The failed council leadership it describes is...wait for it...Bruce Harell.

Tents aren't shorthand for filth and squalor, Rich. They are longhand-in-elegant-calligraphy for filth and squalor. And Kshama Sawant might just be portrayed as a brown woman because, well...I'll let you think about it. (Hint: She's a brown woman. So that means no photos of her in mailers?). That's about as far as I got before I stopped reading to instead go outside on this beautiful day.

Yeah, so many junkies. Clearly the fault of Amazon.

"Some of the tents on that mailer might not have been there if the council stood by its vote to pass the tax"

Laughable.

I love watching the looney left panic as they lose the "homelessness is caused by capitalism!" narrative faster than a junkie shoots up under I5.

Obviously for centuries the Housing Market has had the solution to homelessness, but that solution has been just outside of its grasp... maintaining the status quo will bring a real solution any day now. Just wait!

Looks like another one Kshama Sawant's supporters trying to get the message out about the evils of capitalism and Teslas...

https://twitter.com/robotwood/status/1154607971369754624

The jaded sarcasm in your headline, Rich, is actually more negative.

I think Kshama made a tactical mistake in describing the head tax as an “Amazon Tax”, something The Stranger still repeats. Problem is that citizens of Seattle don’t seem to hate Amazon as much as Kshama and The Stranger. Maybe if this had been presented as a plan to build housing, and by the way here’s how we’re paying for it, things might have gone better. If the left’s strategy is “how much do you hate Amazon”, then good luck with that.

Who the fuck has time to make a bunch of accounts to post on SLOG? Are you being paid? If so its a terrible ROI, like 40 stoners and 20 angry white guys post here. Stay on facebook, you might be able to convince someone's aunt that AOC is the real racist. If my account ever gets deleted I'll never make another one.

@11 only the people who work there or used to work there hate Amazon. Where do you live that you don't know any of these people, Marysville or some shit?

@12 FB blocks them. People like me keep turning them in.

P.S.: we also turn in White Supremacist Terrorists to the FBI. Works wonders.

The mailer is hysterical and ridiculous. They do support the same policies on homelessness though.

Personally, I’d like to do something different. Something effective. So I’ll be looking elsewhere.

Pretty rich of Rich Smith and The Stranger to whine about someone else "going negative." There's literally been negative headlines about "rich people", "civility police", "hysterical ninnies", etc. on the front page of this website every day for the last couple months. There's 3 RIGHT NOW if you count the endorsements, which are chock full of these kinds of insults.

Also, what the fuck is this? "The photos of the District 3 candidates play on the tropes of the angry brown woman and the shady Native American, adding an undercurrent of racism and xenophobia to the mailer's misleading portrait of the homeless crisis." If you didn't know DeWolf was native american you would never be able to tell from that picture. How is this "shady native american" and "racism and xenophobia"?

And you wonder why nobody takes The Stranger seriously. Can't wait for all the whinging when you guys strikeout on your endorsements.

@7, Unfortunately there is this thing called democracy that keeps getting in the way of your strictly theoretical perfect market. I know you would like nothing more than that perfect emblem of a housing free-market, the Kowloon Walled City, plopped down in Cal Anderson Park, but it's not happening. Other rich countries have figured out how to house people, it's not that tricky. What could they possibly do? I'll give you hint, it actually involves more government intervention the market. One of the richest cities in human history (Seattle) doesn't actually need SRO tenements to solve our housing issues. SROs would just help the government solve it more cheaply.

Show me a single example of a land-constrained growing city that has solved it's housing issues strictly through market based reforms. Just one.

I'll instead show you if you google any growing city in America + housing crisis you will find a local newspaper article wondering what to do about their housing crisis. And some local "expert" saying if they just keep building more one of these days people will stop being displaced. In red states, blue states, red cities, blue cities, all have the same issues regardless of the make-up of their city council. Think of a city and try it, some to start... Missoula, Charlotte, Arlington, Nashville, Phoenix. How could "the market" possibly fail in every city in America? It's almost as if it doesn't work.

"In an email, People for Seattle cite Melissa Westbrook's blog to back those claims."

I AM Melissa Westbrook and I have a few things to say.

People for Seattle, show me where I said he sat on the Board for only a year. Oh yeah, I didn't. You will be hearing from me.

Director DeWolf has been on the Board nearly two years. Do I think him lackluster in that role? I do. Has he failed to have community meetings like the other directors? Yes.

