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it's reports such as this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw that make it painfully obvious that socialism does NOT work. Most certainly NOT the type that your democrats are providing and attempting to bring to the rest of the country. Poor Seattle is the example of this video and it's perfectly well known that the likes of San Francisco and L.A. and other areas too numerous to mention in California are already there. Don't even think about giving it all away to the immigrants when you can utterly ignore the homeless issues that wreak havoc on so many areas already that need those funds. But you want it all given to the poor individuals seeking asylum in our beloved country while to let this cancer fester that is already present. Why oh why can't you just wake up
Homelessness is not limited to Seattle or LA/ San Francisco. It is a worldwide problem. As a retired Social Worker, I can tell you the major cause of homelessness is not drug use. The majority of druggies are not homeless. The majority of homeless are mentally ill. Next comes the hard luck (job loss or housing loss). And sure, some have become homeless due substance abuse
The suggestion therefore is: mental health services should be increased, but that is something many conservatives don't want to pay for and it seems to also be the case for many liberals
Homelessness is not limited to Seattle or LA/ San Francisco. It is a worldwide problem. As a retired Social Worker, I can tell you the major cause of homelessness is not drug use. The majority of druggies are not homeless. The majority of homeless are mentally ill. Next comes the hard luck (job loss or housing loss). And sure, some have become homeless due substance abuse
The suggestion therefore is: mental health services should be increased, but that is something many conservatives don't want to pay for and it seems to also be the case for many liberals
The US used to have mental hospitals and treatment for those unfortunates prior to the 1970s. Some countries Finland, Japan, Poland, Hungary, Korea, Iceland etc to take care of their unfortunate folks - even if it means higher taxes. I wonder why those countries do but the US doesn't.
It is interesting that in this video the representative of the police stated that virtually 100% of the law offenders were indeed drug dependents. So there is a huge connection there to be sure.
I completely disagree with the OP, due to my personal experience.
This weekend, while walking downtown, I passed a condo being renovated on Saturday morning. To a man, (15-ish-year-old boy, actually), the people hard at work making this previously-condemned building into a beautiful expensive living space were short, brown-skinned, and Spanish-speaking. They were clearly from "here", having the complexion and appearance of the people who have lived in the SoCal / Baja region for far longer than I (being tall, pale, and blond thanks to my Prussian ancestors). I'm sure I'm being presumptuous, but those men, and the men and women laboring in the fields I drive past every day, though being more native than I, may not have all the papers our government requires of them. I'd gladly give any one, or all in aggregate, a hand up. Subsidized health care to allow them to stay healthy, even on a day laborer's wages, subsidized schools to better their children.
Also, on my walk downtown, I passed vagrants who look more like me. Young, able-bodied, white men "working hard" sitting around holding up cardboard signs with "just hungry" written in sharpie. Track marks all up and down their arms. Bolt cutters and theives' tools in their backpacks, for supplementing the income, after the rich tourists go to bed, they get for lounging on a street corner.
Now, I don't envy anyone else's life. If I fell on hard times, I might turn to drugs to deal with sleeping on the hard ground every night. If we had unlimited resources, we should help both groups. But we don't.
In reality, money spent on vagrants, no matter their citizenship status, is money pissed down the drain. Addiction is a terminal disease, with a cure rate in the low 20%, if not lower. All the money in the world (or all the job openings in the farming, construction, and fast-food industries) is not going to transform the young white man loitering with a sign--to get drug money--into the 15-year-old Latino boy cutting blocks on a stone saw--to supplement his family income.
So I, personally, am all for spending money on our population of workers, rather than our population of vagrants, citizenship status be damned. It's just common sense to help those who are bettering our communities and contributing to our economy. Social services should only go to those who are willing to work. As for those who are making our communities worse places to live, the only help I care to give them is a bus ticket back to wherever they came from.
Homeless advocates keep massaging the numbers, to pretend it's a local problem, but the truth is that 50% or more of our homeless population moved here from elsewhere in the last 2-5 years.
So, yeah, we need to wake up and take a clear-eyed look at what is REALLY going on in our communities.
After what research I did on it, it seems indeed you are accurate. That those on the streets of Seattle are by NO means "natives" to the area. For some strange reason (don't know if it's absolutely true or not) those people got the info or word that the Seattle area was rife with a freebie attitude where they could come and get some free stuff or live unbothered in their desired lifestyle be it homeless AND drug addicted with access to safe places to shoot up and more. Unfortunately for Seattle a paid bus ride out of town would likely NOT be accepted by those offenders. You're right, they are most likely NOT going to work for a living and have denigrated themselves now to the point it's not going to happen, be it they can't due to the drugs or mentally are out of control (I hear mental illness is a huge portion of them as well). It's a mess to be sure, but sadly unless Seattle was to literally KICK them all out, have a huge clean up movement to scour all the streets of the garbage, feces, urine and non permanent type housing, it is likely to only get worse. Eventually it will be all over and very much out of control as small areas of LA have already gotten to be. it is sad indeed to see Seattle going this route. But what else can one do? Literal removal is all there is as options and then guess what........where do you think they will move to? They won't evaporate!
