Comments

1

"talking about how the homeless crisis is fueled by drugs and not by the housing crisis."

Drug or alcohol use is the second most common self-reported cause of homelessness in the 2019 Point-In-Time Count. In contrast, only 8% of survey respondents attributed their homelessness to being unable to afford a rent increase.

I know the conventional wisdom at the Stranger is that housing costs is the primary cause of homelessness, but that's not what the homeless think.

2

Becoming bankrupt because your health "insurance" didn't / doesn't / never ever will cover your Medical Emergency is a Thing in these united states of America -- thee Richest Country in the History of the fucking World.

Kinda Ironic, don'tchya think?

3

I expect Abe to be so annoyed, he'll get up and walk out his memorial.

4

Yep, conservative grifters funded by the Koch Brothers, Discovery Institute, Manhattan Institute, etc. are calling the same plays up and down the West Coast:

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/06/04/Fox-News-zeroes-in-on-a-new-target-the-homeless/223865

The short-term fear-stoking is about energizing the base and punishing sanctuary cities.

But you can totally see this administration moving from Muslims to immigrants at the borders to the poorest and most vulnerable folks living on the street, as they test to see if they can get away with putting American citizens in detention centers. We should make sure they can't.

5

Something tells me that people will be beating the GOP to a pulp because of Donald Trump for a very, very long time.

6

Even broken clocks are correct once a day.

7

@5 RickFromTexas: Can I hug you? I really, really do hope you're right.Here's to the mass extinction of the GOP, once and for all.

8

"We're looking at it very seriously. We may intercede. We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up. We have to take the people and do something,"

ah yes, taking the people and doing something. why didn't seattle libtards think of that? or the libtards in forks? port townsend? tacoma?

stupid, binary people all come up with stupid, binary solutions.

President Rapist Asshole's just bullshitting. he's never even thought about it until Carlson asked. he has zero intention of doing anything.

9

It’s entertaining to watch The Stranger flail and rage at everyone else, from the president on down, for The Stranger’s having lost all the fights it needlessly picked on homelessness policy.

Imagine if, over the past decade or so, Stranger staffers had walked past all the discarded needles around The Stranger’s Capitol Hill office and concluded there was an addiction crisis in our city. Then, those writers could have demanded more treatment, more halfway houses, more resources for addiction treatment. Who knows, they might thus have saved a few lives?

But no, they decided it was a housing crisis — just like the “crisis” they faced, in not being able to afford apartments on Capitol Hill for what The Stranger was paying them. So they went all in with CMs O’Brien, Sawant, and Herbold, declaring it was a housing crisis, as junkies died on streets all over Capitol Hill.

Now, we see the dead end of that failed strategy, and it isn’t pretty.

10

Trump can feign compassion, but the real goal is to hide the very visible failure of the economy and education system for large swaths or the population.
It’s hard to argue that the scale of the problem doesn’t require resources and coordination on the federal level, but we should be very skeptical of anyone suggesting work camps ala this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_Arbeitsscheu_Reich

12

You got it Right, Shorline Dave!

Solving human problems humanitarily
is what (most) Humans do.

I know, I know, that always make Rs Mad as hell.
Sadly, they'll never get 'over it.'

13

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. How long will it take Seattle and other cities to realize what they are doing isn’t working?

Enabling people is not helping them. Providing benefits with no requirements or expectations allows people to continue as they are and nothing will change. Ask a family member of someone who is addicted to heroin or alcohol about enablement. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t help, and always creates more problems in the end.

Housing prices aren’t the problem. Addiction and people making terrible choices is the crisis. You can’t force someone to make good choices. People won’t change until they hit rock bottom and want to change on their own. Free benefits just delays the process and subsidizes their addictions. I’m liberal AF and sad to say I’m with Trump on this one.

14

kristofarian how does giving someone an apartment solve any of their problems that led to them being homeless in the first place? Are you requiring rehab as a condition for the free apartment? Are you doing ongoing drug testing as a condition for keeping the apartment? Are you requiring any work training or vocational training so that they are able to get a job and make their own way? Are you requiring any sacrifice or change from them in exchange for a free place to live?

Giving someone a free house with zero strings attached so that they can continue their substance abuse and previous living patterns in is shortsighted and isn’t helping them long term.

15

@1: And those results comport nicely with Seattle’s 2016 survey of the homeless, wherein a majority of respondents reported not being originally from Seattle, of having most recently become homeless outside of Seattle, and of using alcohol and other drugs.

Ignoring those results, CM O’Brien et al continue to make policy as if a majority of our homeless were locals who had become homeless from rent increases. The dismal results follow from the descriptions given @13 & @14.

Our local, self-described advocates for the homeless have literally spent years ignoring what actual homeless persons have consistently said. It’s almost as if our local, self-described advocates for the homeless have an agenda which does not involve helping the homeless get housed.

16

Yea, the liberal solution to our drug addiction/homeless crises have been a resounding success. We should destroy anyone who comes up with alternative ideas to end the misery these poor people are suffering through.

Seriously, people living in filth as if it were Medieval times, the needles on the streets and in parks, the increase in property crime, the vision and smell of human waste on nearly every sidewalk downtown, and the destruction of our national reputation. These harsh realities mean nothing compared to defending the liberal greed of the current policies that financially benefit government unions while thousands suffer on the streets.

17

@15: It's not as simple as saying "it's an addiction issue", and we all know it's not possible to deal with addiction as a criminal justice issue or through forced institutionalization. And a decent city can't just run people out of town.

As to the addiction component, here's what we need to do:

1) Bring back the neighborhood drug treatment centers which were created in the late Sixties and Seventies, where people could go to get drug treatment without facing stigmatization or arrest. This is important because people can't be forced off of drugs and sending them to prison doesn't generally get people off of drugs-every prison in the country is filled with drugs. The only way to get people off of drugs is to deal with it as a health issue and not as a personal failing or a "bad choice".

2) Actually study people going through treatment in these centers, learn their life stories, and find out what drove them to drugs. Drug use is almost never a conscious choice to be an irresponsible, selfish jerk; it is not something people go to for no reason. There's a strong connection between drug use and both untreated individual depression-we badly need to increase funding for outpatient mental health clinics all through this country-and the sense of despair this country and the way it excludes and discards people, the way it declares people to be of no value, to be "deadwood", plays a major role in the acquisition of an addiction. To truly wipe out addiction, we need to wage a war against not only poverty and homelessness(a lot of people become addicts after becoming hopelessness-and why would they not? When you've become homeless, it's natural to conclude that you have no hope and no reason to live-many of us, if made homeless, would come to the same conclusion. If people came from other places, it's because they came from other places where they had no hope. Denying them hope here isn't going to cause them to give up drugs; it's almost certainly going to cause them to double down on drug use.

18

In short, it does no good to treat homelessness as a problem that can be solved by mass incarceration of mass institutionalization, and it doesn't matter of some of the homeless say they came from other places. Most people in Seattle came from other places, too-where anyone came from is irrelevant.


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