Comments

1

In all your years in office you've done nothing to make anyone's life better. There are more people experiencing homelessness than ever. Your support of rioters has helped make downtown a ghost town. Nothing that you've said or done has served to lessen tensions between the police and Seattle citizens. If anything your actions have made SPD more sympathetic. Feels to a lot of people like the only thing you've brought to this city is chaos and death. So if you are against this amendment then it must be exactly what is needed.

2

when neocons
use the word 'compassionate'
they mean mean. when they say
'War is Peace!' you just gotta convince Yourself.

how are you at Math?

3

to think that only the big bad corporations want to see this charter pass is naïve. Seattle city counsel has proved to be 100% ineffective in this issue and it is clear that the majority of Seattleites consider this to be the major issue our city faces, more than police reform, covid restrictions and taxing the rich. The completely lack of desire on the part of our leadership to hold anyone on the streets accountable for their actions is disgusting at best. Get out of your echo chamber and take a two block walk around the Seattle public library in Lake City and tell us with a straight face that what you see is because its too expensive to live in Seattle. Our streets are flooded with cheap drugs and city counsel would rather enable peoples addictions and turn a blind eye to the deaths, property crime, and blight than do anything to clean up the streets. MAKE IT HARDER FOR ADDICTS TO GET HIGH NOT EASIER. Lets start with that and focus recourses to those that are needing housing assistance and mental health. Junkies need to hit rock bottom to change and city counsel would prefer to string addicts along and give them very little incentive to change their behavior.

6

Let's be respectful to Ms. Sawant and avoid hyperbole and hostility in our commentary.

7

yes misses Reindeer.

8

@6 Sure, sure, but can we maybe refrain from concern trolling and tone policing as well?

9

"Why would large, profitable corporations throw in significant resources for a charter amendment allegedly about helping the homeless?"

For the same reason large, profitable corporations have donated millions to help persons experiencing homelessness in our region.

https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/big-businesses-raise-over-3-million-in-campaign-for-marys-place/281-acc7e402-4603-4d55-b309-3351475a7b90

https://komonews.com/news/local/windermere-donates-30k-in-seahawks-homelessness-campaign

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/community/opened-during-the-pandemic-providing-shelter-and-hope-for-years-to-come?fbclid=IwAR03q68K1pUgG-hxlgDtvre-NaqW6BuWOSDv7CsjpRmHtaDVNha7ghqldTM

I could go on and on with these examples. As CM Sawant knows all too well, a huge proportion of funding for homelessness relief comes in the form of corporate donations.

10

It always comes down to the same talking points from CM Sawant. We need to tax Amazon because they are the root of all evil in Seattle. The other way to look at this charter amendment is that the community is so tired of an ineffective and partisan city government they are willing to work around them rather than continue to bang their head against the wall. At least this amendment should give CM Sawant more reason to print up a bunch of red posters on the city copy machines. Anything to take the focus off her own malfeasance and the recall effort currently underway.

11

I would not necessarily assume that a company has some anterior motive if they give to a homeless cause.

Even if you want to be completely cynical about it, you can make a business argument for helping homeless people. If you have a significant presence of homelessness, it can depress a neighborhood and possibly scare customers. If your business has any interface with the public, you want the business to be in a welcoming and inviting neighborhood. So throwing some money at the homeless problem can help clean up a neighborhood, which in turn is more inviting to customers, and increases profits. Plus it's good PR, which is also important for any business that that interfaces with the public.

In addition, most large companies have a charitable giving division (or at least a person who is in charge of it). Again, if you want to be completely cynical, it's mostly a PR thing, and helps if they are lobbying government to be able to claim to be a good corporate citizen. Still, charitable giving is a part of most companies. And giving to homeless causes is a relatively safe place to throw some of any company's charitable giving budget.

12

Unfounded mandates never work out wel

13

"The charter amendment “requires” the city to provide for 2,000 units of permanent or emergency housing within one year, but says nothing about how it will be funded. "

Yep. Just like the state constitution requires the state to fund basic education, even though it says nothing about how to fund it. It is up to the representatives to figure that out. That means that politicians have to stop being demagogues and actually solve problems.

14

@12 -- K-12 education in low income school districts in Washington State is a helluva lot better because of the unfunded mandate. So much for never.

15

This letter is a great illustration about why we have things like this charter amendment, which by the way I think is the wrong way to go about this.

