In a few of the threads, the mention of SROs and need for housing come up. Gentrification, affordable housing, etc.
But, one question I fail to see answered well is, why should a city that isn't affordable be required to find and provide housing for individuals in said city? I can't afford to live in Carmel, Los Altos, etc, but I live where I can afford.
California has places like Modesto, Stockton, etc. that have available housing that is not expensive. I'm sure there are places in rural washington as well. Why not have the city partner with neighboring (affordable) municipalities and establish housing, maybe jobs and recovery programs, etc. at a fraction of the cost of trying to wedge the same into places like Seattle or Washington?
A UC Santa Cruz / Civinomics study for homeless in Santa Cruz found roughly 2/3 of the individuals arrived here either on the edge or already homeless.
At what point do municipalities say "enough" and put their own first? I have friends locally going back generations that can't afford to live here and move, yet I am told that someone living in their RV has every right to camp on the street and demand local services, yet arrived here recently.
There are several answers to this question. On a moral level: major cities are the economic engines of the US, and are unrivaled in the opportunities they can offer their residents, in terms of education, employment, upward mobility, etc. I don't think you have to think everyone should have a right to live wherever they want to be uncomfortable with the idea that only people that already come from money should have access to those opportunities, just like a lot of people aren't comfortable with the idea that only rich people should be able to go to college. It smells of entrenched aristocracy of the kind that at least in theory Americans aren't wild about.
On a more practical level: even many (most?) gentrifiers with money like to live in vibrant and diverse cities. They want there to be people to work in their coffee shops and clean their officers, and they want access to the pho joints and bodegas that come with immigrant populations. That requires making accommodations for people less well of than them to be able to live in their cities.
I don't live in a major city, I live, ostensibly in a suburb of San Jose/Silicon Valley (have for 25 years, and a bay area native).
Living close to Silicon Valley (being in tech) as well as being a part of a community that is tied tightly to agriculture, looking at how people work and what they require/demand from society is interesting.
Santa Cruz, based off of really questionable "point in time counts", has a homeless population of around 3500. If Santa Cruz was to scale to the size of San Francisco, we'd have nearly 50k homeless. Basically 5% which is absolutely nuts.
We are a mixed community, tech, service, labor, farm, etc. Even with a "day labor" center, I daily see individuals from central and south america looking for work. Do I see the "indigent" white kids freeloading downtown trying to work? No. There should be a need to require (or at least work towards a path of) doing something gainful for the community in exchange for services, housing, and rehab.
Homelessness is a real issue. Unfortunately, the majority of those in the "industry" can't/won't/refuse to distinguish different categories and that is a problem. The 20-something meth-head from Santa Barbara, I reached out to her "friends" on Facebook to get her the hell out of the local spiral, no response. Our community owes her nothing. A friend of mine who lived across the street, works in the arts, couldn't find a single room rental in his budget is currently couch surfing and thinking about an RV/Van, he's been here 20 years; I'm trying to help him out. He has enough contacts/etc, to not enter the system based off of a housing need, he's an exception.
The system should provide for locals and those with a track record of ties. Yet, in liberal areas, like the military industrial complex, there is a homeless industrial complex...Non-profits and others that "mean well", but require those state, federal, and private dollars to "do good" and justify bloated salaries.
If "homelessness" was cured in Santa Cruz tomorrow, I estimate that 1000 people would be out of a job, at the least.
I understand the need for non-profits and those willing to do the hard job, but many times "compassion" is bandied about as a means to milk $$ and do nothing.
The notion that diversity is necessary to enjoy a variety of food is readily disproven by visiting San Francisco. You can enjoy great food from all sorts of cuisines: French, Chinese, Greek, Puerto Rican, Hungarian, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Polish, etc. But if you look in the kitchen, it's all made by Mexicans.
You can also see this in some of the whitest states in the nation. All of these types of cuisine are available in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, in the major cities (i.e. > 50k people...) You don't need a whole lot of population to supply the ethnic food economy.
Are those restaurants started by Mexicans, or just staffed by them once the founder gets busy and is looking to maintain a profit? I dare say you don't get Hungarian restaurants in a city without Hungarian people.
>major cities are the economic engines of the US, and are unrivaled in the opportunities they can offer their residents, in terms of education, employment, upward mobility, etc.
Isn't that where public transportation enters the picture? If the homeless' situation is such that even public transportation isn't within their grasp then that should be part of the solution as well.
If you are working minimum wage, the last thing you want is to spend between 2 and 4 more hours per day on public transportation or driving (if you can afford it).
It could be worse though, it could be that you can't afford public transportation either. Look at London: Unaffordable to live in if you're minimum wage (hence the unofficial "London minimum wage"), plus the train could get as expensive as £500 a month while still living 30 minutes away from zone 1. So there's the situation where what you save on housing you spend on transport (and feeling miserable spending hours on a train/tube/bus).
Economists and policy makers don't work in a competitive environment the way that software developers do.
The arena is also extremely political, unscientific, and uncompetitive--no matter how much effort the field of econ has put forth in arguing that they are scientific, primarily through quantifying the study of economics, if you can't experiment, test, observe and reproduce you're not doing science. And no one ever was untrustworthy or incorrect using math and statistics, right?
