I also keep getting sent this and I've been noting this for a bit, not just the ad, but the weird sort of out-of-nowhere chorus of angry "area homeowners" and pilers-on from elsewhere who all seem to be repeating the same canned message about homeless camps, crime, drugs, etc etc etc.

My bullshit sensor goes off when I see large numbers of previously-unheard people emerging and reading from a script. This shit has the smell of astroturf all over it, and as Eli pointed out, it ain't the Russians. It's just us.

Does this group who placed this ad recommend building a lot of new housing and/or changing laws to make it easier to do a lot of that? There's a whole lot of money associated with building a lot of new structures such that some folks would be willing to place ads to promote such like. ...not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with this means of addressing homelessness - but ...follow-the-money.

@1 Good point. Although it's possible that local residents have finally grown weary of decades of ineffective policy and wasteful spending, it's most likely that this is all just a social media agenda of some secretive organization.

What's frustrating to me is that I'm squarely on the side of this campaign, and I can easily see that the lack of transparency is utterly self-defeating. Now, I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to think that this ad actually came from O'Brien or other head tax supporters. I always take the Occam's razor choice that says, "Never attribute to Machiavellian genius what can be chalked up to sheer stupidity."

BTW, Jon Talton in The Times has what I consider the most compelling case against the head tax I have yet to read, "Morning after on the jobs tax: Whether it comes fast or slow, Seattle will face a reckoning":
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/morning-after-on-the-jobs-tax-a-fast-or-slow-reckoning/

They don't mind taxes and spending all that much, as long as all of it is spent on police and jails. And maybe mental asylums as long as they're not too nice. They don't really want a detailed budget and fiscal accountability. Single line budget items are all they need to know: police, jails, asylums. People warehouses are good, or work farms. Concentration camps? Sure, keep it simple.

What bothers them is helping people who are on the bottom of society. Helping a person who is in poverty, sick, hungry, unsheltered, and especially, especially addicted, is a violation of their basic values. They only want to help people who really deserve help, and if they're worthy, how could they even need help? It's impossible. If you're a decent person, life gives you stuff. If you have stuff, you're a good person. It's an unholy alliance of atheist Objectivism and prosperity gospel. It sounds gross because it is.

Their most cherished belief is that life is fair. If you pay police to swing a billy club at a person living in a blanket, that's fine. They must have done something really terrible or they wouldn't be poor. Abusing people at the bottom of society is in accord with the natural order.

They are happy to pay twice as much to keep someone in jail than to put them in public housing, because one is reinforcing the ideology that everyone gets what they deserve, and the other is taking from those who deserve nice houses and nice cars, and giving to to those whom God, or the god of the free market, has told you are unworthy.

It's even more of an offense to the universal truth that life is fair if you're only taxing the rich. It's bad enough to tax moderately worthy people along with everyone else, but progressive taxes are a blatant attack on the notion that the rich deserve to be rich. Progressive taxes directly target those whom Nature has deemed the best among us, most deserving of the greatest rewards.

You've got retired people whose Amazon job isn't leaving town because of the "jobs tax", who obviously aren't employers making enough to pay the tax, who are boiling over with rage over this. They want the homeless moved out of their sight, but not like this. They want sweeps. They want to see them cower in fear and hiding in rat holes. Not given things! And given things taken from the rich! It's like twisting the knife. It's driving them to mob riots.

Hell hath no fury like privileged white people when you tell them they didn't build that. It's an attack on their very identity.

So if you see one, let them know: life is not fair.

BS radar went off? Collusion, witch hunt and hush hush payoffs? We await with bated breath. Definitely a potential Pulitzer Prize winning article here. Go get ‘em tiger.

The bigger scandal is how the folks pushing the nearly $1 billion Move Seattle levy misled voters. Who are the actors behind that and where has the money gone? But let’s just keep our head in the sand and be happy with $12 million/mile bike lane and crumbling bridges.

@5
Do you have any thoughts of your own, or are you just an expert on what other people think?

Awful seattle. They just need to put up barracks outside the city, by monroe or something as drug treatment. Make it legal to open a bunch of single room occupancy boarding houses like in nyc, chicago, houston and san francisco. Open a big flipping shelter, in south park that is a shithole anyway to get some women, kids elderly off the streets. Rent control, especially in shit areas. Get elderly and children off the streets. MANY SINGLE COCCUPANCIES BY SEATTLE AND, SURROUNDING AREAS, TO GET WORKING POOR FROM LIVING IN VEHICLES! So evil and stupid. Seattle is a shitty, bourgeois town with snotty, arrogant idiots running things. Need to change zoning and building regulations. Just stupid.

