"Hatred for the rich is actually a very natural feeling. It springs from an innate sense of equality."

More like a sense of resentment and entitlement. But keep trying.

Pitch perfect, CM.

So KOMO “manufactures hate for the homeless” by, um, reporting the news? This post is nothing more than a (very long-winded) liberal version of the stock right-wing whine about how “the liberal media” keep accurately reporting how sainted right-wing leaders are actually corrupt moral failures.

(If Charles thinks a story about a crazy homeless person wandering around Belltown somehow inherently lacks credibility, then he ought to try visiting Belltown a little more often.)

@3 because it's categorizing him a homeless person it's implying that homeless people are dangerous. How fucking absurd would it be to announce someone with a home attacked someone. Do we need to anounce your bank account ballance when you get arrested? Oh, they earn 27k a year, well below the 36k a year mark where people become unbalanced and violent.

@5

When a society fails to fund mental health care for the poor, then there are going to be mentally unstable and occasionally violent people living on the street.

We can blame Reagan for gutting the MHSA and deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill, but pretending the obvious consequences aren't happening isn't going to help anyone.

@3 I couldn't agree with you more, this article is ridiculous. I suppose reporting on the bathroom raping in Ballard was reported to manufacture hate also. I don't think anybody in this city hates the homeless, but we hate hearing about tourist being attacked, women being raped, innocent people being harassed.

Just today I witnessed a homeless man spitting on a small business store front just after he removed all the trash from a trash can, and kicked it around the sidewalk...THAT IS WHAT WE HATE.

I have walked in homeless urine, homeless feces, homeless vomit, I’ve been accosted by the homeless, spit on by the homeless, panhandled by the homeless, and been poked by a needle left by homeless. I don’t need KOMO news to tell me to hate the homeless. I hate liberals and progressives that allowed it to get this bad over the last 15 years. All KOMO did was pander to it. Really KOMO isn’t so much the issue as The Strangers underhanded attack on Sinclair Broadcasting using homelessness as the conspiracy which anyone can see right through like glass on a clear day - or did you think everyone just forgot how The Stranger really feels (what didn’t get enough boycotters who cared?):
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/04/02/25985148/its-time-to-boycott-sinclairs-propaganda-machine-but-were-going-to-need-your-help

@5: As @6 (and others here) noted, pretending there isn’t a real solid, causal connection between mental illness and homelessness is part of the reason why Seattle still has so many homeless persons, after decades of throwing money at the problem. Only after we recognize that some of our homeless population lack the ability to make rational, healthy, and sane choices can we get them off our streets and into treatment. (This same argument applies to drug-addicted homeless persons, some of whom also have mental-health issues.)

Pretending these obvious links do not exist, pretending that anyone who recognizes the existence of these links somehow “hates the homeless” — such denials of reality are part of the problem, not part of any solution.

@5: Homeless people are not inherently dangerous because of their situation. However, homeless ness presents dangerous and unhealthy situations for a society.

Therefore revulsion against homelessness is natural and justified.

Charles has been pounding on his “Seattle hates the homeless” drum since a few minutes after our City Council repealed the EHT, aka “head tax”. It’s his warm, comfortable, soothing fable to explain to himself how a safely rubber-stamped 9-0 vote was reversed by a 7-2 vote a month later.

The uninvited and unwelcome intervention of actual democracy, invalidating the tightly closed process by which unelected activists manipulated the Council into that unanimous vote, has proven traumatic for most of the Stranger’s chattering politicos. To his credit, Charles at least showed the energy and imagination to fabricate his own explanation. The rest of them have been reduced by shock to muttering the same talking points which lost them the 7-2 vote, in the belief that Big Sister Sawant’s law died because they didn’t duckspeak hard enough.

Why did it take so long to get the civil rights acts started? Why did it take so long for women to get the right to vote? Why is it taking us so long to get the help that the homeless need? If they had a choice, not many of them would be homeless or lynched or voteless. They need help. So why don't you do something besides complain about everything The Stranger writers post??? Because society is not ready to help them yet? Same shit excuses, different day.

@13: Homelessness is an economic and geographic problem, not a civil rights problem. I suggest retaining from conflating issues to accommodate predetermined narratives.

@16

ICESCR, signed by the United States in 1977, Article 11, section 1:

"1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing"

So yeah, it kind of is a human rights issue.