Mrs. Sawant has been on the council for seven years, each of these years we've spent more on the homeless crisis and seen the problem get worse. In 2014, there were about 3,120 unsheltered homeless in King County, mostly in Seattle. In 2020, there were 5,570. Mrs. Sawant's solution is rent control, which is illegal in Washington, along with taxing Amazon more. We are in the middle of an opium epidemic and as the rising numbers of overdose deaths we see each year indicates, but somehow this isn't part of the plan.

There are some cities which ended homelessness, well, by the government's measure this really means homelessness is rare and brief. They all used a housing first approach and actively tracked each homeless person to understand their individual needs. None of them used rent control or had taxing a certain corporation as a central part of their approach.

16

"Mrs. Sawant has been on the council for seven years, each of these years we've spent more on the homeless crisis and seen the problem get worse."
--@MikeX

so Kshama being absent means we'd have spent Less and seen the Problem get Better? Fantaastic!

and when Pandemic's Over
and the Evictions come and the
Evicted turn to Hard Fucking Drugs*
'cause it Makes the Pain go AWAY (for a time)
and Kshama's Not there it's just gonna Get Better?

a Crystal Ball
I Wish I had
too.

*like
Alcohol eg

17

@16 so Kshama being absent means we'd have spent Less and seen the Problem get Better? Fantaastic!

Nope, I didn't say anything remotely like that. Try again... Or don't.

17

Reading some of these comments reminds me that lots of people don't know shit about homelessness. They make comments like they are experts, yet haven't bothered to read the literature on it. My guess is, few of them have actually experienced homelessness themselves, or even have friends that have experienced it. Yet they write about the subject as if they have, spewing ignorant statements.

Allow me to cover the basics. First of all, there is a very strong correspondence with homelessness and housing prices*. That is why the mayor and the city council can make a huge dent in the problem without spending a motherfucking dime. Just liberalize the zoning code. This will lead to cheaper market rate housing, and public housing dollars will go further**.

The outlier is Houston. They have far hewer homeless than expected, given their housing prices. In short, cities should follow Houston's lead***. In short, they dramatically improved coordination and took a "housing first" approach. The city coordinates with various government and charitable agencies, using a central database, called the Homeless Management Information System. At the same time, they focused on getting homeless individuals and families permanent housing first, then helping them find stability by addressing whatever other issues they might have. There is no reason why Seattle can't do what Houston did (although it would require spending money).

https://dupagehomeless.org/research-demonstrates-connection-between-housing-affordability-homelessness/

** https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/

  • https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2019/1118/Houston-we-have-a-solution-How-the-city-curbed-homelessness
18

OK, that's weird. The footnotes I tried to make didn't work. I tried using different asterisks (*, , *) with the corresponding links at the bottom. It kinda worked, in that at least the links are in order.

19

yeah Ross tS's pretty
Stingy when it comes to *.

20

@17 Ok, say the zoning code is changed tomorrow. How long do you think it will take for for-profit developers to build enough low-income housing to provide shelter for a substantial proportion of our homeless population?

Personally, I think it would never happen. With re-zoning, existing SFH lots would either stay SFH (folks who recently spent a small fortune on their dream house in Ballard aren't likely to redevelop to help the homeless), or turn into luxury townhomes, like you can see all over the city.

21

*s.

"Nope, I didn't say anything remotely like that."
--@17

nope ya surely Didn't.
you said the Opposite.

22

Its always about the price of land (homeless or affordable housing) ..Relaxed zoning AND community land trust which curb runaway profiteering from the RE market.

23

California allows 2 ADUs on every single lot, yet without a incentive or stick, it wont address the acute affordable housing crisis there.

24

Sorry, Sawant, I’m a “Yes” vote on Compassion Seattle. Time for the parks to go back to being parks. Homeless need services, and the rest of us need outdoor spaces. Sweep ‘em...preferably into housing, but sweep ‘em.

@21: Spot on. People are delusional who think upzoning and the free market will somehow lead to cheap homes for poor people. In reality, if we want to house the homeless, the public is going to have to buy them homes, paid for by taxes. Everything else is a lie by the development industry.

25

tiny villages!
why do we have
Golf Courses in Cities?

26

@20, Yeah, it'll never happen. However, rezoning, if it's done right, can increase the supply and density of housing which will both make public transit better and keep prices from rising so much in the future. This makes it worth doing... except of course in my neighborhood. The downside is that the new development will be based on what will sell rather than what we'd want built and that some developers will make money.

