coast are expensive and ineffective. They aren’t good for anyone. I think the author of this post [1] makes greats points about the problems of unlimited compassion. Looking at the numbers really changes how I feel about the tent city down the street from me. [1] https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness

asdff 7y ago

There are people who are mentally ill, addicted to drugs, and/or abused. The streets are no place to heal these wounds, they are a place for them to fester. Modern asylums and rehab centers should be built, along with shelter space with counseling and medical services. Leaving people to rot on the street for even an instant longer is abhorrently inhumane, and the local government officials in charge of our west coast cities should just resign, since they so clearly lack any empathy or rational thinking.