Elaborated in 1991, in General Comment No. 4: The Right to Adequate Housing (Art. 11 (1) of the Covenant):

"7. In the Committee’s view, the right to housing should not be interpreted in a
narrow or restrictive sense which equates it with, for example, the shelter provided by
merely having a roof over one’s head or views shelter exclusively as a commodity.
Rather it should be seen as the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity.
This is appropriate for at least two reasons. In the first place, the right to housing is
integrally linked to other human rights and to the fundamental principles upon which
the Covenant is premised. This “the inherent dignity of the human person” from
which the rights in the Covenant are said to derive requires that the term “housing” be
interpreted so as to take account of a variety of other considerations, most importantly
that the right to housing should be ensured to all persons irrespective of income or
access to economic resources. Secondly, the reference in article 11 (1) must be read as
referring not just to housing but to adequate housing. As both the Commission on
Human Settlements and the Global Strategy for Shelter to the Year 2000 have stated:
“Adequate shelter means ... adequate privacy, adequate space, adequate security,
adequate lighting and ventilation, adequate basic infrastructure and adequate location
with regard to work and basic facilities - all at a reasonable cost”."

Dear lord. Apologies for the formatting, I haven't been able to make a post look right since SLOG took away our bold and italics.

@13: I wasn’t explicit enough for you @9, huh? Ok, here goes: the Stranger’s constant bitter, petulant attacks upon Seattle’s citizens for our demanding repeal of the EHT are not part of the solution. @5 smugly claiming homelessness and mental health are not linked is not part of the solution. Calling citizens of liberal Seattle “reactionary bootlickers” because — like almost everyone everywhere — they happen to have been born smarter than you is not part of the solution. These are all part of the problem, and the first step to solving a problem is understanding who is part of the problem.

We stopped our City Council from being part of the problem. Maybe now they can work on being part of the solution.

When the head tax was under consideration every business that would have been affected issued a statement more or less claiming that homelessness is a tragedy, and without the tax they would do miracles to end homelessness. So where are the miracles? Besos? Spady? Meinhart?

All I hear are crickets.

Hey! Hey! Hey! Charles! Come on man! We also always report that “a homeowner with well paying job shot his girlfriend tonight in...”

Also “the son of a middle class owner of a nice house in the suburbs killed a dozen students and teachers today in his high school...”

We always report on the socio-economic status of people who commit crimes, especially when they are white or wealthy or both. So how about you quit your ranting and just settle yourself down like a good black man now OK.

People still watch TV news? The last time I watched TV news my hairdid was still in style.

Wow, Charles, a searing expose.
Good work.

Next you could tackle how the media manufactures hate for the police.

Among the many and diverse types of people experiencing homelessness, there certainly is a subset who are mentally ill and/or pathologically violent, and they represent a much larger part of the homeless pie than that of the rest of society.

How a given media outlet chooses to not represent this fact says more about how far out either end of the political spectrum that media outlet is than anything else.

@22: All the time on various devices. This notion that TV news is antiquated is ridiculous, considering that consumers have numerous ways of consuming content from multiple sources whether broadcast, cable, or internet streaming.

@9 gets it

@20: "All I hear are crickets."

Listen harder:

Amazon to Build a Permanent Mary’s Place Family Shelter Within Its Seattle Headquarters

First-of-its-kind facility will provide 24/7 shelter and services for more than 200 homeless women, children, and families each night

http://www.marysplaceseattle.org/blog/amazon-marys-place-announcement/

(Yes, the very same Amazon which was vilified by CM Sawant and the other losers of their needless EHT battle. Funny how that works.)

Charles i think you need to get laid more man. You are a serious complainer. And that can’t be good for your gut man.

Ha, blackheel ain't had pussy since it had him.

Absolute drivel.

Both of these stories show why seattle won’t actually tackle the homeless crisis. The right wants to play make believe and pretend that all homeless people are violent criminals, and the left wants to play make believe and pretend that there are no problems caused by seattles homeless.

Or, maybe it’s not a good idea to let the mentally ill fend for themselves on the street and his is yet another example of why. In case we need more.

CM is a treasure. It is odd how some commentators yell about their experience with homeless people as if they’re the only people affected by it. The reality is they’re the people having a rage filled, dehumanizing panic attack.

@35: I suppose it's because they're the ones who are cleaning up, stepping over, and paying for the effects of it -- rather than those just pouting from their armchairs.

@36:

Bullshit, they're not doing squat about people being forced to defecate in the streets (pun intended) because they literally have no where else to perform an essential bodily function. Well, except for dehumanizing the most vulnerable people in our society because they'd rather eliminate them than help them - THAT they're doing in spades.