28

People say there is a correlation between housing prices and homelessness, i agree with that but you cannot say there is no correlation between a crippling drug addiction and homelessness. All you need to do is look at the needle farms around the camps to see that. Ignoring 1/2 main reasons behind it because it goes against some ridiculous progressive notion that its ok to string addicts along is compounding the situation we are in. Housing price control will take years, sweeping camps to confiscate drugs and being harder on dealers could be done today but the city turns a blind eye to it. And on the point of compassion? Come on, how about compassion for the kids in the city that gotta walk past shit and needles to possibly play in a corner of their playground? I grew up kicking around the woods of bitter lake, ballard etc you think kids feel safe playing in the woods now?

29

CM Sawant, clean parks, streets, sidewalks, and green belts are matters of public health and safety. Keeping them clean and working as intended is part of the social contract between the city and citizens. Our City Council, led by you as the most senior member, has repeatedly refused to fund the means to keep our parks, sidewalks, green belts, and other public spaces clean and safe. You have willingly, intentionally, and repeatedly chosen to break our social contract, and so we voters may require you to keep it. Writing policy into our City Charter is never a good idea, but you have forced the issue by your chronic, intentional refusal to do your job.

Do you want to defeat this charter amendment? Then do your job. Restore our social contract. Restore our parks, streets, sidewalks, and green belts so they are clean and safe for us.

30

A lot of the anger at the campers would go away if there was some minimal enforcement of reasonable conduct. For example, most of the tents I've walked by in Woodland Park are not surrounded by piles of stolen property and trash. The illegal campfires there should be stamped out and tickets written (that is a huge public safety hazard), but in general the behavior of the campers is not horrible.

Compare that to the enormous trash piles spilling out of some of the camps next to freeways or on the streets (I just saw an incredible pile of debris in the I-district the other night under the freeway). And the camp at Bitter Lake is a fucking disgrace. Trash everywhere and basically in a schoolyard. It's pretty hard to blame the neighbors who have to deal with that.

32

This "Compassion Seattle" initiative sounds eerily reminiscent of Hitler's final solution, at least from the standpoint of a homeless family who has nowhere to go, which is typical of the euphemistic bromides we get from the Seattle upper middle-class and their pretentious efforts to sugarcoat their less than honorable treatment of the impoverished, who are a direct manifestation of their greed and money fetishism.

At the very minimum, allow these displaced individuals to camp in certain designated areas around town, and provide bathing and sanitation facilities. There is plenty of flat,
unused land on the perimeter of Seattle, if you can get these rich rats to let go of it and share it with our denizens of the street, who are the displaced original people of the post-industrial era.

Much of the greed and philistinism we witness in America today and Seattle in particular can be traced back to the green-orange pre-Neolithic howler-monkey Trump and his wife, the space beaver, who have the intellect and sensitivity of the Dennis Hopper character in “Blue Velvet” and or Honey Boo-Boo, professional denizen of the trailer park and bicycle seat sniffer.

Mayor Durkan was as useful as boobs on a surfboard and Seattle cannot wait for a more engaged, grounded executive administrator like Echohawk, González,
Sawant or Oliver to take the reigns and address these crucial public health and safety issues.

Pollysexual has been inserting plenty of line breaks so those of you who are viewing these posts upside down in your gravity boots and bopping the baloney can still read and comprehend while the screen is bouncing around and you’re spraying it with your precious bodily fluids.

33

Houston has tons of homeless but you never see them because to get anywhere in Houston you have to drive 45 minutes. I once walked from Hobby airport 14 miles to NASA Road 1 in Webster. Under nearly every overpass rarely traversed by passersby were people huddled under blankets and luggage and junk. Texas takes an out of sight out of mind approach to mental illness and homelessness, but if you can glean some inspiration from their good intentions then so be it.

37

I had no idea what Compassion Seattle Initiative is until now but if it is something so important that triggered my council member Sawant then I am a big “Yes” vote on this.

Kristofarian - you remind me of Loki from The Vikings with your enigmatic style

38

I don't know how you can write police abuse of human rights into a city charter. It's unconstitutional. Including the prohibition of camping in public parks -- and by private corporations.

The constant online bleating by conservatives about Sawant is pathetic. The worsening conditions they cite are a reflection of their own economics and policies, not a lone socialist on a city council who is actually proposing real solutions -- and holding the wealthy accountable to pay their fair share.

