Charles: "They city was still functioning despite the outrageous fact that on one side of this bridge there were living things without a place, and the other, dead things with a place. How is this possible?"

OK, Charles...you asked the question. Do you have an answer? How could we make what is currently possible into something that is impossible?

Put a land rent/location fee on all commercial land (let's be real: it only commands its value through location, the investments of taxpayers and working people) and see if it makes sense to have surface parking lots or big box stores. How many jobs does a hoarders warehouse create and where do those monthly rents go? Nothing to the local economy. Seattle is an ATM for investors and speculators, and the money comes from the working people.

It's nearly ubiquitous where noteworthy things find themselves adjacent to each other (often paradoxically so), with one being to the east and the other being to west of the other.

I missed the part where somewhere in the pi**ing and moaning about "society" and "things" and "people" that you proposed a solution.

Here's my solution: Mandatory housing.

Liberal cities with tolerable climates have spent much more than enough money on sheltering and related programs to provide every single homeless person with a place to live, particularly in light of subsidies and government requirements upon developers for below-market housing.

So, let's house them. Or else, accommodate them in any fashion of their choosing that doesn't involve creating ad hoc encampments in public places.

So, among other reasons, that you don't have to view them and become upset with this dreadful and uncaring society, Mr. Mudede.

As it happens, quite a number of homeless people rent storage units at that very Public Storage facility. I have a unit there, and when the place is opening in the AM I always see a few homeless people, dropping off their overnight gear and picking up stuff they need for the daytime, and vice versa around closing time in the evening. This addresses a great challenge of being homeless: keeping your stuff from getting stolen and/or rained on.

I'm not quite homeless myself, but I live in a tiny (less than 100 sq ft) space, which is all I can afford. The storage unit makes this quite feasible; otherwise I'd have to get rid of most of my books and records in order to have room to lie down. So, while I can see Charles's point, I don't think that particular storage facility is really the best example of our society's inequality.

The fun part about human rights is, humans get to decide that they are!

Wooo, FUN!

Now let's stop leaving it up to the sociopaths and the hateful idiots to decide, mmkay?

@9: "So, let's house them. Or else, accommodate them in any fashion of their choosing that doesn't involve creating ad hoc encampments in public places."

Perhaps these ad hoc encampments are of their choosing. Because you've just hit on the root cause of the problem for a lot of thee people. Once you RULE OUT encampments, you are imposing rules on other people. Which they may not want and, as a result, they move out of your rules-encumbered housing and back into tents.

@2- if @1 has a job then they are contributing to society via taxes, but you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?

I live nearby and know the area well. The homeless live on all sides of that bridge. They live on the west side on the hill. Threy live on the south side under the bridge. They live in José Rizal park. They live in Daejeon park. They live along the path to Jimi Hendrix Park. They live pretty much everywhere they can on Beacon Hill.

The only divide is between Mudede and objective reality. He clearly didn't bother to ask the locals before writing tht article. Had he, he would have heard an endless stream of stories of break-ins and harassment perpetrated by his poor oppressed masses. Maybe he wants to live next to these wonderful misunderstood people and have his car window broken to steal 50$ worth of stuff.

Also, they live in the public storage itself, even though they're not supposed to. Maybe Mudede should have bothered to ask the public storage employees.

Mr. Mudede saw some homeless people and was soooo moved he had to write something about it. And those homeless people are still homeless. What a fucking liberal. You see a social problem and rather than solve the problem, you use it as an opportunity to self-promote.

10's comment is enlightening. There used to be a great variety of very low cost housing options available to poor people: SRO hotels, cage hotels, boarding houses, basement bedrooms rented out, and a variety of other options to keep people off the streets and out of the rain. (read Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt for a description of immigrant housing in NYC) We have spent the last 50 years using zoning and building codes and regulations to squeeze almost all of that out of existence, Topping that off with changes to the economics of land use, not much is left. Except the very poor remain. #10 has scraped together a situation to keep homelessness at bay, probably at quite low cost. I am guessing that includes a shared bathroom and no cooking facilities, but it is warm and dry and secure. Perhaps reintroducing market and zoning incentives to provide some market area for very low cost housing to exist, and combine that with very modest subsidies. I bet a $200 / month subsidy would get a lot of folks out of their tents, if some better options were available. This would not do much to funnel money to the Poverty Industrial Complex, but might improve some impoverished folks lives a bit.

typical libtard whining about everyone else not giving enough, when he himself is giving nothing AND it is the very giving that has ENABLED them to be drug addicts and jobless

It must suck living in a City controlled by the very politicians you trolled for and their mindless far left policies only to look at the face of those failed policies and try to round that square peg you created. If it were me I’d be stoned out like Charles is most of the day