Nobody gets to make a hypothesis and conduct an experiment on 32 Seattles. Without the scientific method, I've come to learn not to expect much from the human race, what there is to see here is mostly just politics. Add to that a lack of competition (very high barriers to entry, little incentive structures to get involved seriously) in the market space for creating affordable housing... What we're left with is programs that are highly political and even often run counter to what most economists themselves would argue for: market-based solutions, lump-sum transfer payments(or at least in the form of housing vouchers), or no intervention at all.
> I can't afford to live in Carmel, Los Altos, etc, but I live where I can afford.
Have you ever considered that maybe you should be able to afford to live in those places? That the wealthiest nation in the history of humanity ought to cultivate a society that encourages freedom of movement? That cordoning off sections exclusively for the rich leads to a decrease in empathy for the less fortunate? That safe housing and access to the amenities of a city ought not to be exclusively for those who happened to have the lucky combination of skills and money?
Have you considered that the people you hope to exclude are people no different from you?
My inlaws are from a part of Germany where I could buy a 60 square meter apartment for cash without really thinking about it (low 5 figures), my truck cost more. A similar sized apartment in Munich would be probably be at least 20x the cost.
Should I expect the city of Munich to provide such a unit at a similar cost to the country side 3 hours away? No.
No, I do not think every municipality has the requirement to provide affordable housing to everyone that has a desire to be there.
Do I think regions need to do better at providing a balance of housing to accommodate the spectrum of people working jobs in the area? Yes. But should a single municipality be expected to accept everyone wanting to be there at a price that individual can afford? No.
In the case of individuals (there are many in Santa Cruz) that don't want to work, want to live the way they want, and have done nothing for the community, the community has every right to say "no".
The wealthiest nation in the history of humanity had the guts to build things they couldn't afford to give everyone. Some day everyone gets those things, and somebody like you will say: have you ever considered that maybe you should have a private aircraft?
Inequalities like this only apply in the current frame of reference.
Also, from the basic market perspective, it is entirely impossible for everyone to live in Carmel; and if everyone lived there, you'd want to live somewhere else.
Under your scheme I demand a penthouse room on a 100+ story high rise with a view of central park. The idea that everyone has a right to live anywhere they want is untenable and frankly idiotic. It's the same as saying everyone can have as much gold as they demand.
If you want to give people freedom of movement, that includes giving like-minded people of similar means the right to cluster up and live where they choose.
This is why it's so hard to take the "science" of economics and politics seriously. It's just arguing in circles.
As for me- I'm with OP. I want to live in Beverly Hills, but tough shit I can't afford it so I live in Oakland close to my job.
That said, we should keep opportunity open so that if someone wants to try to do something to generate enough value to be able to afford to live there, they should.
You're essentially arguing for a "name your price" eBay. Scarcity in real estate is very much a real thing. How do you determine who gets what, if not by "highest bidder"?
I'm free to live anywhere I want provided I can find the coin; to me, that's the definition of fair.
In fact, the more you mess with that basic concept, the more you ensure someone willing and able to pay will be (unfairly) locked out of the market.
What happens when you have no affordable housing in cities is an impossible situation for low-wage workers. All the jobs are in the city, all the homes are outside the city, and the cost of traveling back and forth is very high relative to the pay.
Also you need socioeconomic diversity to have all of the things that make up a high-quality urban or suburban life. You need doctors, lawyers, and bankers but also bartenders and cashiers. If you only have one or the other, it won't be a very enjoyable place to live. Building affordable housing can achieve this type of diversity, whereas a free market approach will likely do the opposite.
In a theoretical economy, maybe. In reality you'll have a small increase in wages, but likely business owners being chronically short staffed, going out of business, or choosing not to start a business. Even if wages to go up perfectly like in an econ textbook, that will increase the cost of goods and services which may not matter much for the wealthy residents but will make the city much less attractive for visitors/tourists and cut into the elevated wages. Remember, workers are consumers.
There's also the issue that raising wages will not fix the problem if landlords capture the wage increase by raising the price of housing. It's all about buying power, the absolute numbers mean nothing.
The free market can't solve all of our problems, and even if it could housing in particular is too important to wait on supply and demand forces to fix everything. Moving has very high material/time/emotional costs and humans need uninterrupted housing to maintain a decent life.
Unless there exists _any_ kind of unemployment - in that case people will travel for a ridiculous amount of time just to have a job, thus ruining their chances of a decent private life.
Things do not just adjust themselves as in the theories, weaker people are just squeezed harder. When they can't be squeezed any more, things _may_ change - but when is that?
The working poor are a pretty good example of this.
This is the theory, the practice is that there will never be scarcity since if the real alternative for these people is unemployment, they will still accept punishing conditions (long commutes, long hours and barely making the ends meet).
It's one of the cases where the market is working as expected (low wages since the offer is high), but it doesn't really translate in benefit for (some of) the people involved.
What can happen is the for the counties / cities to provide subsidized housing for those making below a certain age and working in that country / city.
I have seen this happen and lived next to a community like that. It was a peaceful and nice place, well maintained without the associated stereotypes for a such a community. It was mostly taxi drivers, service workers, construction, recent immigrants and so on.