@3 "Junkies need to hit rock bottom to change." Sorry, but this is an incredibly ignorant statement refuted by just about every credible medical authority in the field of addiction. Addicts don't need to get worse - they need to get better. They need healthcare, and if they're homeless, they need housing. Being both an addict and homeless makes it even harder to overcome a drug addiction. Housing plus health care gives drug addicts an opportunity to get beyond these drugs.

I doubt you would advocate such harsh deprivation to wealthy drug addicts going into country club rehab. Do you should be thrown out on the street instead and badgered by police? And so that they can "hit rock bottom" first? That would be more helpful?

Why should you treat homeless addicts any different? Maybe you need to take a closer look at your classism.

Maybe a lot of people on these boards should.

It's not brain surgery fixing homelessness. You don't need police sweeps - you need housing. You need to just give people homes - and not these abominations known as "shelters." People need apartments, tiny houses (which are reportedly showing success), and minimally, hotel rooms with individual bathrooms and doors that lock.

What's the matter? Your real estate might suffer? Boo hoo. So what. Housing is a human right. If your wealth depends on other people's poverty, pick yourselves up by your bootstraps and find another job.

39

@38 Typo Correction "Do you should be thrown out on the street instead and badgered by police?" Should read: "Do you (think they) should be thrown out on the street instead and badgered by police?"

40

"Housing is a human right."

No, it isn't. Neither is food.

If you do a search about UN human rights, tangibles aren't listed. They are "the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education"

Which stands to reason when you think about it.

42

@40 Good lord raindrop, do we need to give you lessons on how to use a search engine, in addition to that desk dictionary?

Here, have a look at the first result for "housing rights UN." Or do you need someone to show you how to open a .pdf file, too?

43

@41: Good lord robotslave. Stay focused. You searched for housing rights, I searched for human rights. There's a difference. Try again, if you dare.

44

@43 Did you read at least the title of the document, raindrop, or are you just afraid to ask for help opening the .pdf?

45

@44: This should be the reference.

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

Article 25 states: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."

Totally correct and moral. The rights are framed as standards, not as tangibles that can be demanded.

46

As long as we're doing this, here's the text of Article 25 Section 1 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a formal international treaty to which the United States is a signatory. The US is also ratified ICESCR, which gives legal force to the 1948 agreement.


"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."

(emphasis added)

47

@45 Oh so you're still having trouble opening that first document, are you?

Housing is a human right. Food is a human right. I don't know what kind of hairsplitting you think you're trying to achieve with that slithering "standards not tangibles" gobbledygook, but there is no ambiguity about it. These are in fact legally explicit human rights.

48

@47: If you find them explicitly stated as human rights in UN documentation, I'll concede your point.

49

@48 Read the fourth word of the paragraph you quoted again. Then read the title of the treaty it appears in again.

What kind of right could you possibly imagine they're talking about in that section, if you've managed to convince yourself it somehow isn't human rights being spelled out there?

50

@49: Read the subject that "right" refers to, which is "a standard of living."

A "standard of living" is inherently subject to interpretation. If the UN articles were "Article X: Food is a human right" and "Article Y: Housing is a human right" -- what's to prevent someone for demanding food without payment at a grocery store just by saying it's "my human right"?

Fortunately, there are legal scholars and attorneys at the UN.

51

@50 OK, back to the slithering, fine.

What kind of right is the fourth word of Article 25 referring to? If your answer is "standard of living right," well, what kind of right do you mean by that? Is it a property right? A civil right? Or does the title of the document maybe give us a little clue as to what kind of rights we might find within it?

It looks to me like the authors and signatories of the treaty were well aware that "standard of living" is an imprecise term, and it is for that very reason that they immediately and explicitly enumerated a number of things to be covered by the term in the document. This is pretty basic law-writing 101 stuff, I'm sure all those scholars and attornies you refer to know how it works.

Your eye-rolling grocery store example is kind of amazing. I'm pretty sure there aren't any grocery stores who are party to the treaty. Governments signed the treaty, not firms or individuals.

Your very own government recognizes the human right to food, and therefore guarantees food to all. Grocery stores play a part in the system your government has set up to meet that guarantee, and somehow it all works without anyone refusing to pay and citing chapter and verse of international treaties at checkout. Well, as far as I know at any rate; some of your sovereign citizen types might have given it a shot at some point.

53

@52 The treaties weren't ratified by individual People, they were signed by governments.