Really, who cares who financed the ad. It sounds pretty much on cue to the reality everyone except the writers at The Stranger. It’s not like the Russians have a valued interest in the homeless unless they have a lot of investment stock in tents and sleeping bags and even then it’s moot if those using your widget have no money. So if someone somehow thinks that putting out an ad that pretty much says what everyone is thinking and living day-to-day backed by some Russian Organization - well then we should be giving the Russians a lot more credit for observation than we are.

“...it's more than enough to pack a public meeting.”

I like the implication that this ad campaign is the sole reason we angry citizens are showing up at district meetings and demanding accountability of our elected representatives. We’re apparently ourselves utterly incapable of figuring out that our tax money has been wasted upon an obviously failed policy which our City Council shows no interest in fixing.

@3 who fed you those talking points? Dori Monson?

@12 Do you really think people can't see what's going on and form their own opinions? They need a radio host for talking points? How many needles do you have to pick up before your kids soccer game or how many times do you have to see one of our poor, can't-catch-a-breakers pissing in a doorway before you come to the conclusion you've had it?

It's weird how good one gets at knowing what people think when they spend every waking hour TELLING YOU WHAT THEY THINK in every conceivable medium. They buy ads, the spam all the forums, they chant demands at meetings. Pretty sure we heard them by now.

Am I wrong? How much fiscal accountability do they demand when someone runs off with hundreds of millions of dollars for a grandiose boondoggle of a police station or new jail? They trust government when that's where the money goes.

It's not about wasting money. They don't really mind waste. It's not about taxes. They don't really mind taxes. It's not about safety. When the "wrong sort" is unsafe, that's fine. Not about getting dirty people out of sight. Get them off the streets, yes, but not in a kind way.

It's only about one thing: be as rough and cruel as possible to punish the ones on the bottom, and coddle and flatter those at the top.

The Stranger:
Go to reading for 58-year-old white male homeowners in the burbs...

So hip it hurts!

@5, @15: Aw, look: the guy with thousands upon thousands of comments on Slog got all butthurt at his fellow citizens for speaking obvious truths he can’t or won’t admit. Poor, poor baby!

If it makes you feel better to call every last critic of our failed homeless policy a big fat meaniehead, then you can do it. That you look like a belligerent ignoramus is your problem, not ours.

Here’s a thought, since you obviously can’t come up with it all by yourself: if we pay for a police station or jail and get one, then we got what we paid for. When we paid for a ten-year-plan to end homelessness, and got so many more homeless people that it became a crisis, then we obviously didn’t get what we paid for. Please do try to comprehend the difference between getting what we paid for, and not getting what we paid for. They really are two different things. (You’ll just have to trust me on this.)

@19: It’s even better in context. CM O’Brien paddled his kayak onto Elliott Bay for an environmental protest. When it comes to broken-down vehicles discharging untreated human waste into that same Elliott Bay via storm drains, well, hey — no plan needed!

"People ensconced in those intentionally manufactured filter bubbles then show up at public meetings, angry and armed with the beliefs that advertisers like "City Council: Make It Better" want them to have top of mind."

I haven't seen this ad, but it's interesting that Eli thinks that ads like this are what gets people angry and going to public meetings. Stranger people, you need to get out of your Capitol Hill bubble. Ads aren't driving them to get angry. The anger drives the ads.

5 You are spot on about what is going on here.

The hue and cry about the homeless by the privileged who are not doing shit about making things better for those who are suffering. The city stinks too and paying bureaucrats big bucks to mishandle things is another problem.

Do you have enough jails to satisfy your thirst for control? Are there enough dead people found on the streets? You don’t want to see what your greed and selfishness does. You continue to blame the oppressed for being oppressed. That is truly disgusting.

15 Thanks for that because its true.

13 Thanks for the laugh.

You made the comment section so readable.

14 We have heard that song before. Stop making excuses for yourself.

@Ivy, @Ivy, @Ivy:

Seattle’s taxpayers fund shelters, transitional housing, and we’re rebuilding Yesler Terrace to have even more affordable housing. What more should we do?

The poverty rate in King County has fallen for each of the past few years. What more should happen?

"if we pay for a police station or jail and get one, then we got what we paid for."

I rest my case.

You think throwing a couple hundred million into a hole in the ground gets you the police station you paid for. It doesn't, not unless somebody makes for damn sure the money gets spent the way it's supposed to. Without intense oversight, you get a half-dug hole in the ground and they come back to the taxpayers and shrug: "Soooooory! Cost overruns! Who knew?" And you'll pay more. Gladly. You'll keep paying until it's done.

If the police tell you they need a submarine, you'll buy them a submarine. Anything to add to the spectacle of police theater that reinforces the social hierarchy.