I don't believe any of the numbers I see about bartender incomes. A woman I know was a part-time bartender in an affluent urban area. She regularly took home several hundred $ in cash tips per night. And that income wasn't reported or taxed.
In my experience most bartenders aren't doing it as a full-time long-term career. So it's unreasonable to expect such jobs to pay a living wage.
I think all experiences on this will be highly variable for virtually every aspect ofyour experience. If they're receiving tips, they are supposed to report it; not doing it isn't a fringe benefit, it's just the government electing not to pursue the matter.
Likewise, some bartenders will pull hundreds based on location, their appearance, their social skills. Others will either get no tips or very few for a whole night. Some bar tenders wil work high volume bars at clubs and process hundreds of sales a night with minor tips. Others will work a bar in a restaurant or a hotel and get maybe a few customers a night.
There really isn't a blanket understanding of bar tender wages simply because it's incredibly dependent on factors outside of the work itself. Whether or not it's a long term career is kind of irrelevant; I don't think too many people go into bar-tending with the idea that this is it for their life, it tends to be a failback when other options just don't pan out. Regardless of how long they do it, while they're doing it, if a city wants to have these workers and bars as part of a city life, they should probably make an effort to ensure that the workers have a place to live and can eat at least, else they will have to leave by necessity.
Like, the idea of a career job versus a non-career job seems very arbitrary here; the expectation of a living wage is kind of basic for work - it's why most people do the work thing. Sometimes it's labor of passion, but a lot of times, it's "I can do this and someone is willing to pay me for it."
This is a good question. There are many reasons for a city to be responsible to its homeless citizens. e.g.
1. Many homeless people actually have a job in the city.
2. Many homeless people need access to services that are only available in cities. e.g. drug rehab. Having the methadone clinic close to where you live (even if you live in a tent under the freeway) significantly increases the odds that you will go there. If you live in a rural area and have to travel 40 miles every day to get your methadone, you'll not have a good chance of recovery.
Yes, large cities can provide services at scale, but two things again factor in:
1. The original commentor above has a good point, who pays? A lot of times, a regional issue ends up costing a single municipality the bulk of the costs (Seattle w/ the east side communities; Santa Cruz as the county seat)
2. Services for locals first. I hope she has left, but here in SC, we had one young lady from Santa Barbara that was arrested over 15 times (i think 30 to date all told) for assorted drug and theft issues. She was still getting services from local homeless services. She arrived here, hopped on the Santa Cruz heroin/meth downward spiral and made a nuisance of herself. Honestly, I'm surprised she's survived this long, but as a community that she was new to, what obligation do we actually have to offer her a seat at the services table versus the grizzled vet or other local who's been here for years?
Re: (2), municipalities should have an obligation to say "no". Unfortunately, I don't know about other areas, but locally, there is a cottage industry (hundreds of individuals employed, upwards of mid 8-figure overall budgets) around "homelessness".
I am jaded, but locally when I hear "we want to cure homelessness", I know it's bullshit because the number of jobs that would be lost would be in the hundreds if not thousands.
I also know, locally, those "in charge" preach "best practices" without any real evidence beyond arguing and name calling when you ask about results.
See an earlier comment -- regions should have an overall approach to affordable housing and transport.
That said, specific to Santa Cruz? As an alumnus, I'm appalled at how much the university (and bureaucracy) has grown and that on campus housing hasn't kept up with enrollment figures.
Hell, administration overhead has grown way more $$-wise than available bed space has.
Santa Cruz has limited space to build, the UC system buying up property around town (taking it off the tax rolls), and not building more housing is a huge issue.
If I decided to move, I could AirBnB my house for $200/night (like a neighbor) or charge $3300/mo for a 2/1. Things are messed up here.
But, cities, counties, and state entities don't actually plan. And in this case, the city/county can't put restrictions on what a state institution does, yet, it can take parcels off the tax records and not build housing to keep up with enrollment.
> But, one question I fail to see answered well is, why should a city that isn't affordable be required to find and provide housing for individuals in said city? I can't afford to live in Carmel, Los Altos, etc, but I live where I can afford.
Well to be selfish about it: Palo Alto was a much more interesting place to live before the SRO hotels were converted to boutique hotels and before the city council sold out the prior commitment to Section 8 housing and diversity. Until the early '00s we had a lower median income than MP, MV & LA much less PV and LAH.
Also I like that my housekeeper lives in town only a mile or so from me; that one of her kids is a scout like my son, that her kids go to the palo alto schools. I wish the cops's kids did too -- there would be less stress between the cops and citizens.
I don't necessarily agree with this, but FYI the thinking goes something like this:
If people truly don't want to come in and work in the city/expensive area, the market should take care of it. Eventually wages will have to rise to where it's worth it for someone to take that job, either because the higher wage makes the commute worth it or the higher wage enables them to live in the area.
This is very interesting. I recently moved from San Francisco to Pittsburgh and I've noticed that there aren't as many homeless people in this city (Although to be fair; Coming from San Francisco, I feel you can say that about almost any major city in the US). Two things that do exist in Pittsburgh are a ton abandoned homes as well as a declining city population[1]. If the pattern of what is described in these articles are true, I'm wondering if some of the city residents are taking advantage of old buildings as dwellings?