As for Saint Jeffrey's largess: the January head count showed 6,320 unsheltered individuals in King County. 200 shelter beds represents 3.16% of the total number of spaces needed to accommodate that many people. All you teary-eyed altruists at AMZN HQ1 can start patting yourselves on the back when your boss - the richest single human being in the entire history of recorded civilization, who fought tooth-and-claw to not have to spend one drop more out of his illimitable ocean of wealth - bumps that number up to something significant.

@37: Amazon is currently paying for Mary’s Place, on 7th Avenue in Belltown. Amazon will host the new Mary’s Place for long after the EHT would have been phased out. But since Amazon’s concern for women and children impacted by domestic violence seems lost on you, we’ll just note that Seattle’s 2018 homeless count showed a lower usage of shelter beds, in both absolute and relative terms, than did the 2017 count.

(You know, after you suffer an ass-handing on the magnitude of a 9-0 victory becoming a 7-2 defeat a month later, you might want to ask yourself why you lost in such a humiliating manner, instead of just lashing out in rage against a company which is actually helping.)

@30, you’re right I stay away from pussy and handle the young bottoms

@15 we read the Stranger for the same reason Charles watches the dumb white woman eat her sandwich

Hate for the homeless stems from the manufactured "opinion" that people choose to be homeless, rather than it being a forced consequence of our country's rigged economy. As long as conservatives believe that poor people deserve to be poor because of their choices, the empathy will never be there.

@38:

Unsheltered homeless = 6,320. Mary's Space = 200 beds. I presume you have some facility with teh maths? Bucket, meet drop.

@41: Seattleites are very empathetic. Last I checked, Seattle is infested with liberals, not infested with conservatives (despite Sinclair). There are bleeding heart warriors and SWJ outrage junkies at every corner of the city, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Your narrative needs adjusting.

And of course, let's not forget: Bezos will reap a huge tax windfall for his "charitable donation", so it's not like this is completely an act of selfless altruism on his part, not to mention all the very-much free publicity he's generated as a result.

And as I hear it told, it hasn't been quite as easy of a go for Mary's Place as the Amazon Marketing and Publicity machine would have us believe: there have been added costs imposed on the organization due to the difficulty of transporting, storing, and distributing donated food; there have been problems with the donated spaces that have made it very difficult for MP to manage them; there's been increased stress on staff to cope with the slap-dap logistics all this has entailed - ironic, given that Amazon rather prides itself on its "superior" logistical management processes.

One example that's been well-documented: shelter staff would never know how much food was going to be donated on any given day and at times would receive more than they had space to safely store, resulting in much of it having to be dumped or else setting off a mad scramble, often with only a few minutes notice, to try to find other organizations willing and able to take the excess. Often staff was never informed as to how long donated food had been left unrefrigerated, so no way to determine how much longer it could be stored safely. Even with the recent hiring of someone to manage all this, according to staff, the situation has only barely improved and they're still tossing out large quantities of unusable, unstoreable, and excess food. Basically, Amazon has turned Mary's Place into a cheap way to dispose of its own excess, with little or no regard for the significant extra burden it has placed on ground-level employees of the organization.

And we won't even get into things like: shelter guest being locked out of their spaces for hours on-end, sometimes overnight, with no access to their personal belongings; Amazon management requesting "tours" of the facilities to show them off to high-ranking visitors - I guess they felt it was sort of like their own personal "human zoo"?

So yeah, keep on crowing about all the good Bezos and Co. are doing for the community. But at the same time, consider how much additional burden your "charity" is placing on Mary's Place - a burden that could be very easily lifted, if only your Glorious, Beneficent Leader would spend what to him would amount to loose change found under a seat cushion to alleviate.

@44- all excellent points. Shut it down.

@44: So Mary's Place is less that perfect. It's still making a difference. Sorry, you don't have any creditably when you criticize philanthropy.

@44: You might want to talk to the “staff” (at Mary’s Place? At Amazon?) who fed you those rumors:

“Mary’s Place will no longer accept donations of food that is unpackaged or not prepared in a commercial kitchen by permitted food handlers. Donations of food that is in unopened, original packaging can still be accepted.“

http://www.marysplaceseattle.org/support-us/share-your-stuff/

As for your harping on the total number of shelter beds, why is that important when the use rate of those shelter beds has been declining? If one of your arguments for the EHT was that it would further increase the number of unused shelter beds, then I’ll do you the kind favor of informing you that was actually an argument against the EHT. Little wonder you lost.

Other than getting your hate on Amazon for assisting Mary’s Place (!) in caring for women and children escaping domestic violence, have you any other lazily ignorant opinions, based (at best) upon groundless rumors, for you to demand we take seriously?