You don't mind wasted tax dollars. It's not about waste. MAGA Seattle just can't stand helping people who are at the bottom. Can't stand it.

@27: Oh, so you do understand the difference between spending money to get something of lasting value, and spending money to make a problem worse? Good for you! Baby steps, baby steps. Maybe after a few (million) years of such progress, you'll be qualified to participate in a dialog amongst adults about public policy.

Meanwhile, all you've got is idiocy about building a submarine for the police, and the already-tired accusation that anyone who opposes failed policies must have voted for Trump. (That last is not even original desperate stupidity: Geov Parrish threw exactly such a hissy-fit at citizens of Ballard because they had dared speak at a district meeting without first obtaining his express consent. The nerve of some people!)

Have fun telling beleaguered homeowners in Ballard and other parts of the North End they don't need a new police station. Not that you care or anything, but between our homeless population there and the existing slate of unsolved crimes, the case for a new police station is so obvious, even you'd have trouble opposing it on merits -- should you ever try, that is.

@12 You have suggested I listen to Dori Monson. That is, hands down, the most offensive thing anyone has ever said to me in the Slog comment section.

I demand an aplogoy.

Tensor, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless have infinite lasting value, far beyond any stone edifice you could ever imagine constructing. North Seattle doesn't need a new police station, nor do we need to expand jail space, or add a lot of more cops in response to a crime rate that hasn't been this low in 50 years. I bet any amount of money if the SPD said they need a new helicopter, or submarine, or howitzer, for that matter, these same rubes would be filling town halls chanting that they want that desperately vital public safety hardware NOW.

What is so sad about Seattle's new nativist, xenophobic MAGA crowd is that they probably didn't vote for Trump. But now look at them: they listen to right wing talk radio, and follow their swarm of Facebook front groups, and their heads get filled with false information about crime rates, the homeless population, and where they came from. The facts say most homeless people are from here, and they are not crossing vast distances to suckle at the Seattle social welfare teat. It's made-up bullshit, from Jason Rantz and Dori Monson (Uh, oh, someone got triggered! Shoe fits, princess, wear it.) and the rest of those phonies. What the hell are they doing slurping up that Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting swill if they were ever anything other than Republicans? What is their excuse?

A man who owns a house gets in his car, drives down the street, and sees someone sleeping on the sidewalk who wasn't there the day before. And his first thought? Not concern for the human being in obvious distress. He immediately thinks of himself as the victim in this scenario. He is the aggrieved party. Because his vista was blighted by the sight of human misery. And that guy didn't vote for Trump? What the hell happened to him since the last election? Something has warped this person's values out of all recognition.

But OK. Fine. Bunch of people want to be perceived as former Democrats, liberals even, who now want to join pogroms and lynch mobs out to string up a member of the least powerful group in sight, who gets blamed for everything that goes wrong, and who is part of a vast conspiracy of politicians and business interests to profit at the expense of hardworking salt of the earth decent folk. No, not gypsies. Not Jews. Not blacks. Yes, it sounds like the old scapegoating, same old story, same plot. But this time it's bankers + homeless + your local city council! Plotting behind closed doors and now they're coming for our daughters!

Did you hear Dori Monson obsessing over Seattle's like 80th rape this year? Spent all day on it. Probably still wailing about it today. Not a word about the other 79 or so rapes up to this one, no. Other than to raise awareness of how sometimes rape victims LIE. Oh, yes, the defenders of female purity do want to remind the world about how that happens so, so often. But this one particular rape suddenly matters do Seattle's wingnuts. Disgusting.

MAGA Seattle sucks, man. Fucking sucks.

@30:

"Tensor, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless have infinite lasting value..."

I've never said otherwise. What proof have you that revenues from the head tax will do anything on that list you recited?

Do you understand that Seattle has spent millions of dollars trying to house a few thousand persons, and will continue to do so, no matter what happens to the head tax? Do you understand that being told to pay more money, without so much as an attempt to explain why our previous expenditures failed, is the reason Seattle's citizens may repeal the head tax? It has nothing to do with Seattle's voters supporting Republicans or Trump, we support neither. Your blatant lying, to say we do, does not help you.

"A man who owns a house gets in his car, drives down the street, and sees someone sleeping on the sidewalk who wasn't there the day before. And his first thought?"

He thinks, "Whatever happened to our ten-year plan to end homelessness? DIdn't I pay plenty of money for that?"

What answer have your for his question?

(Oh, and please stop pulling that police submarine out of your ass, waving it around, and telling us how great it smells. In reality, Seattle's citizens elected as mayor the very person who sued the city to reform our police department. Good luck getting anyone but yourself to believe that very same electorate would give SPD anything it wants.)