Jon Grant and Cary Moon got their asses mercilessly kicked because of their stance on the homeless issue. I hope our newly elected leaders interpret those 20+ point margins as a strong mandate that the voters of Seattle are tired of our parks and public being trashed by an over-coddled homeless population. Bring on the sweeps!

Grant must be getting really good at writing concession speeches.

@1 if you don't want them swept to "our parks and public [sic]" where DO you want them swept to?

Wow - after reading this I am so glad he didn't win the election. I hope Mosqueda will be more moderate and look to spend the huge increase in tax revenue we have more wisely, instead of immediately asking for more taxes.

More fauxregressive energy for another regressive payroll tax that's not being directed at Olympia to demand a state income tax. And when you just took your state government back too. You've got low unemployment now, but more people are going to have to contract and give up benefits if you do this. Meanwhile, your state spends more than $1000 per person less than other blue states. That's called slack, and it's revenue you could raise in a progressive way if you could stay focused.

@3 our parks and public SPACES, you typo-pointing-out dildo

Where should they be swept to? JAIL. Any person, regardless of housing status, who breaks illegal camping laws, or public drug use laws, should be prosecuted. In jail people receive adequate food and shelter. If the tax bill for incarceration becomes too expensive for us to tolerate, that might force measures to pay for alternative housing. Until then, we should refuse to allow our streets to continue being trashed under the cowardly excuse of "compassion."

Everyone knows damn well Seattle can't solve the homeless problem on our own, and any measures we take to make things better for homeless people cause more to come here. The people have spoken, by a very wide margin, that until we have a strong national program to address homeless, Seattle is tired of being the Northwest's hobo dumping ground.

@1/3:

If you voted for Mosqueda thinking she was going to go all "law-and-order" on the homeless population in Seattle, I think you grossly misinterpreted her stance on the issue.

Correction: @8 meant for @1/7...

@3 Id be happy to pay more taxes for the city to acquire a large piece of land and some apartment building. Make their use conditional on substance abuse evaluation and treatment (tax payer funded). I'd also be happy to pay for some job training. Then clear the streets and parks.

The Housing First program makes sense to work with the homeless. Jail isn’t an answer and ends up far more destructive for everyone.

Keenan C. I wouldn’t concern yourself about compassion because clearly you have lost the ability to comprehend that part of full humanity.

That creepy Joker smile can't disappear from the media soon enough.

Actually, I think Grant mainly lost because he's got a rep as a jerk and an abusive boss.

And arrests just turn homeless people into homeless people with criminal records who will then find it impossible to get work or do anything else to get out of homelessness. This helps the problem HOW?

People sleep rough because they have no alternative to sleeping rough and have no other choices. Arresting them achieves nothing because it won't help make them non-homeless. Punishment doesn't solve any part of the problem.

@14 Letting drug addicts live undisturbed in squalor in our parks until they kill themselves with the addiction doesn't solve any part of the problem either and it is not humane.

#15: Ok, then come up with something ELSE. Re-open the drug treatment centers Reagan defunded in the Eighties-I assume even you admit that "Just Say No!" was arrogant, judgmental delusional bullshit. Addiction is a real thing and is almost never stopped by throwing addicts in jail and thus giving them a criminal record which will guarantee that almost no one will give them a job or a chance when they leave jail. And if you're going to something like sweeps-despite the fact that all available evidence shows they make nothing better-give people a week's notice or so they can at least hang on to their belongings. It's not evil simple to live in the camps; for most it means they have nowhere else to go.

To really make a difference, there's also going to need to be intervention against "market forces". It's time to finally overturn the state ban on rent control laws (it's not Olympia's place to prevent cities from keeping rental housing affordable for the many) and there's going to need to be a REGIONAL project to build enough low-cost housing to keep people alive in the dead of winter.

And there needs to be a general social consensus on not devaluing or discarding people-a society in which no one who hadn't committed horrific crimes was treated as expendable, as wo as "deadwood", as worthy of nothing but derision would be a society where few people felt the need for debilitating drugs like heroin.

In fact if we treated people like they deserve to be alive, have a right to be live they live, are of intrinsic value and entitled to some baseline level of respect, and many of our worst problems as a society and a planet would vanish. And nothing anyone needed would be lost.