Comments

1
"were already living in Seattle or King County when they most recently became homeless......"
That is a huge loophole.
2
And a self survey is valid only in telling you what the surveyed population wants you to believe.
It would be possible to independently determine where the folks lived, if anyone really wanted to know.
3
I'm at the point where I don't even care. All I care about is the condition of my city. Garbage everywhere, tents everywhere, graffiti everywhere - it's as bad as it's ever been and the cleanup needs to begin at once. I just returned from New York City, and I was taken aback at how clean the city was. It's like Seattle is now NY of the 70s and NY is Seattle of the 70s. I am not convinced at all that simply throwing money at the problem is going to solve the problem - unless that money is spent collecting garbage and clearing illegal encampments. Heartless? Perhaps, but I won't lose any sleep over it.
4
Surely if we throw a lot of money at the problem.....In ways we don't yet know....It will be solved forever. We will end homelessness!
5
@1-4: typical responses: "they're losers", "they're liars", "throw them out", "my tax dollars".

let's hear some ideas, then. put up, or go scurrying back to the seattle times comments.
6
What if we took a lesson from the bathhouses, and provided basic rooms with a locking door and a bed, with bathrooms down the hall? Size them so they're manageable and put them all over town. If you disrupt, you're bounced.

7
New Survey Finds Results that Favor Survey Administrators' Interests.
8
@6: A bunch of people would be helped, but in any system there's always going to be a percentage of folks who won't/can't follow the rules and will get "bounced". Those folks will remain on the streets until they die or are forcibly incarcerated.

I'm not saying we shouldn't "take a lesson from the bathhouses", mind you. A lot of people would be helped and off the streets.
9
5

We really don't have to re-invent the wheel here, Mr Grumpy.
Lots of communities have had great success dealing with the homeless in humane effective ways.
Salt Lake to name one.
Surely someone in the local govt or an activist could spend a few minutes on google and find out the secret recipe.....
11
The only way to really help the homeless is to vote no on Murray's crony capitalism tax scam. It just creates false hope.
12
@9: ah, the popular SLC exemplar. the impact of which is vastly overhyped. and consisted of providing housing at taxpayer expense.

just admit you got nothing.
13
"All the homeless are flocking here because of we coddle our homeless."

Multiple surveys say otherwise.

"Surveys are biased."

How very Republican of people. Believe what you believe despite any and all data that says otherwise, then attack. But to answer the question of why you need the data, it's to try and placate those who would vote against these services because of their belief it's for "others." They might have the merest shred of empathy in their Christian hearts if they know the homeless are from here. And white.

I've always felt that if you're mobile enough to move to Seattle in order to be homeless and luxuriate in our homeless services, why would you pick Seattle in the first place? You know where you can get services too? San Francisco and Santa Monica, to think of two I'm fairly familiar with. You know where you can be homeless with much better weather, which is kind of important if you're homeless? San Francisco and Santa Monica.
14
I would have much more empathy for the plight of the homeless if they were just neater. So much garbage and squalor. If 3000 tourists per day can figure how to properly pee, poo and throw trash away on a daily basis, 3000 homeless should be able to as well.
15
12
OK. We'll do it your way.
Come up with a program that employs lots of 'activists' and leaves thousands of the homeless living in gutters.
Feel better?

13
Biased?
A survey conducted by activists who make a living off of the homeless and by homeless people?
What could possibly go wrong?
16
@14:

3000 tourists have access to hotels, restaurants, sports stadiums, museums, theatres, airports, and other places that conveniently provide disposal facilities for their use. 3000 homeless people, not so much.
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@16- 3000 people pay for those services and those who provide the services pay for them via property, b&o and other taxes.
18
@Catalina Vel-DuRay: What if we ... provided basic rooms with a locking door and a bed, with bathrooms down the hall?

A reasonable suggestion, but you need some way to prevent a locally funded safety net from being overwhelmed by the nation's drug/alcohol addicts, schizophrenics, and drifters.

By opening up Seattle as a free camping zone, that's effectively what's happened now, despite the claims of this survey of not-at-all randomly selected people.
19
@17:

So, basically, you get to have access to toilets and trash cans only if you can afford to pay for them - welcome to Urinetown...
21
So, basically, you get to have access to >>fill in the blank<<
only if you can afford to pay for them - welcome to The Real World...
22
@19. BS. I can (and do...)walk from Cap hill to downtown to Pioneer square to ID and back and am able to pee, poo, and throw my trash away without spending a dime. Numerous facilities for all three...free.
23
@21:

Right, because consuming food to stay alive, and the resulting elimination of bodily wastes are activities only people with money should be able to do.
24
@22:

In that case, maybe you should go to some of the local encampments and offer to introduce the homeless around to all these places - I'm sure where ever YOU perform these activities (assuming of course they're not places with pesky signage like "Restrooms Are For Customers Only" for instance) will welcome them in with the proverbial open arms.
25
@15: did you read a comment from me proposing that solution? you didn't. I've laid out one of my ideas here and been attacked as an elitist. so I'm not the bleeding heart you assume.

you said @9 that "lots communities" solved this, but other than SLC's chronic homelessness program (which you really should read up on), you're not sharing. it sounds like you know of multiple approaches that work. enlighten us.
26
@20: many of who are INCAPABLE of working, being self-sufficient, or being productive. tell me how the 60 year old lady screaming and flipping everyone the bird on the corner of 1st and union this morning re-enters the workforce.

she won't.

