Comments

2

@1 - Yes, there are homeless tents now enjoying their beach view at Green Lake. We thought of all parks, this one would be safe. But not with our evil city council.

3

"A truly compassionate, progressive city would secure or construct adequate facilities to house everyone in need of a home, rather than punishing them."

And just how would you go about doing that, in a city that has some of the highest property values in the nation? Who would build them? Who would maintain them? How would rent be determined? Would it be free? If so, how would eligibility be determined? What rules would you establish to keep order? What about people who need addiction or mental health treatments? What if they need medicine to control their condition? What if they are violent? What if people start flocking here because of this compassionate progressing housing? How do we control that?

This is not a problem of compassionate progressive cities. This is a problem that requires leadership at the federal level so that all across the country we can treat homeless people with the same level of dignity.

4

@2 yeah those folks are really living the sweet life with the waterfront view. I feel cheated. Why dont people like you and I who are housed and financially secure ever get any breaks?

6

@4 - How faux you can be never ceases to amaze me.

8

6, recalibrate your capacity for amazement then ¯(ツ)/¯

10

@2:

Nobody's stopping you from selling your home and pitching a tent on the pristine shores of Greenlake yourself. But, you wouldn't even think of doing such a thing, because you know, as do all the other "the homeless are all scum" concern-trolls, just how miserable an existence it really is.

@9:

Have you ever seen our beautiful parks after, say, a summer weekend or major civic event such as Seafair, the Fourth of July or Bumbershoot? Piles of garbage and discarded food, and overflowing waste bins and Honey Buckets all of which attract armies of vermin, and all requiring the City to spend thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to clear away. But, because all that refuse is generated by people with homes nobody gives it a second thought.

So, the question is: are you really cool with people trashing our beautiful parks or is it only when they're homeless people that you find this behavior objectionable?

11

We do need to do a better job creating and maintaining adequate housing for homeless people, but allowing them to crash in vacant properties is a terrible idea. The photo you grabbed is of a row of houses near Roosevelt high school, owned by one of the worst slum lords in the city. The houses were shut down by the city for being unsafe wrecks. The last thing we need is to allow homeless people to crash there. The buildings are nearly falling down. Homeless people are safer in tents than in some of these dilapidated buildings. The city is doing the right thing by keeping homeless people out of them... for their own safety.

12

@10.a - Oh, and I suppose you would?
@10.b - You're comparing it periodic waste bin overflows?

You, I just have to come out and say it, are unbalanced.

14

@12a.

I'm not the one complaining about the homeless, am I?

@12b.

During warm weather months "periodic" = almost daily. Functionally there's no difference aside from the fact that people with homes perceive leaving piles of garbage in a park as their right, whereas with homeless people it's pretty much a necessity. I mean, it's not like the homeless can cart their waste home to deposit in their own trash bins, can they?

@12c.

You calling someone unbalanced is about as apposite to this discussion as letting a blind person umpire a baseball game...

15

Professor_Hiztory dear, I'm not discounting the contributions that progressive cities can and should make. I'm just saying that this is a national problem that has fallen largely upon the shoulders of the coastal cities.

16

Just because someone is homeless does not give them license to be obnoxious pricks and set their crap right smack dab in our most popular and treasured parks along the edge of Greenlake.

Good grief.

17

@7, I'm with Catalina, er, I mean Mrs. Vel-DuRay here. I'm not sure where you get that "This is a proven technique, time and time again." Really, where is it working? In the past 15 years, the number of homeless people in the US as a whole has been dropping while it has been skyrocketing in New York, LA, SF, and Seattle, the places which are implementing housing first policies. I expect if we could build the 6 or 7,000 housing units we'd need to meet the current demand, we'd find we'd need another 10,000 within a year. It also doesn't make sense to concentrate more and more of this housing in the most expensive cities in the US. As a city, we can't really fix this. This doesn't mean Seattle and the other cities on that list don't have a role to play, but the city's current approach is going to sacrifice the quality of life of a lot of the people living here, which is an important problem as well.

18

Having lived across from a vacant house with squatters, fuuuuuuck anyone who squats in a house.
Worst fucking experience. Nightly drug runs, trash, and apparently stolen cars used as transportation because a stolen car was abondon outside the property weekly.
These people do not give a single fuck. Not one. Not about you, the city, neighbors, the law, or really even themselves.
Another squatter experience: I was doing volunteer work at Marra Farm and overnight some squatters dumped hundreds of Gatorade bottles full of the nastiest, orangest, rancid-smelling junkie piss on the property. We had to empty them all and clean it up. This is a place that provides free organize produce to food banks, but here are our local protected class of junkie vagrants destroying that beautiful work. Fuck them.

21

@4, @17- Exactly. Poverty is a national problem and needs a national solution, or at the very least a regional one. It's completely unreasonable to expect Seattle to house all the homeless in the area. And I too wonder about the attractive effect of our relative leniency - I've read the reports on homelessness the last few years & cannot figure out how many of the homeless here are actually from here and how many came here once they became homeless.

Some argue that people are drawn here because of Seattle's permissive attitude towards drugs. Some say not. Again, it's impossible to answer this question. Oregon has been kind enough to begin an experiment to answer that question. We'll see whether decriminalizing hard drug use draws the street population there or not.

As far as Green Lake/Woodland Park goes, at least make them stop lighting the damned campfires. That is dangerous for everyone.

25

@23 last week Seattle Times described building shleter for the homeless as a "growth industry" $$$.


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