What also throws another question my curiosity is that the city of Pittsburgh a number of tax abatement programs to spur on growth to rebuild many areas. I'm wondering if these programs will trigger a similar effects as the orders put in place in Seattle?
> Pittsburgh and I've noticed that there aren't as many homeless people in this city
The sounds callous, but part of it is the climate. Winters in Seattle rarely get below freezing, which means the truly homeless can still survive here even when sleeping outside. Most Midwestern or Atlantic Seaboard cities are just too cold during the winter, so Seattle gets a disproportionate number of homeless.
Man those homeless guys in Chicago.... they are tough. Few blankets and sleeping under the overpass. I think the worst few nights they pull most into shelters , but plenty sleep there when it is 20F outside.
That said if I ever want to be homeless its SF or Hawaii.
I'm saying it more as a matter of a stark contrast between the city I just moved from and this one; not as a disregard for the serious condition facing the homeless population.
I used to work for Amazon so I took quite a few trip from San Francisco to Seattle. I actually remember a guy stringing a hammock up between the corner of a fence the first night I was there. Even though the weather was amazing, that night; it really broke my heart.
As for Pittsburgh, the winter here was definitely cold for me. I moved in January and the first day I got here it was 8℉ for the entire week. I can definitely see your point about how the climate can impact the number of homelessness. While I have seen a few people here; nothing I've seen in the U.S. really compares to San Francisco.
Do we give homeless people money to help them or because we want them to go away?
I feel like society puts up a facade of "social justice" trying to help the homeless with one arm while taking away from them and dehumanizing them with the other. Some examples of taking away from them: health care and criminal laws that indirectly make their lives harder over time, the VA, and societies continued criminalizing views on mental health issues such as substance abuse.
Pardon my threadjacking, but I know a lot of people reading this are in the SF Bay Area and would like to do something to help with SF's homelessness problem (which is similar in scale to Seattle's).
Consider a donation to a local organization like Larkin Street Youth Services (http://larkinstreetyouth.org/). It's not just a band-aid, these organizations can actually turn life around for a homeless person and help people get off the streets for good. There are ~10,000 homeless people in San Francisco. It's a huge number, but there is more than enough money in this city for private citizens to do something about it. You don't have to wait for politicians to think up a plan.
At last count, there were 4,500 people living on the streets of Seattle and King County. It wasn’t always this way
Couldn't this be said about San Francisco, New York, and every other major city? Homelessness is certainly an issue in Seattle, but I would be more interested to look at it holistically and what as a country and world we can do to help solve this problem.
You're not wrong, but the impulse to recontextualize responsibility on a larger scale probably gets in the way of exploring what communities can do to alleviate the problem locally. It also assumes that the causes are the same in all cases where the symptoms appear similar, and that all communities or cities have equivalent resources they can marshal to address homelessness.
My understanding is that the homelessness crisis facing Seattle is more pronounced and more rapidly worsening than similar issues in other major urban areas. I recently relocated to Seattle from New York and never saw anything like Seattle's tent cities and encampments back in Manhattan.
This is one of those stories that I've heard or read everywhere I've lived or been (Austin, Honolulu, Seattle, San Fran) that I just assume it's an urban legend used to obfuscate the real issues.
Part of the reason is that in the Pacific NW, the elements don't threaten death in the summer and/or winter. You can sleep outside without dying to subzero frost, or heat stroke in the day.
Well to be fair the police in Seattle are a lot more hands off with the homeless than in NYC. You probably didn't perceive the problem because it was out of sight, out of mind as police routinely will move the homeless to less desirable areas.
Contrast that to Seattle where, for example, there is a homeless camp about 2 blocks from the Ballard farmers market.
Agreed. San Francisco, for example, still has many SROs in operation, and it's not even remotely clear whether they're a net benefit.
That said, I think they might be onto something with respect to affordable places to live. I'm not sure that SROs and the like are the answer, but it doesn't seem quite right that your lowest cost option to live near the core of any major city is a studio that costs on the order of thousands a month to rent.
Not all solutions are best when it's one size fits all. What may cause homelessness in one area may not be the root cause in another. Also people local to the community have a vested interest in fixing it vs. bureaucrat who will be treating it as a number on a balance sheet(i.e. not have to experience the problem themselves).
I live in Seattle. I also live in one of the "lesser" areas of the city.
One of the things that frustrates me the most about our local homeless crisis--if that's what it is, or maybe it's just become more visible--is how lacking the regional response to it is. Seattle seems to be the only city in the north King County/south Snohomish County area that is actually trying to do anything about homelessness versus shuffling the problem off to another city.
This is frustrating for two reasons: one, it puts all of the burden on the backs of the Seattle taxpayers. All the surrounding 'burbs need to do is come up with enough to pay their police departments to round up the "troublemakers"--because that's usually how someone sleeping on a bench in Bellevue or Redmond[0] is deemed--and then ship them off to the King County Jail, conveniently located in downtown Seattle. Once the "miscreant" (in quotes because, usually, their only crime is sleeping on a bench or maybe smelling of pot) sleeps it off, that person walks out into the drizzly daylight of now being in Seattle, so he or she heads to Pioneer Square or Ballard or Lake City or Rainier Valley and begins anew.