28
Wow, that's a lot of tweekers.

29
@20 @27 Although many of the questions resulted in more than one answer, it appears that more than half suffer from depression and PTSD, more than half use hard drugs and (likely) have chronic alcoholism, a frequent cause of homelessness. Recognizing that substance use disorder is a mental illness, along with depression and PTSD, you have well over half these homeless folks who are likely too disabled to hold down a job. It really does no good to tell them to work when they have a disabling brain disease and our state ranks 48th in the U.S. in mental health treatment.
30
@26, have you been by any of the shanty towns erected near the freeway? They're 90% people under 40, nay - under 30 - sitting around drunk or dope sick, surrounded by stolen bikes. Fuck working.

A liberal paradise!
31
Everything is a mental disease and no one is ever responsible for their actions and choices.
Except for the poor suckers trying to work and make life work and support their families, who are supposed to foot the bill for everyone else and are terrible evil people if they don't.
32
@30:

Do you have an eidetic memory that allows you to glean such specific data from a few seconds of passing by an encampment? If so, have you ever considered hiring yourself out as a consultant, given your amazing ability to so confidently diagnose complex mental and physical disorders from such fleetingly cursory observations?

@31:

I take it then you're not a follower of that Yeshua fellow from way back, you know, the one who admonished his adherents to "love thy neighbor as thy self", and "sell all your possessions and give to the poor", and "judge not, lest yee be judged", and all that other nonsensical, bleeding-heart, commie-liberal rot?
34
32
Ye have the poor always with you.
Certainly in Seattle, it seems...
sigh...
35
@34:

You can find them everywhere, the poor are with us in literally every city, town, village, and hamlet and yes, they always will be, always have been. All we can do, truly, is to make their life a little less distraught.
36
This report is so flawed I can't even believe it's being thought of as legitimate. The title of the article itself is enough to write a couple of paragraphs about how faulty that conclusion is.

The question in the survey leading to that answer was in describing "your most recent bout of homelessness." So, if a person has been homeless on and off for 20 years...and they've traveled around for the last 10 years, and first came to Seattle 2 years ago, and they had an apartment for 2 months one year ago, the conclusion is that "they were in Seattle already before they became homeless." Already they're creating a narrative of "homeless people in Seattle are from Seattle," which isn't true, but almost sounds true from the way they worded the questions. There are so many other examples that show the lack of intellectual rigor of this survey.

What about the question about why they became homeless? Apparently the main reason is that they "Lost their job?" How about asking, "were you fired," or "laid off due to lack of work?" Big difference. But their conclusion really doesn't shed light on much. As a business owner, many of my employees over the years have "lost their job," but maybe 1 out of 20 of them who "lost their job" lost it because the work wasn't there -- more commonly because they weren't reliable, didn't follow through well, or displayed some other version of glaring dysfunctionality. Since they only could list one reason, rather than a more realistic assessment such as "I lost my job because my boss overheard me threatening to kill somebody." Or, "I lost my job because I kept having to go to the port-a-potty to sniff glue," or "I lost my job because I kept making expensive mistakes that other people had to fix," lead to a very different conclusion about the situation than simply, "I lost my job."

It seems the city wanted to create a specific narrative around "the majority of homeless people are from Seattle and are homeless simply because they lost their job" or something along those lines. They wanted a specific conclusion and they got it. Can't see any other explanation for how sadly biased and flawed the questions are. Sheesh. I was really looking forward to seeing a rigorous study, but for the $100,000 the city spent for this survey to be completed they seemed to have designed a good propaganda piece to gain support for the $285 million dollar property tax levy being proposed by the mayor. Sad but true.

37
So 30% of the "homeless" were from Seattle. That leaves 70% of the "homeless" came from out of state. Everyone knows that the first three digits of your Social Security number tells you what state you were in when you first applied for your Social Security card to begin work, and the next two digits of your Social Security number tells you what part of the state you came from. So the anti-homeless coalition is right.

Furthermore, the term "homeless" is a misnomer perpetrated by the media to make people think that there is actually a "homeless" problem that exists. These people are not "homeless" they are vagrants. Drug addicts, prostitutes, alcoholics, and the "mentally ill homeless" who were kicked out of their group homes because they refused to take their medications. Instead, they would rather take illicit drugs that aggravate their condition.

A person who abstains from alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, is homeless and jobless, won't be in that situation for very long in Seattle. There is plenty of housing available for the truly homeless.
38
WoofCandy dear, My Bathhouse plan would involve constructing thirty 50 unit "centers" all across the city. To get in, you'd have to pass a perfunctory mental health check - if you needed care, you'd be directed to a *real* mental healthcare program (not some Jesus-y thing).

Everyone else would be allowed to stay in their bathhouse room as long as they wanted, and come and go as they please - as long as they checked in once a day. If medication were required, they would have to take the medication in front of a staff member. Higher functioning residents could earn money working there (cleaning, etc). They can do whatever they want in their rooms, as long as it doesn't disturb others. If you misbehaved, you'd be out.

Having provided basic shelter and mental health care, we'd have zero tolerance for public camping. People found doing it would be arrested for trespassing on public property.

Harsh? Perhaps, but we've got to do something. It's getting ridiculous.
39
Who would believe the word of a junkie.
40
Norm may have a point - look at Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump. Their cocaine addiction has destroyed any credibility they may have once had.
41
@33- " Common sense of anyone who has lived in Central Seattle for more 3 years points to the obvious in-migration driven..."

Common sense is conducting a survey, being an asshole is "I don't personally know any of these newly homeless so they must be from out of town."
42
https://www.facebook.com/events/41075319….

here is a FB event I am hosting to raise awareness about the issue in our community....I'll be performing please attend to continue the conversation.......thank you

rodger p

https://youtu.be/I2KeQxAjL6M
http://iamhomelessinseattle.blogspot.com…


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