I am so tired of living in an insane asylum; in a social experiment (Seattle: hotels, house)

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by primaltech

It's just a daily existence. And then you go home and hear on the news about all the crime and violence happening around the city. Random acts of murder and assault. Wondering why we're all paying this ridiculously high rent, why the most humble condos start at half a million and up, and wondering if I can pay even more rent to live in a safer/less crazy area.

REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) have taken over much of the rental stock in Seattle, built even more, like crazy, and have manipulated the market to charge the highest what they call "market rate" possible, even when their buildings stand half empty year after year. That's one big reason why you're all paying ridiculously high rent. And it's going on all over the US now.

[MechAndy]

Why thank you for that lesson in spelling.
How thoughtful of you .

Yes I was here in 1966.
We lived between here and West Germany every other year when I was growing up.
My parents are/were German engineers and saw things from a different perspective than most of my friends parents.
I still don’t think Reagan was great at much other than being an orator and I don’t take back anything I said.
My thoughts are and remain that we are long over due to fix this and it’s not going to be easy.
When I see countless people taking the easy path with most things in life and expecting more I am in a loss of faith.

[Lodestar]

Originally Posted by MechAndy

Homesinseattle I normally agree with most of your view points
However,
As much as I didn’t care for Ronald Reagan or his policies I don’t think we can still lay the blame on him.
To me that is similar to locking the barn after the horses have left.
Why after all these years is this “barn” still locked?

What Regan did was implement President Kennedy's Community Mental Health Act which hadn't been put into motion yet. No one seems to know that.

The responsibility to this day lays with legislators on both sides who don't allocate enough money to provide adequate services. And the fact of the matter is all the tax money could go toward mental health and we still couldn't solve all the social problems involved.

Minnesota is one of the leaders in provision of services and still we fall short. The horror stories are seldom reported but they are abundant.

We have that fear of securing people for their own and the public's own good. In Minnesota we actually free our most dangerous wards of the state for independent shopping trips downtown as incentives for good behavior. Makes you wonder who is the most mentally ill.

This is what happens when you have decision-makers with no knowledge of psychiatric issues. I think we need to start there, with candidates spending time in the facilities - not just a tour to admire the lunchroom, but in the trenches, hands-on time.

[Transmition]

The problem is that they are several issues that get muddled with each other - homelessness, mental health, drug addiction - and then people used the police as a blunt hammer to deal with them all as criminals. We've got as far as trying to stop the blunt approach but it's going to take a lot more to actually solve the original problems that just accelerated over the pandemic, and the police are all pouty about it.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by Lodestar

What Regan did was implement President Kennedy's Community Mental Health Act which hadn't been put into motion yet. No one seems to know that.

The responsibility to this day lays with legislators on both sides who don't allocate enough money to provide adequate services. And the fact of the matter is all the tax money could go toward mental health and we still couldn't solve all the social problems involved.

Minnesota is one of the leaders in provision of services and still we fall short. The horror stories are seldom reported but they are abundant.

We have that fear of securing people for their own and the public's own good. In Minnesota we actually free our most dangerous wards of the state for independent shopping trips downtown as incentives for good behavior. Makes you wonder who is the most mentally ill.

This is what happens when you have decision-makers with no knowledge of psychiatric issues. I think we need to start there, with candidates spending time in the facilities - not just a tour to admire the lunchroom, but in the trenches, hands-on time.

Here's an article I found to get up to speed on Pres. Kennedy's Community Mental Health Act. Source: American Journal of Psychiatry. It's an interesting read. It mentions the issue of legislators with no background in psychiatry, but also mentions that the psychiatry field at the time was divided on whether the cause of severe mental illness was biological or social or of other causes. A key factor is,that the mental health and medical fields had too much faith in what psychiatric meds could achieve.

The description of the Act sounds a lot like the one Carter signed.
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi...rj.2021.160404

Thanks for contributing on this all-important topic!

[leastprime]

Agree with OP.
However, the majority of voters, budget limiters, and tax controllers, seem to favor less taxes to pay for facilities and so called "treatment".