Two, and this is where I get selfish, as a result of this the suburbs "get to" (more like create a situation) enjoy things like clean parks, outdoor bathroom facilities that aren't overused to the point of despair, streets and other public spaces unencumbered by tents and other makeshift encampments...all the while, their residents cluck their tongues about how dirty and run down and depressing Seattle is and aren't their cities so much nicer for not having all of the street people around? But Seattle, for all of the money we residents pour into housing programs and social services, are the bad people if we try to insist that tents not be located on public property or broken-down RVs move every 72 hours.
To continue my rant, speaking of money we pour into all of these things, now I turn to what I've been told by homeless people and their advocates about our broken shelter system. A big problem is that such services are concentrated into a couple of small areas (Pioneer Square and Ballard) and there's neither the funding nor the will to integrate them into surrounding neighborhoods so any new siting proposal meets significant resistance. On top of that, our shelters are unattractive for a laundry list of reasons (security, insufficient storage for personal goods, deliberately separating couples into same-sex housing, disallowing pets) that, while are good for efficient operation of dormitories, don't account for the humans who are trying to exist--or choosing not to exist--in them.
So yeah, it's frustrating all the way around, for the housed and the unhoused. While I'll still vote yes on the housing levy in August--because what does voting no accomplish? Cuts in public services to those who need it most and no impetus to build better facilities--I wish our response, our regional response would be better.
0 - I pick on Bellevue and Redmond but they're not the only ones, just the most recent target of my ire. Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, Kirkland, Bothell, Kenmore, Woodinville...they're all just as complicit in "oh no, we can't possibly build any more public facilities but if you dare take a nap on the grass in one of our parks off to 5th and James you go."
As someone who lives in Santa Cruz, CA and is in Seattle/Kirkland/Redmond with regularity, honestly, being able to go to a park, sit down and not run the risk of someone mentally ill screaming at you, trash and human waste strewn about or needles, really is a treat.
I've seen the camps along the highways when driving from the airport and heading north. It is a problem.
Big cities (especially on the west coast), as mentioned in other threads, have a problem with homelessness. SF has reported numbers around 6600 for a city of 850k, Santa Cruz reported about 3500 for a city of 60k.
The problem here isn't just homelessness, but acceptance of bad behaviors and almost no penalties for crimes committed by those without means -- citations are ignored, many arrests are catch and release.
I don't know what the solution is, but as someone living in a city with severe issues and no will to change it, I enjoy visiting some of those places mentioned on the east side.
> being able to go to a park, sit down and not run the risk of someone mentally ill screaming at you, trash and human waste strewn about or needles, really is a treat. ... I enjoy visiting some of those places mentioned on the east side.
This, right here, is what makes me want to stand out in the street and scream like a banshee. It's not that this happens in Seattle with regularity, at least for me. But that it happens more than very occasionally is bad enough for a city's reputation. I happen to really enjoy living in Seattle and I'm tired of seeing my city be (literally and figuratively) shit on by the nose-in-the-air suburbs because we refuse, either out of compassion or indifference, in Seattle to shuffle people off onto someone else.
> acceptance of bad behaviors and almost no penalties for crimes committed by those without means -- citations are ignored, many arrests are catch and release.
In Seattle's case, it's "catch in the suburbs, release into Seattle" and that only compounds the problem. My blood pressure is starting to build so I should really stop replying, and so I shall after this: I'm PISSED AS FUCK that Redmond gets to have a reputation as a leafy suburb with well-groomed bike-and-walk trails and amazing parks while Seattle also has those things but there's a non-zero chance that you'll also witness some taking a bath in the nearby fountain so we get the rap as a run down, dirty city that people rush to escape once the workday is through. (Even though 97% of the city is just as nice and usable as the 'burbs. Our "local paper," the Seattle Times, really seems to enjoy perpetuating the stereotype.)
I'm just ranting at this point and maybe irrationally defending my city so now I'm going to go hop on my bike and enjoy some of those parks and trails and nice weather and pick up my dog from the doggie daycare and have some cold brew coffee or something.
It is interesting how large cities with a similar problem differ from smaller "towns" like Santa Cruz which have as bad or worse problem (due to concentration/space constraints).
Local individuals here will defend and make excuses for ill behavior, even to the point a few years back -- a local shelter w/ no bed space (waiting list); magically a mentally disturbed individual (inadvertently released) finds bed space due to AB109 or similar; a few days later brutally murders a local business woman who was walking between her house and downtown. When other individuals asked to understand why someone like this magically got bed space, local "homeless advocates" were apoplectic about such questions.
Here, the politics around "homeless issues" are highly polarizing. The ability to have a rationale conversation is almost impossible.
I understand the urge to rant. After 25 years here, some of those "burbs" you mentioned are looking appealing as are other areas in rural california, etc.
> The problem here isn't just homelessness, but acceptance of bad behaviors and almost no penalties for crimes committed by those without means -- citations are ignored, many arrests are catch and release.
I couldn't agree more. I wish this opinion were more widely held. Yes, we should work to create social programs that help people who have nothing. Yes, these people are hurting enough and it's sad to just pile on the trouble.