However, this flyer is waaaay out of line. To align two such different people - both who have good and bad points - is wrong.

Also, those shitty photos designed to make the two candidates look shady, please. Anyone who has ever seen Director DeWolf knows he is a very well-groomed guy. Not sure how they found the one bad photo of him.

When people are desperate apparently they do desperate things and this flyer reeks of that.

Unicorns are formed in the explosions created by a criticality of hypocrisy.

@20: Exactly.

@17
Lol. You must be new here.
Please show us where The Stranger ever said they were against going negative.

The take of "you can't include pictures of non-white candidates while criticizing them, because if people know what they look like, it's racist" is fucking hysterical.

No more Pho Cyclo for me.

Free speech, embrace it in all its forms.

Every time they come for Kshama, she wins.

Bring it on.

"The photos of the District 3 candidates play on the tropes of the angry brown woman and the shady Native American, adding an undercurrent of racism and xenophobia to the mailer's misleading portrait of the homeless crisis."

Yes of course! It couldn't possibly be about their ridiculous policies and ideologies. Case in point:

"Some of the tents on that mailer might not have been there if the council stood by its vote to pass the (head) tax,"

Wrong. The only thing that would disappear would have been jobs in the retail, grocery, and restaurant industries. In other words, businesses with a relatively higher number of employees and a very tight profit margin. Marxists like Sawant, who likely got her economics degree from a Cracker Jacks box, dont seem to understand the difference between net and gross revenue. The head tax would have targeted the latter. Not a single tent would have disappeared. The funds from the head tax would have been flushed down the same toilet they flush the rest of the taxes and levies on.

Fuck drug vagrant culture, The Stranger, Sawant, DeWolf, Morales and Herbold. Your narrative around “our most vulnerable neighbors”, affordable housing, and Amazon is a lie. You have ignored the huge migration of drug vagrants from all over the region and country to enabling Seattle and the epic failure of Pete Holmes’ and Dan Satterberg’s prison reform experiment as a driver for the zombie apocalypse playing out in SEATTLE because it does not fit your preferred ideological narrative. People are dying in the streets and the public realm is a shitshow because stupid tea-party-equivalent blind adherence to liberal ideology regardless of reality. You are ruining Seattle and re-electing Trump because of your stupidity. Thank you to Tim Burgess and a growing number of Seattle citizens for speaking the truth and fight back to break the echo chamber and expose the lie. If you think the status quo isn’t working, than vote the opposite of the Stranger endorsements.

1) People read mailings?

2) Despite all the conservative grumblings and local TV hand-wringing, here's the deal: Homelessness - at least the homeless that everyone (including me) is so tired of - will not go away until we have a NATIONAL POLICY to deal with mental illness and addiction. People do come to Seattle (and San Francisco, Portland and LA) because we have programs that at least have a veneer of compassion, we have mostly tolerant citizens, and we have temperate climates.

If we were able to get the mentally ill and addicted off the streets and into treatment, dealing with the rest of the homeless situation would be fairly easy (Public housing, builder incentives, transient worker accommodations, etc.) But it would cost money, and that might inconvenience the wealthy.

The problem is not the homeless. The problem is the rich.

@Catalina -- Anytime one group alone is identified as "the problem," the chances are stratospherically high that other contributing factors have been overlooked. I don't entirely disagree with your comment, and I hope that wealthy people will open their wallets under a new income tax scheme (however and whenever we can make that happen) but as a relatively wealthy person myself, I'm not interested in paying a penny more in taxes until we've gotten a much better handle on what services will work, won't work, and how we're going to address service resistant individuals. We need a plan, we need measures/accountability to achieve that plan and we need to make sure we don't let folks weasel out of that accountability. You show me that and I'll be happy to pay more income tax.

I would gladly pay for more police, for more police who are single threaded, on seriously souring the milk for the addicts and mentally ill that call Seattle their home. Run them all out of town. It's not a matter of compassion, we the citizens are simply fed up with the touchy-feely attempts. It's time to get mean and treat people like adults. I guarantee if you make it hard for a junkie to score and then shoot up here in Seattle, they'll go somewhere else. And that's all we want, really, is for them and their needles and shit and piss to leave our city.

Jubilation dear, I hope you realize that I am talking about the wealthy all across the nation (for this is a nationwide problem), and not just those enlightened enough to live in metropolitan areas. And I hope you realize I that mean soak it to the really rich - the parasites living off inheritances, in particular - not so much the productive wealthy.

tempur_tempur dear, I think it's sad when old people aren't placed in a more structured environments when they start to go 'round the bend, for their paranoia and outmoded thinking brands them as coots. Don't you have any loved ones who care for you?

