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I walk through Belltown from/to Westlake twice a day at 6am and 2:30 where all the homeless are on the sidewalks, and while I have observed a few drug and other illegal “transactions”, only once in 8 years have I seen an incident requiring police action. In summer, the afternoon tourists walk around perfectly happy. I suppose there could be worse areas, but I suspect an exaggeration.
Wouldn't you rather not have them on the sidewalks at all? And 6 am to 2:30 are the 'off hours'. They come to life at night. I worked swing/graveyard shift in DT Seattle for 3 years and I know they prefer to work under the cover of darkness.
At some point, I do believe (/opinion) the people will swing the gamut and put a Rudy Giuliani type in office and clean out the city council, empower the police, and clean up the city like what happened in NY NY in the 1990s. There are limits to what people will take, NY NY hit theirs though since has gone back to some extent to the bad old days. There must be a happy medium between frisking every minority face the cops don't like, vs. letting bums and vagrants rove free and setup camp next to million dollar home and harass taxpayers. It will be found.
I hope I'm still in Seattle when we elect our own "Rob Ford"... it will be great when it happens.
Westlake Park or whatever that area is called is such a mess and that should be the heart of the city. I think the Seattleites who keep saying it's really not that bad are the ones who have refined their ability to tune out or avoid the riffraff.
I was finally notified by Redfin this morning that a place i actually looked at in Mt Vernon sold for 5-10,000 less than asking and it wasn't a wet glop of moss so something is going on . Under $200,000 as well .
And the Socratic method Mr. Polite uses, always, a bit further down thread is even better: "...funny, in (many) years, I've only seen a very few..." An admirable quality. He's a scalpel, I'm a broadsword:
Hey, OP: you are entitled to an opinion, same as others, but the hyperbole is pretty ridiculous. It just sounds, well, not too clever. I spent a good chunk of last summer commuting from Eastside to Pioneer Square (station) and walking north on 3rd to beyond Cherry. There are/were plenty of bums, vagrants, and winos and it's a damn shame. I'd take some of the $47M the Communists intend* to shakedown from Starbucks and Amazon and (whoever else), build a labor camp, and have the able-bodied shipped to it and at work picking apples about nine months from the day the tax went into place. The remainder would be sunk into asylums and new courts, to rack every of the reprobates through either mental health or drug rehab services and *off* the streets in under a year, period. Be very thankful, then, I'm not in charge. Yet.
That said, no such dystopian reality is the true state of affairs. There are pockets of trouble. I'd not wander downtown without non-lethal methods of counter-attack, ever, and those who do aren't too bright full-stop. I don't walk around bum-infested areas at 2am on dark nights looking for trouble. At some point, I do believe (/opinion) the people will swing the gamut and put a Rudy Giuliani type in office and clean out the city council, empower the police, and clean up the city like what happened in NY NY in the 1990s. There are limits to what people will take, NY NY hit theirs though since has gone back to some extent to the bad old days. There must be a happy medium between frisking every minority face the cops don't like, vs. letting bums and vagrants rove free and setup camp next to million dollar home and harass taxpayers. It will be found.
I've lived in about seven medium to large cities and Seattle still has most of them beat for quality of life, and more than one study has us at or near the very pinnacle as America's economic powerhouse for growth in tech especially. Didn't mention that, did you?
And they beat down the doors to get here and buy houses in the likes of Magnolia, Ballard, Madison Park, etc. Don't like it, move Eastside. I did. That garbage is not tolerated here, for the most part, OR is contained by the charities pretty well which I personally think is a pretty nitfty solution (the homeless "camp" in the church parking lot that was neat and well contained, staying as long as their lease lasted and no longer).
Good words, Blonde. Spot on, pretty much. Notice also that the pockets of potential trouble tend to be where social services are or opportunities for begging exist. Listen, I'm a liberal who has a successful business. 20 years ago, between careers, I went through a rough patch, got divorced, had some medical problems, went bankrupt, ate from a food bank for 6 months. I learned humility but also learned that many of these people are decent people. Some aren't though, and some have mental problems and violent tendencies. So, as you say, carry some pepper spray, be aware of your surroundings. Don't however lose your heart or kindness toward people who are less fortunate, I will continue to believe until the day I die in the potential of humans to lift themselves up. All? Of course not.
So just choose wisely where you live. If you want more peace in your surroundings, create that. Learn about the neighborhoods, spend time there at different times of day. If you have the resources, move to a mellow peaceful place. Plenty of Seattle locations offer that. Keep your heart engaged though, try to be part of the solution. Above all, don't become cynical and judgemental toward those less fortunate.
The urban decay and blight of Seattle cannot be overstated. For the second time this week, a man was axed to death just a block from my luxury highrise apartment. There are bums in every street corner, harassing people. When I walk around, I have to be careful to avoid human excrement and urine. Even amongst the non-homeless, the people in Seattle look like they are perpetually high, haven't showered in days, and/or just crawled out of a cave. There is so little feminine beauty in Seattle that I'm sure my testosterone has plummeted to pre-pubescent levels since I moved here. Everywhere I go, people are bitching about "evil corporations," capitalism, and Trump. Losers wear communist shirts with pictures of Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and Marx, without a hint of irony.
If North Korea nuked Seattle, would they actually be doing the world a favor?
Call me unadventurous, but I had never even heard of a watermelon feta salad before versions of it started popping up on food blogs everywhere. Even then, the very thought of it gave me pause. Watermelon, with salty cheese? Yeah, right.