But we encourage this behavior every time we allow it to happen with no consequences. There's a guy who's been living in a tent on my block on Folsom longer than I've been living in my apartment. What the fuck? The police don't care when I call, even though there are laws in place about this. I'm a monster if I walk over there and rip it down.
There need to be consequences, but how do you discourage someone who has nothing? They're almost inherently unpunishable.
I believe there should be enforced confinement of people who break laws repeatedly. However, it's crazy to put homeless people into jails.
If someone is clearly mentally ill, drug addicted, or otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves, and they violate minor laws repeatedly, something below a prison camp seems like the most appropriate option -- and I don't see why it needs to be in expensive real estate in the city.
A live/work camp wouldn't be break-even, but probably could support people for $10-15k/yr, which is much cheaper than prison or other services. Barring any other system to re-integrate people into society locally, I'd rather they be sent to camp rather than left in parks and permitted to violate laws indefinitely, or sent to jail/prison.
Since the crimes would be very minor, it wouldn't be "punishment" so much as just housing, so there's a lot of opportunity to make it both better for the participants and less expensive than any kind of prison incarceration.
That's the baseline; if private organizations want to provide them with something better, that's an option too, but there's a limit to what city/county/state government can do.
I think if you moved people out to an open facility like that, showed them the lifestyle available and then let them choose whether they would stay, you might see some success? Opportunities for them to find purpose in life, but no huge obligation to work bulk hours; shelter in an affordable region and style; support at-hand, but still the option of ignoring it and staying in control.
The interesting part would be making it non-selective; anyone who wanted to be there for a while could. Maybe some social pressure that rich/temporary people contribute cash or externally produced things.
> But we encourage this behavior every time we allow it to happen with no consequences. There's a guy who's been living in a tent on my block on Folsom longer than I've been living in my apartment. What the fuck? The police don't care when I call, even though there are laws in place about this. I'm a monster if I walk over there and rip it down.
Yes, you are a monster if you rip down their home.
Encourage this behavior? How do we encourage homelessness by locking people up for having nothing? Do you think by putting someone in jail or forcing someone with most likely no income to pay a fine that it will all the sudden hit them that homelessness might not be the best lifestyle?
These people are doing what they must to survive. Do some of them have mental health or substance abuse issues? Probably, but the solution to those problems isn't punitive. The sort of issues require counseling and access to health care and most importantly shelter. Trying to combat homelessness by stepping up police efforts (which brings in host of it's own problems) is short sighted and wreaks of NIMBY-ism.
I haven't encouraged locking anybody up, or fining anybody. They don't care. It doesn't work. I know. Please don't put words in my mouth.
"They're just doing what they must to survive" doesn't justify the street behavior of san francisco vagrants any more than it justifies a hungry dog ripping the face off a kid.
Do you live in a neighborhood where you deal with the homeless and mentally ill on a daily basis and at all hours?
Do you step in shit? Are you spit on? Accosted? Have your roommates come home with phlegm and spit in their hair? Have you left your apartment to find a man's face pressed against the window, yelling "You look like you've been waiting to eat my ass your whole life"?
I'd need a yard to put the Y in NIMBY, but all I have is a feces-caked grate that I routinely kick people off of so I can open the door and get into a street that stinks of piss. Sorry if you're bummed that I'm interrupting their pill sales.
Live and let live doesn't cut it here, not for me. The idea that these people should be left alone regardless of the blight and destruction they cause to public spaces is short sighted and wreaks of "I don't actually experience this problem".
The homeless are struggling. They need help. But they're a scourge, too, and I'm sick and tired of people boo-hooing about how they're just trying to survive as the streets in this city rot from their presence, as though their being in pain makes it acceptable that they erode the quality of every public space in the city. It is not acceptable.
The solutions we have for homelessness and its associated ailments are weak, and need to be better. They need to be rooted in generosity and upward mobility. I completely agree. I'm all for huge city spending on building, and on every conceivable social program, especially for mental health.
What I am not for is turning a blind eye to the realities of homelessness' effects on the city in the mean time, and to distance the crimes and destruction from the individuals who commit them.
You do not get a free pass to fuck up the world because your life sucks.
> I haven't encouraged locking anybody up, or fining anybody.
Well, you encouraged "consequences," which usually means one of those two things.
> But we encourage this behavior every time we allow it to happen with no consequences... There need to be consequences, but how do you discourage someone who has nothing? They're almost inherently unpunishable.
So, there need to be consequences, but you don't agree with locking people up or fining them? What consequences were you referring to then?
I have no idea, and that's what makes it difficult. It's the purpose of the sentence you quoted.
Consequences are almost always about losing something, and you have to have something to lose it, so you can't punish those who have nothing.
This creates a bizzaro nightmare scenario where the destitute can commit petty crimes with impunity.
I won't pretend to have a solution to this. So far, I'm not sure anybody does.
But that doesn't mean I can't be mad as hell about it. I'm sick of people saying that how people act in the streets here is somehow short of reprehensible.
Send like 4000 homeless people to a small abandoned town (like old dead mining towns and such), with gear and supplies, such that they can help each other create themselves a society, simultaneously they might revive the abandoned town. If they then choose to leave, they leave. If they choose to stay they stay.
Not everyone needs to be assimilated, and us building services to help them "be successful", is the literal meaning of assimilation. Kinda like a commune or an Amish village, potentially even burning man, allow them to build themselves the society such that they are successfully able to live in.