The governments who signed the treaties are obliged to uphold human rights, including the human right to food, for their own citizens. Whether they accomplish this directly, or by imposing various restrictions and obligations on firms or individuals or markets, or by some combination of those or by other means, is left to their discretion. What they're not allowed to do under treaty is let people starve to death based solely on the nasty little theory that those people aren't "entitled" to "take" food from someone or something or somewhere.

54

@51: Yes, Article 25 cites a nebulous premise followed by an enumeration that is not meant to be comprehensive or exact. Nevertheless, your interpretations are sound and I give you 1/2 a point.

56

@55 What?

57

@54 Are you suggesting the signatories are free to disregard the language that stipulates both food and housing are to be explicitly included under the term "standard of living?"

If that's not what you're saying, then I don't think you've got much left of your claim that neither the right to food nor the right to housing are human rights enumerated under the treaty. And a half dozen other treaties and US-affirmed resolutions, too, but good god I can't even imagine how exhausting it would be to argue you through a straightforward reading of Fact Sheet No.21, The Human Right to Adequate Housing, paragraph by mother-loving paragraph.

59

@57: The only thing I suggested was that your interpretations are sound. Nothing left to belabor.

61

@60 People, again, do not sign international treaties on human rights. Nor do grocery stores, or even city council members. Governments sign those treaties. Governments that sign them are obliged to uphold the human right to food. This is not charity, this is not "humanitarian aid," this is a basic responsibility of every government that agrees to the treaty. Governments that fail to do it are in violation of the treaty! Yes. You got that right. Sort of.

But here? In America? I don't know what dimension you're living in? The one I happen to inhabit has a US government that guarantees the human right to food primarily through grocery stores, not by making exceptions to laws against shoplifting but rather via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

79% of SNAP recipients have jobs. More than 98% have housing-- there are 38 million SNAP recipients in the country, and ~500k total homeless. Even if every single homeless person were enrolled (they tend not to be, lacking a place to store and prepare food) they'd be less than 2% of everyone the US government is providing food for, as it is required to do under human rights treaties.

Your obsessions are getting the better of you, skiddie. This really has nothing to do with, um, grocery stores in Sudan? Or your hate-crush on a local politician?

62

"The constant online bleating by conservatives about Sawant is pathetic.

The worsening conditions they cite are a reflection of their own economics and policies [the top 0ne percent owning more Wealth than the "bottom" 90?], not a lone socialist [oh the Humanity] on a city council who is actually proposing real solutions -- and holding the wealthy accountable to pay their fair share." --@NAJB

thank you N. American Jay Bird

billionaires have convinced
half of us to look down on
the other half and to
Never EVER look

Up.

63

uP

64

@14, there’s a levy swap mechanism for that, otherwise where would the low income district get its money from? It’s funded by Seattle.

65

There seem to be more and more people camping in the city every day. Why? We have an eviction moratorium, so it is not that people are getting thrown out. Also a bar on rent increases, so it is not that people's rents are being raised past what they can pay. Unemployment is dropping, so it would not appear to be due to people losing their jobs (yes, I know there would be a lag between losing a job & becoming homeless, but things have been trending up the last few months). What is going on?

Is it possible that we are being rewarded for being relatively tolerant by having homeless people moving in from other less tolerant places? If so, it means that we can never solve the problem by providing services here if other places do not, or by allowing camping/RV living if other places do not.

This HAS to be treated as a regional/national issue. If we don't, we will never ever be able to make a dent in the demand. More cheap housing will lead to more demand ad nauseum. And it is just not reasonable for Seattle to be the destination for everyone on the street in the county or larger areas.

66

It seems to me gone are the days of destitute families with dirty faced kids living in cars and tents truly out of work and trying to survive. Honestly poverty stricken.. No, These tents are filled with addicts who lay waste to this city period.. The grocer I work for is being looted everyday. we lose 5 to 8K per day in inventory.. Now, the near by hotel or 2 have been turned into affordable housing for these addicts and our looting has increased 10 fold. .. My 2 cents.

67

Guess what, Kshama? Do better. Clearly the self-managed, let them wallow in filth, let them shoot dope, let them rob and steal and assault methodology triumphed by the likes of you and SHARE isn't fucking working.
Take a look in the fucking mirror.