But watermelon sprinkled with salt is how many people enjoy the fruit, so perhaps it isn’t too far of a stretch to consider that it might be good with salty cheese?
Last week my curiosity was finally satisfied when I was served such a salad at a dinner given by my friend Peg. I couldn’t wait to recreate it! It’s wonderfully refreshing and light, and perfect for heat-wave days like we are having now in California.
Good words, Blonde. Spot on, pretty much. Notice also that the pockets of potential trouble tend to be where social services are or opportunities for begging exist. Listen, I'm a liberal who has a successful business. 20 years ago, between careers, I went through a rough patch, got divorced, had some medical problems, went bankrupt, ate from a food bank for 6 months. I learned humility but also learned that many of these people are decent people. Some aren't though, and some have mental problems and violent tendencies. So, as you say, carry some pepper spray, be aware of your surroundings. Don't however lose your heart or kindness toward people who are less fortunate, I will continue to believe until the day I die in the potential of humans to lift themselves up. All? Of course not.
So just choose wisely where you live. If you want more peace in your surroundings, create that. Learn about the neighborhoods, spend time there at different times of day. If you have the resources, move to a mellow peaceful place. Plenty of Seattle locations offer that. Keep your heart engaged though, try to be part of the solution. Above all, don't become cynical and judgemental toward those less fortunate.
You rock, Homes. I'm a Viking with blonde beard on fire, us Irish (Celts) are not noted for our diplomacy and "I think" we have (cough) a bit of an emergency with the homeless. I never screw with others, being the Seattle Freeze-walking, so to speak, and at size XL and six foot of foul ogre, few screw with me. I do not like it when others are screwed with and will tend to counter-attack the attackers, on-occasion. It happens. It's rare, thankfully.
I do not agree the tax is the solution, since no one seems to be accountable for *results*, but if someone is and that $47M or so doesn't just disappear like aid to the UN, I'll stand fairly corrected.
Even I volunteer for the less fortunate on-occasion. Yep, it's true, but shhhh: don't tell anyone. Boys and Girls Club mentoring through one employer, couple times per year past couple years, plus shoveling bark via another likewise throughout past ten years or so. Good for the soul, a help-up vs. handout.
Compassion for the needy is mandatory for a balanced soul.
Justice for criminality is necessary for an ordered society, with oversight (who watches the watchers).
Treatment for disruptive mentally ill is, to me, the biggest gray area. I've only dealt with it once, a Borderline Personlity Disorder (BPD) GF, and that was terrifying enough for the layman. I do believe, though expensive, in patient and outpatient service MUST....must...be expanded for these people to keep them off the streets! Yes, I'll pay more taxes for it, Liberal-leaners! Okay!
It's been several days, and the OP hasn't returned to answer questions about whether the axe murders in his neighborhood really happened, and were covered in the media, nor to answer a simple question about where, he lives, that such things happen routinely, as he would have us believe.
People whoa start a provocative topic, then disappear, run the risk of being considered ... "imaginative" posters, the kind who post only to stir things up.
You should've seen Seattle in the 70's, 80's and 90's.
The same could be said of many major US metropolitan areas: the Bay Area, SF & Berkeley, to name a couple. What happened, to make the homeless situation so bad? I know Reagan happened, and shut down the mental health hospitals. But that doesn't explain everything.
While it is true that homelessness afflicts not just Seattle but other areas, there are a few unique things about the situation here that bear mentioning.
First is the fact that Seattle, because its voters are incredibly generous (some might say naive), has spent more per capita on dealing with this than anywhere else. We have not turned down a housing levy here in decades and the last one passed convincingly even though it was double the amount of the previous one seven years earlier. Yet despite this largesse, the problem has gotten worse if one goes by the official counts, to the point where Seattle trails only LA and NYC in the absolute number of unsheltered individuals.
Much of this failure can be laid at the feet of city government. When they hired a consultant to investigate and make recommendations to improve outcomes, her report was ignored. The head tax that was recently passed 9-0 makes it clear that for this council and mayor, the only thing that matters is getting more money. Before the ink was even dry on the mayor's signature there was already a battle brewing over how much would be spent for transitional housing, how much for permanent housing, and how much for related services (outreach, etc.). They've just given themselves a massive amount of money and they have no clue how they're going to spend it. Worse, they have no serious intent to hold themselves accountable for positive results.
In addition they have compounded the problem by instituting a policy of "low-barrier" housing and placing those facilities in neighborhoods with little or no honest attempt at neighborhood outreach. Then when neighbors complained about, among other things, that drug and alcohol use would not be regulated, they are dismissed as mere NIMBY's. Even city council members stoop to this, one of whom, according to one first-person account, said that instituting such restrictions would be akin to policies in Nazi Germany. Ditto encampments; criticize tents on the sidewalks and you're guilty of "demonizing the homeless."
Recently the interim mayor of the city people here like to diss most, San Francisco, announced a change in policy after multiple news reports (and vociferous complaints by tourist-related businesses and their clients) documented the mess that city has become due to its laissez-faire policy toward homelessness. Henceforth, no more tents on the sidewalks and no more tolerance of the behavior associated with these encampments. To be fair, SF may not follow through; they've been down this road before. But they've at least started dealing with this in the city's Mission district.
In Seattle, we apparently can't even have an adult conversation about this, much less take action to deal with it. And it has nothing to do with money. We aren't getting results with the money we've spent, so why should we expect better outcomes if we just keep giving the same people more money?
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