P.S. I don't have particularly good ideas about how you keep them safe, or even if you should. It should be their society and maybe that means, allow them to make their own laws.
> But that doesn't mean I can't be mad as hell about it.
You can, but please don't do it here. Tirades are destructive to thoughtful, reflective conversation, which is what the site is for.
If you're hot under the collar, please wait until you cool down before posting. That goes for all of us. We have to stop being reflexive before we can become reflective.
I found it quite informative actually. Sure, it was written as a rant, but since I never lived in a city that was really affected by homelessness, it was at most a visual nuisance in my life. What the RickS wrote gave me some real information that you hardly ever find spelled out in articles.
Bribes. The cops here used to find the most chronic bums who caused disturbances and offer them cash and a bus ticket to leave and never come back. Effectively makes it somebody else's problem but what can you do. Your block could all agree to pitch in and bribe him to leave then make the area less desireable for new replacement hobos to move in.
Selfishly, this reads like a great ad for life on the Eastside. I don't know what the solution is, but if the individually-rational choice is to take advantage of communities with nice parks, good schools, etc., seems unlikely things will change.
Pretty sure the Chamber of Commerce won't be asking me to write any ad copy for them. That said, it's not an uninhabitable hellscape west of the lake and over 680,000 of us are doing just grand. I'd still rather live in the city (our schools are just fine and we still have some of the most amazing parks in the Pacific Northwest) than anywhere else in the region.
You've hit the nail on the head, regardless of where I live. As long as the Eastside can fob its problems off onto Seattle, it will continue to do so. I kind of fear for the day when those of us who live in Seattle get sufficiently fed up with the situation that we push back.
It's not like Seattle is emptying out in favor of the Eastside, companies are actually moving to the Seattle side because it is better for recruiting (Expedia being a really big example). Some people really like sterile cookie cutter suburbs and the Eastside is perfect for that, but it's not for everyone regardless of how "nice" it is.
Vancouver also has a broken shelter system. There is too many completely insane people who are homeless, with drug addiction problems who stay at these shelters so nobody else goes there since it's dangerous. They sleep in tents or on the street in the open instead. There's also way too many rules, curfews and other nonsense. There's also rampant bed bugs, theft.. nobody in their right mind stays at a shelter.
What would really work is opening mental institutions and detox centers and moving those people into them and off the streets. Then the non addict homeless can actually get at services which currently are overloaded with chronic addicts and tent cities will disappear. That is of course until more homeless bus in from other cities without these services and the problem repeats itself.
The visible homeless I see everyday are crazy and are not there because of unemployment, they are there because some politician thought it would be a good idea to shut down the mental institutions and toss these people on the streets.
Let's not also forget how certain neighborhoods in Seattle react as well. Queen Anne (Upper) and Wallingford, for instance, seem to shuttle homeless off their hills rather effectively.
I work in Pioneer Square currently, and am keeping an eye on what the shiny new Weyerhauser building on Occidental (probably the largest public concentration of transient folks in Pioneer Square) does to the situation.
I completely agree, though I do give them a touch of credit for usually voting for (and paying into) the social services that Seattle, City of provides. And a homeless person in Wallingford is still much less likely to be arrested and hauled off to jail on another citizen's having called the police than he or she would be in Woodinville (or, FSM forbid, Medina).
This problem seems to crop up across many issues. Things like law enforcement, social safety nets, health, transport, etc. All require wide scale planning with responsibility resting at least at regional levels, if not state or national levels in some cases. But we aren't set up that way.
Case in point, why are there so many cities in the Bay Area? There should be far fewer, at least all of South Bay should be one municipality, but there's seemingly dozens.
The most obvious root cause of increased homelessness in Seattle is an increase in overall population and a larger economy . Without discounting any of the historical work the author has done, they need to establish a clearer causal relationship to the present.
Because the surrounding areas have essentially no services for the homeless and their police forces are far more hostile, Seattle acts as a regional magnet, even before other cities "dump" their homeless.
Expanding social services for the homeless within King County is likely to cause even more homeless to live there. Viewing the success or failure of a city's social services by the total number of homeless punishes cities with social services and incentivizes cities that are openly hostile.
Any non-regional solution to homelessness in Seattle is going to fail, because the more the center invests, the more the periphery offloads all the expenses onto it, over a broader and broader area. Decentralization of services for the homeless is far more sensible than trying to build a "master plan" that ignores the immediate root cause.
Most of the homeless population in Seattle is from elsewhere, and most of the newly homeless in the region go to Seattle. Linking the crisis to HUD cuts in the 1980s is no doubt a correct systemic explanation, but does not tell us why the homeless population in Seattle is growing so rapidly.
It's a bit like a history Ottoman Empire's failure to modernize in an article about the declining percentage of college graduates among arab males living in Europe from 2006-2016. Of course it can still be a contributing factor, but it completely ignores the millions of refugees that arrived in the last year.
As a Kirkland resident, I think that's a fair criticism, but I'm also reticent to say that each city should try to build their own infrastructure to deal with the problem.
I definitely support the Seattle-area cities working together, though.
Coming soon to a demographic group near you. Homelessness, not just for day laborers and factory employees anymore.