After what research I did on it, it seems indeed you are accurate. That those on the streets of Seattle are by NO means "natives" to the area. For some strange reason (don't know if it's absolutely true or not) those people got the info or word that the Seattle area was rife with a freebie attitude where they could come and get some free stuff or live unbothered in their desired lifestyle be it homeless AND drug addicted with access to safe places to shoot up and more. Unfortunately for Seattle a paid bus ride out of town would likely NOT be accepted by those offenders. You're right, they are most likely NOT going to work for a living and have denigrated themselves now to the point it's not going to happen, be it they can't due to the drugs or mentally are out of control (I hear mental illness is a huge portion of them as well). It's a mess to be sure, but sadly unless Seattle was to literally KICK them all out, have a huge clean up movement to scour all the streets of the garbage, feces, urine and non permanent type housing, it is likely to only get worse. Eventually it will be all over and very much out of control as small areas of LA have already gotten to be. it is sad indeed to see Seattle going this route. But what else can one do? Literal removal is all there is as options and then guess what........where do you think they will move to? They won't evaporate!
Yeah? Why don’t you share your “research” with us readers? Because I’m calling it bulltweet. Close to 90% are from the area.
Quote:
Seattle homelessness task force in 1985 under then-Mayor Charlie Royer wrote, “The City’s size, mild climate, the relative tolerance of our population and laws and the perception that it is a center of opportunity contribute to its ‘magnet effect.’ ”
It’s not just a question in Seattle. Samantha Green works for Applied Survey Research, which has conducted annual point-in-time counts of homelessness in King County as well as San Francisco, Palo Alto and Oakland in California. In every city she works with, people ask this question.
“I haven’t met a single community where people don’t say, ‘People are coming here from other places,’ ” Green said. Other researchers and leaders in the field told The Seattle Times the same thing.
... What the data say
When homeless advocates or shelter providers are asked this question, they often downplay the idea as a “magnet myth.” But there’s evidence that some homeless people come to Seattle and King County looking for help. In a survey conducted during the point-in-time count this year, about 3 percent of the more than 800 homeless people surveyed said they came to King County to access homeless services or benefits.
... Still, academics The Seattle Times spoke to agreed the survey is the best available picture of the population, and the numbers of who last had housing outside the county stay pretty consistent — usually 15 to 20 percent — across the nation, according to Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor and former director of research at the National Center on Homelessness among Veterans.
... Other West Coast cities see similar numbers, even when their surveys are conducted by universities. Some of these cities ask this question differently and get different answers. Santa Clara County, home of Palo Alto, asks homeless people how long they’ve lived in the county — not how long they lived there before becoming homeless, as King County does. The Santa Clara survey found more than 60 percent had lived there 10 years or more and five percent had lived in the county for less than one year.
... But these people in Somers’ study usually migrated from nearby cities and provinces, and the number of homeless people who migrate from even farther isn’t that large. It’s probably around 15 percent, according to a study of more than 100,000 homeless veterans from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans. It followed veterans’ migrations from 2011 to 2014, noting where their names showed up in different V.A. service networks across the country. It found around 15 percent moved into a new service network (which generally cover two to three states) in those years.
... To sum it up: There are homeless people who migrate — somewhere around 15 to 20 percent of all homeless people — but there aren’t many who migrate far beyond their home state and region. While research hasn’t definitively answered the question of how many homeless people migrate just to get help, we know that in King County, 3 percent said they did.
I can bury you in similar findings from across the nation.
The second key myth is that the homeless are “our neighbors,” native to Seattle. Progressive publications like The Stranger insist that “most people experiencing homelessness in Seattle were already here when they became homeless.” This assertion, too, clashes with empirical evidence. More than half of Seattle’s homeless come from outside the city limits, according to the city’s own data. Even this number might be vastly inflated, as the survey asks only “where respondents were living at the time they most recently became homeless”—so, for example, a person could move to Seattle, check into a motel for a week, and then start living on the streets and be considered “from Seattle.” More rigorous academic studies in San Francisco and Vancouver suggest that 40 percent to 50 percent of the homeless moved to those cities for their permissive culture and generous services. There’s no reason to believe that Seattle is different on this score.
The second key myth is that the homeless are “our neighbors,” native to Seattle. Progressive publications like The Stranger insist that “most people experiencing homelessness in Seattle were already here when they became homeless.” This assertion, too, clashes with empirical evidence. More than half of Seattle’s homeless come from outside the city limits, according to the city’s own data. Even this number might be vastly inflated, as the survey asks only “where respondents were living at the time they most recently became homeless”—so, for example, a person could move to Seattle, check into a motel for a week, and then start living on the streets and be considered “from Seattle.” More rigorous academic studies in San Francisco and Vancouver suggest that 40 percent to 50 percent of the homeless moved to those cities for their permissive culture and generous services. There’s no reason to believe that Seattle is different on this score.
More than half of Seattle’s homeless come from outside the city limits, according to the city’s own data.
Thus they lived in the area, not say out of State. They are mainly locals. Since the other nearly 1/2 are from Seattle and the balance just from outside the city limits, they are mainly ... locals; AND the article addressed the major cause as ... rising housing costs and rents driving "Locals" into homelessness.
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