68

@38, @67: Campers use our public property without compensation, do not pay for upkeep of our public property they use, and often leave waste (including dirty needles) for us clean up at public expense. It's amazing that a member of Socialist Alternative endorses these (ab)uses of public property by private individuals for private purposes. If a real-estate developer started building office spaces in our parks, paid nothing to the city, and expected the city to haul away all of the garbage the office workers produced, CM Sawant would loudly oppose this, and rightfully so -- no matter how much office space Seattle needs.

69

Your pivot sentence is the big reveal.
"Defeating big business and its Compassion Seattle pro-sweeps initiative will require a united movement of working people, and a serious fight for rent control and expanding the Amazon Tax to fund affordable housing and homeless services."
You want their efforts stopped, and public sentiment to reverse their agenda, advancing your own goals in a never ending zero-sum game. This isn't a game. This legislationnis an assault onnour freedom, and you are using it to. assault those who proposed it, failing to provide a better agenda.

Why aren't you proposing better legislation in the first place?
'Freeing public spaces for the use of others' indicates an empowering our overburdened Law Enforcement with another burden they don't want: picking and choosing who gets to use what areas, and when.

Talk about waste and over-reach.
The bill is a complete rollback of our freedoms.

Please stop the legislative tit-for-tat class warfare. Seattle needs more leaders voted into office. Get with that program or seek other employment.
You have lost my vote.

70

If you truly have compassion, please start advocating that Seattle use this law en masse to get its homeless the help they need:
https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=11.88.010

71

Get the tents out of city parks and off of roadsides and utilize Jefferson Golf Course as a tent city. It's relatively close to services and transit. As low cost housing becomes available, move residents out, when appropriate.

72

@40 Yes, housing is indeed a human right - and as pointed out to you by robotslave, in your own U.N. source and document title. But frankly, if the U.N. didn't recognize it as a human right, that wouldn't stop me from recognizing it, myself.

@62 Thank you, kristofarian.

@68 I've read that many homeless persons are working and pay taxes which provide for the upkeep of the parks. As for these wealthy developers - they often don't pay taxes or disproportionately less than what they should -- and -- they are in a business that is savagely driving people into the streets.

So the reported reality runs counter to the stereotypes you seem to subscribe to, in addition to your own reasoning about who is paying for it, and ergo, whether they have rights to camp there on that basis.

73

@72: You might want to stop drinking so much of CM Sawant's Kool-Aid, and avail yourself of some actual facts about Seattle's homeless population. The City conducted a survey of the homeless in 2016, and published the results about four years ago. (http://coshumaninterests-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/City-of-Seattle-Report-FINAL-with-4.11.17-additions.pdf) Here's some of what it reported:

68.7% of the homeless reported not being from Seattle. A majority reported having arrived in Seattle already homeless. A majority reported drug use. A majority reported themselves as being unemployed or unable to work; only 11% said a rent increase had caused them to become homeless. "The highest percent (71%) of respondents reported that they could afford a monthly rent of less than five hundred dollars, followed by 24% who reported they could afford between $500 and $1,000 monthly."

To put that last sentence in context, $500/month apartment rentals were last seen in Seattle about twenty years before the survey was taken. Fully 95% of our homeless were telling us they hadn't been able to afford living here in a long, long time; they had not recently been driven out into the street.

So no, our homeless have not been paying takes toward the upkeep of our public property they have been appropriating and trashing. And why should they care if they trash our public parks and greenbelts? They arrived here already homeless, using drugs, and completely unable to afford life here. Little wonder they have no regard for us.

74

Bottom line, this is not a reasonable city-charter-level amendment. Moreover, it focuses on the mess, not on actually solving the problem of homelessness. If passed, we'll be right back to where the city started before passage, but with extra handcuffs.

75

@59: Didn't you promise, in @48, to concede the point that housing is a human right if @47 could locate that right in what you call "UN documentation?" He's got you dead to rights, with a citation to back it up. Concession time!

76

@72 - which developers are not paying taxes? Have you looked at property taxes lately? Permit fees for building? Income taxes on what they make?

Hating on developers is a very odd way to encourage production of more housing.

77

@73 Kool-aide? You can start with the lies you've concocted about the study you're citing. Then go take another look at the U.S. Dept of Housing and Urban Development.

@76 Where do you think developers get the money for those property taxes and permit fees? They're not paying for anything. And .. income taxes? Don't make me laugh.

As for "hating," @76, you need to take a long look in the mirror and stop projecting your emotional problems on others. Especially, the homeless.


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