Hi Charles. About two weeks ago, an encampment moved onto the sidewalk outside my property. Since then, the guy who lives there has left needles all over the sidewalk, thrown garbage and stolen items everywhere, and stolen several bicycles. We've called the police time and again and been ignored every single time.

My neighbors and I put a lot of effort into keeping this neighborhood nice and clean and safe, but the city not only refuses to get this guy out of here, but also lets him live above the law and destroy what we've worked so hard to maintain. We can't do a damn thing about it even though it's obviously illegal.

Perhaps the hatred for the homeless comes from a place of inequality as well. Because we the housed feel like there are two sets of laws. This homeless guy can steal all our shit and the city won't prosecute. We can't even steal it back from him or we'll get arrested. We didn't create this inequality between homed and homeless. The city created it with its law enforcement policy. We are just responding with revulsion to the existing inequality.

I didn't need Sinclair media or capitalism or Trump or whatever Seattle bogeyman you come up with next week to tell me to hate this criminal who's plopped down in our neighborhood taking advantage of everything we've built and making our streets filthy and unsafe. I hate him because his actions have a strong negative effect on me personally and on my friends and neighbors. And this guy could become unstable at the drop of a pin and attack one of us or our children. He is, after all, shooting up in that tent, and has already shown a proclivity to commit crimes on a nearly daily basis.

The same story plays out time and time again in this city. This week it's my neighborhood. Next week it's a few blocks over. Maybe one day it will be yours. Is it any wonder everyone's so up in arms?

A capitalist society in which the state exists primarily to support the capitalists will inevitably have a permanent “underclass” of people who are left to fend for themselves in a system that is rigged against them. The more money the super-wealthy 1% are allowed to hoard for themselves, the greater the poverty and lack of opportunity suffered by society’s most vulnerable members. Nothing new here. The crimes of the rentier class are far more serious and wide-reaching than crimes perpetuated by homeless people. But since they own the media the focus on the crimes commited by the homeless and the poor.

Even this piece only asks us to be “nicer” to homeless people, the fact that our system and the massive income inequality it breeds is directly responsible for the plight suffered by our society’s most powerless members is never mentioned. And neither is the fact that most Democrats are completely ok with the system as it is. Their “compassion” stops where their self-serving rhetoric ends.

@49: You're juxtaposing the 1% and the homeless as if we shouldn't complain about dirty needles and garbage and theft given the horrendous sins of Amazon, Goldman Sachs or whatever. Why the stupid equivalencies and negating homeless problems just because you think social inequities are more important for discussion? Just because you think the capitalist system is wrong doesn't add credence to your arguments or provide any meaningful input on actually helping the homeless.

I'm not rich, and I can't stand most of these homeless people I've had any interaction with. The "typical" homeless person I've run into, is only looking for a handout. They hang out in our parks where our kids play while they smoke weed and talk loud using foul language, and act crazy creating an unsafe, unpredictable feeling. I don't give a crap if they wanna smoke weed, shoot up, drink, suck dick or shit in the bushes, talk loud, and generally act like the degenerate, good for nothings they are, but when they do this in our public space, I don't give a f*ck about their plight in this world. Ya ya, homelessness is a problem.... it's a problem for everyone except most of the homeless vagrants who don't think twice about taking a shit in the bushes underneath your living room window. They're here because this city has invited them. Why else would someone come to a place that rains 6 months out of the year?

@6... (robotslave). Yes, Reagan did dismantle the MHSA and deinstitutionalize the mentally ill, but, liberals have had a total of 16 years at the highest office of this land to put it back in place since Reagan did that. What happend? What did they do about it? I'll tell you.... they did nothing about it. So, tell us..... what was your point with mentioning Reagan? Because it's been 37 years since he did that and he's dead now.

@52 let me get this straight. The right dismantled a social service system that took nearly forty years to create, continues to guts its funding in every state and resists every possible work around their anti-social services legislation... and it’s liberals fault?

How long does it take to plan, propose, legislate, fund and build say a highway system? A about three decades. How long does it take to demolish one? A couple months.

It’s easier to destroy than to build. You fucking moron.

@53... So, Mr. not a fucking moron smartguy, when do you start rebuilding it? When do you propose more legislation and more taxes. How many studies does it take, and how many millions of dollars for those studies do we need before something actually gets started? Cuz what I'm seeing is mental disorders and homelessness in epidemic proportions. What do YOU propose other than just another lame excuse for nothing being done? Absolute socialism? Total government control over health services? What? Tell us, wise one. You obviously have SOME idea.....don't you?

B-boy Clinton overtly shredded the social safety net even further... It's not all Reagan's fault, it was a bipartisan effort.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/03/the-worst-thing-bill-clinton-has-done/376797/