@34: I believe @32 just says what a lot of citizens may now think, and it’s failure of our policy which got us here. After all, we’ve spent tens of millions of Seattle taxpayer dollars annually for many years, and the homeless problem got much worse. That’s a result we could have obtained for free. As we must pay for the police anyway, why not let them handle it? Can we argue with that logic?

(Yes, of course we can, but that involves being reasonably well-informed about the Poppe Report, the recommendations therein, and the city’s performance in implementing those recommendations. When was the last time any paid poster here at The Stranger mentioned any of that?)

@35 At any given time, the last time anyone mentioned the Poppe report was the last time you typed a SLOG comment, tensor. And yet for all that effort, you don't seem to be able to make up your mind about the thing.

When people accuse Durkan of doing too little to help the homeless, you assure us we're implementing the Poppe report, as planned, and everyone needs to just calm down and be patient. When people accuse the city council of doing too little to help the homeless, you complain that we are not implementing the Poppe report, which everyone has forgotten, and we need to drastically change what the city is doing to get back on course.

It's almost as if the Poppe report issued some grand broad promises, but avoided specifics to the point that there's no way to even determine whether or not its policy recommendations are being carried out?

Again, this is a NATIONAL PROBLEM. Until the UNITED STATES gets its act together regarding addiction and mental health (as well as income inequality) it's probably just going to get worse.

And just how are the police going to handle it? Warehouse the homeless? Drive them to the city limits? Execute them? For a town full of smug, self-satisfied people who are convinced that they are the smartest kid in the room, we sure have a lot of people who want simple-minded solutions to incredibly complex problems.

@37: “And just how are the police going to handle it?”

I doubt very much that the persons who have resigned themselves to a brutal, authoritarian crackdown actually care about the details, dear. (But it’s cute that you seem to believe they do.) They just want what we’ve paid for, and haven’t gotten. Your mocking such sentiments as evidence of senile dementia does nothing to invalidate them, just as your tiresome restatement of the obvious does nothing to solve the problem.

“For a town full of smug, self-satisfied people who are convinced that they are the smartest kid in the room,”

Yeah, it must be tough, going into the office each day, being surrounded by persons who could actually get those pricey STEM jobs. But there’s no need to take it out on the rest of us, dear.

Oh now don’t be bitter, tensor dear. We all that nuance and complexity aren’t your “thing”. But the question remains: What exactly are the police supposed to do?

You lost me at the racism part. Where is the Native American, and how are they used in a racist way?

@39: I didn’t actually write the comment @33, so you’ll just have to ask the person who did. I was merely noting his frustration and anger could well be rationally justified, and thus not necessarily evidence of the senile dementia you implied he had. Perhaps my point contained too much nuanced complexity for you?

What I would do — since you asked — is increase funding for more Navigation Teams, and augment that with more aggressive enforcement of laws against vagrancy, theft, and drug use. Many of our problem homeless drifted in here because we tolerated them when we didn’t have to. If we change that, I believe word would get around fast. We could at least try to prevent threats to public health, after all.

I visited the People for Seattle website since I am a people, and I am definitely for Seattle. No email address, or even contact form. No phone or address, only a PO Box. No information about board officers, but there was a list of names and how to identify them - no pronouns however. (So disappointed in you Stephan Blanford - shame on you.) No financial info, but an opportunity to donate. No social media. Are you certain Tim Burgess isn't a Russian bot? I joined cause I'm nosy that way.

Catalina Vel-DuRay, you are my avatar.

@36: “...last time anyone mentioned the Poppe report was the last time you typed a SLOG comment...”

Thank you for confirming my point. There’s no “here” here.

Speaking of which, for all your meandering about what I supposedly wrote, you didn’t actually ever seem to get around to quoting anything I did write.

“It's almost as if the Poppe report issued some grand broad promises, but avoided specifics to the point that there's no way to even determine whether or not its policy recommendations are being carried out?”

As there is, apparently, no way you could possibly read it for yourself, much less actually compare it to the city’s subsequent actions, you’ll just have to believe whatever it is you manage to surmise from your vague recollections of what I supposedly wrote.

(Don’t forget to call out certain City Council candidates for their supposedly vague statements about homeless policy!)