Yeah, that'll happen.

Like Hamsterdam in "The Wire"

finaly, a realistic solution to bringing business to Pioneer Square

@2 That's what I was thinking!

Here comes The Wire trained sociologists! Please people, cite another source for any point. Can we make it an internet rule? (Hint: Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow is good start)

(from a person currently watching that season)

@Tracy best show on television, ever.

Watch 100 Best Quotes from The Wire. (Warning: SPOILERS)

SHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEIT

The Wire is just as messed up as 24 and just as unrealistic.

Yes, because East Vancouver is such a lovely place.

The story really benefits from KOMO's video presentation.

Seattle folks are too good at rallying a cry of "NIMBY!" Hell, we can't even agree where to put a Tent City.
So Seattle's 'Red Light District' would get lobbied out of the city- not changing much for the satellite sin districts we've got now (See, e.g. 'White Center,' 'Renton,' and 'Ft. Lewis").

@8: Since when do you give a fuck about downtown businesses?

Because I can't help myself:

The OTHER 100 best quotes from The Wire. (Spoiler Alert Continued, also NSFW as the above)

Has a red light district in any other city eliminated drug dealing/prostitution in other parts of that city? I can assure you the answer is no. I have no problem w/ concentrating adult-oriented activities, for those who are going to partake of the legal ones. But that won't change anything elsewhere.

The problem with red light districts set aside for "safe", "regulated" vice industries is that they become magnets for the sleazier, more criminal, more dangerous kinds of vice. Just as Christiana in Copenhagen went from a quaint place to buy hash from unreconstructed hippies to a den of violent heroin addicts and dealers, and Amsterdam's legal pot'n'prostitution zone has become the center of the new European sex-slavery industry.

And there's nowhere in Seattle that isn't on somebody's doorstep.

@9 The Wire is just as unrealistic as 24? I wish i can reach through my screen and slap you.

Fnarf beat me to it, but I'll add that there's no way you're going to get Americans to keep their dirty laundry in one place. It works in the Netherlands because Dutch culture is heavy on social shaming, and the Dutch are actually capable of feeling shame. There are enough asshole yahoos in this country who either don't give a fuck or actually enjoy ruining things for everyone else that, if you set up a red light district, vice will bleed out into surrounding neighborhoods no matter what you do. A perfect example is that graffiti wall in SODO which only *increased* the amount of illegal graffiti in the surrounding area.

Americans delight in being inconsiderate fuckheads.

I feel obligated to mention that I don't necessarily oppose the concept of a red light district, and I support the decriminalization of drugs and prostitution, but those who think a red light district will keep junkies off a business' front stoop are deluding themselves.

@19, I agree with you except for the part about "works in the Netherlands". It doesn't work in the Netherlands, and they're on the verge of getting rid of it.

@9 You have never watched minute fucking one of the Wire based on a previous comment by you claiming that it shows scenes of torture when in fact there are none. So shut your pie-hole you fat sack of crap.

"Down on the sawdust", "the Lava Beds", "Maynardtown", "Skid Road"!? anybody? shit our Tenderloin was at one point even more notorious than SF's original.

I recall the old Savoy Hotel (around 1201 Third Avenue) in the late 70's was used as hooker housing. You could watch them in the morning with their secondary pimps go off to do business. As I recall the ratio of pimp to hooker looked like 1 to 7 or so.

It looked like a form of slavery mixed with dependency. Nasty
business, IMO.

When I was watching this scene (more than once) from my vantage point(s), I was musing on the recent discovery at the time in Japan of a long latency retrovirus that caused leukemia years even decades after initial infection, I wondered at the time how many of the women and men I was watching were infected with that retrovirus. And there were the reports of mysterious deaths in the San Francisco area marked by immune failure. It was trickle in 78 and the flood was to come.