People ask what our plan will be when middle class jobs are eliminated by automation and robots. As if things can't happen without a plan. And a good plan at that. Well, lack of plan never stopped anything in the 70s.
Why not retry the work progress administration? Worst case we will end up with a bunch of cabins in national parks and a bunch of people who have learned that they are not total failures but can, in fact, make something both of themselves and their environment.
I would encourage you to look at the actual national data around homeless rates and public investment into programs to fight and prevent homelessness. As a matter of fact, care for the homeless is something that people do invest in (although not enough).
Although I don't disagree that we have structural economic challenges to overcome, and sooner rather than later (I happen to favor some kind of UBI), nothing will be improved by glib doom-saying.
Getting public policy right is extremely difficult, but it would be made easier if the quality of discussion surrounding it were improved.
Interest can be increased. Not just a blue collar issue from decades past, its the white collar future.
Its incredibly important to note that the last couple decades of misadventure in analogous situations have failed. The worst possible outcome would be to convince ourselves to reimplement Detroit, for example.
A stealth UBI seems likely. Much as America will never tolerate socialized medicine but we love our medicare, we'll have aggressive opposition to UBI while none the less having a stealth UBI under a different name.
Note that on a personal level, not societal level, "we" threw those guys to the wolves. Its likely that when its "our" turn we'll get thrown to the wolves. That IS completely non-useful for society and fixes no large scale problems but is very helpful for small scale individual planning. Tradition is throw them to the wolves, and its likely in our lifetimes we'll be thrown to the wolves. So think up personal scale solutions to avoid their fate... No one will be coming to our defense.
I found this article to be very thin on data to support its thesis that:
a. there is a homeless crisis in Seattle in particular
b. this crisis was caused in part by a systematic erosion of infrastructural support for affordable housing and mental health care.
For some background, there was a spike in the homeless count in the Seattle-Tacoma area over the last three years (http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/count-of-s...), but I don't know how noisy the data gathering technique is (it sounds like it's super noisy), and I gather that the linked article isn't talking about something that happened over the last three years.
I found the reports at http://www.endhomelessness.org (direct link to 2016 report: http://www.endhomelessness.org/page/-/files/2016%20State%20O...) to be very helpful to get a better quantitative view of homelessness. The 2015 report has comparative data by city. Seattle ranked 6th worst in terms of per capita homeless rates, but I haven't found a good Seattle specific breakdown of rates by demographic/cause over time yet.
The overall national (USA) trendline for homelessness is negative from 2007-2016. This is not at all to say that there isn't a problem (there is), but I find the narrative of crisis (which implies something coming to a head, reaching a point of no return, etc.) to be counterproductive. We have systematic structural and infrastructural problems in the USA broadly and Seattle, WA in particular that create unjust and inhumane conditions for a significant percentage of the population. We're slowly getting better, but we don't have very good safeguards against regressing, and we're not getting better as quickly as we'd like. That's what a brief foray into the data says (minus the evaluative bits).
Is there something that has caused a huge spike in homelessness in Seattle in particular? I don't honestly know. Does it have deep roots in the erosion of public support for homelessness? I don't know that either, but my tiny and imperfect window into the data says "probably not."
I found this article to be very thin on data to support its thesis
Yeah. I'm a grant writing consultant, and virtually every large municipality has a group of organizations that receive HUD Continuum of Care funding to deal with homelessness. There are problems with this system (see http://seliger.com/2012/11/11/huds-confusing-continuum-of-ca...) but it exists and the lack of even mentioning it is a red flag.
I don't know about Seattle's specific situation because we haven't worked for any of Seattle's CoC organizations or its public housing authority, but I do know in general that a lot of funding for homelessness organizations exists. (Seattle also has a powerful NIMBY lobby, which likely exacerbates homelessness and drug treatment issues.)
There is a term, the name of which I forget, that is named for a physicist who used to read the newspaper and who was always annoyed by the science reporting, which got essential facts / ideas wrong. One day he realized that if the newspaper was getting essential facts / ideas wrong about science, the other sections probably weren't much better; he just didn't know enough about the topics to know what was wrong. That's how I feel reading the article.
It feels tech invests money into a city. Not enough housing so rent goes up. The investment ends up in landlords pocket.
Isn't it wise for a company to invest in a cheap place with a lot of area around for housing? E.g when MS first started, Redmond was pretty much a large forest.
But, one question I fail to see answered well is, why should a city that isn't affordable be required to find and provide housing for individuals in said city? I can't afford to live in Carmel, Los Altos, etc, but I live where I can afford.
California has places like Modesto, Stockton, etc. that have available housing that is not expensive. I'm sure there are places in rural washington as well. Why not have the city partner with neighboring (affordable) municipalities and establish housing, maybe jobs and recovery programs, etc. at a fraction of the cost of trying to wedge the same into places like Seattle or Washington?
A UC Santa Cruz / Civinomics study for homeless in Santa Cruz found roughly 2/3 of the individuals arrived here either on the edge or already homeless.
At what point do municipalities say "enough" and put their own first? I have friends locally going back generations that can't afford to live here and move, yet I am told that someone living in their RV has every right to camp on the street and demand local services, yet arrived here recently.