[southking500]

Originally Posted by Transmition

The problem is that they are several issues that get muddled with each other - homelessness, mental health, drug addiction - and then people used the police as a blunt hammer to deal with them all as criminals. We've got as far as trying to stop the blunt approach but it's going to take a lot more to actually solve the original problems that just accelerated over the pandemic, and the police are all pouty about it.

Translation: continue issuing get out jail free cards to shoplifters, car thieves and drug addicted vagrants who trash city streets and parks.
Gentle slaps on the wrist for violent crimes, just enough to placate those pesky law and order types.

[rkcarguy]

The problem isn't being dealt with, nationwide. What is being done though, is other states/cities are bussing their "problems" here. I hear it all the time on the scanner, mainly "warrants/priors out of California" when they've apprehended a suspect for drugs...rape... arson... stabbing... shooting....assault.... theft etc etc. WA states soft on crime stance and perpetually increasing homeless funding/taxes has opened the proverbial jumbo-sized bag of chips on the beach, and the seagulls are amassing.
It's not just Seattle btw, it's the whole state. The Bellingham Walmart camp is back, nearby apartment residents are paying $1800/month to live in hell. The camp has assault rifle armed homeless in it, city residents are trying to push the city to bring in the national guard to disperse it. Evidentially with everything going on in this camp it's been deemed one of the most dangerous places in the country. The police won't even come to the camp.
WA state "law and justice" is the laughingstock of the country, I see the same names in the police reports, sometimes multiple times in the same day.

[jabogitlu]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) have taken over much of the rental stock in Seattle, built even more, like crazy, and have manipulated the market to charge the highest what they call "market rate" possible, even when their buildings stand half empty year after year. That's one big reason why you're all paying ridiculously high rent. And it's going on all over the US now.

Do you have any proof that investor-grade apartment buildings are half empty year after year?

Because they aren't. I'm a commercial real estate appraiser. This is a complete falsehood. The entire goal of an investment apartment building is to operate it on a stabilized basis. For properties at this level of capital ($20 million and up), any takeout lender is going to require annual (or even quarterly) financial reporting. If a property isn't operating at a stabilized level, there will be financial/legal repercussions.

Rents are high in places like Seattle for a variety of reasons, but one of the primary reasons is lack of supply. Most of the blame for what we pay in rent prices (and yes, I am a renter) lies with the NIMBYs of Magnolia, Sand Point, and Madison Park who refuse to allow us to use the natural carrying capacity of the land and our infrastructure investments. This has been going on for sufficiently long that our land prices are now artificially massively inflated, which directly contributes to the construction cost of a project.

Other complicit factors/issues include the cost of SFR (also tied to the above), costs of labor and materials, and costs/risks of the local regulatory system (such as the City's required MHA fees and design review board permit processes).

Thankfully, the State has stepped in and started regulating some of this (for example design review and SEPA processes), but we need a lot more reform, most importantly a huge upzone of more of the city's residential land.

Edit: You may be conflating our local issues with somewhere like Vancouver, BC, which is a condo-driven development city. In places like that, sure, it can be expected that under their current regulatory system, outside investment dollars will purchase individual condo units as cash vehicles. But this has nothing to do with REITs, or investors/developers operating currently in the Seattle ecosystem.

[Hemlock140]

In Seattle the buildings with less than 50 units, vacancy is at just 5%, and those with more than 50 units 7%. Many of those larger buildings are new and not full yet. There are still many people moving here that need a place to live, and that affects the prices, preventing some of our lower income people from moving out of their parent's house. From July 2021 to July of 2022, the city had a net gain of about 17,750 people. I couldn't find anything more recent, but when I hired for a recent job opening there were 14 applicants, of which 8 had just moved here or wanted to move here.

https://kidder.com/trend-articles/seattle-puget-sound-apartment-market-dynamics-3/#:~:text=Rent%20%26%20Vacancy%20Insight,-East%20King's%20rent&text=For%20buildings%20with%2 0less%20than,and%20leasing%20of%20new%20buildings.