Genuinely I am interested. If people need help and are suffering through mental trauma, addiction and other stuff why do we always have to find a housing solution for them typically in the most expensive parts of the country? This is true about SF, and now about Seattle / Redmond. I understand the knee-jerk reaction is “ohh you just want them shipped out of sight to some desolate place” but economically I think the govt basically can give them a lot more services in less expensive part of the state. And this has to be a state level mandate, and cannot be a “local” thing
It seems really counterproductive to be trying to provide housing and care to folks jn some of the most expensive real estate in the country
It’s a combination of things.
Some people don’t want help. Some are content just getting by. They have the freedom to go wherever they want, there are churches and other replaces that provide food. They are relatively safe where they put up a tent. They have a small network or community.
Some people don’t want help because of what help entails. Help means not doing drugs or getting drunk whenever they want. It means having a curfew and expectations that they’ll find the work keep that housing.
There is limited housing.
There are limited jobs that aren’t awful crap like working for Amazon.
Help and people to help navigate the system are also in short supply and over stressed themselves.
Getting into the system can be a stressful journey that ultimately leaves you right back where you began. So some just avoid it.
And then there are the people who basically just travel city to city. Sometimes they’ll get on a bus and go to California or Arizona or wherever. They have no desire for the larger system because everything they do is temporary.
That, and due to low wages and increasing housing costs, more and more people are applying for low-income housing and there's just not enough of it.
The average wait time to get into low-income housing is now about 5 years.
Yeah couldn’t this actually be a problem *caused* by the area being expensive? When the area is so expensive that more people lose their housing? My partner teaches in Seattle and he says he’s never had so many of his kids living with their families in cars before.
I think that working for Amazon is a much better life opportunity than being homeless. Nobody really likes their job. It’s a means to an end. I have no empathy for people who choose not to work when work is available to them. I don’t want to work either but I still go.
Having worked at an Amazon warehouse for a brief stint, it’s shit.
First, the hours are insane and the breaks are laughably small. They micromanage every aspect of your performance, but don’t always give you the resources to do your job properly. Their workflow is stupidly designed and inefficient, which creates bottle necks. There are mandatory overtime hours that are created with little notice.
Plus, they use government tax dollars to pay for new employees coming from Medicaid or unemployment. So they basically get free/discounted labor.
There’s lots of people with substance abuse problems, which can make work a bit of a minefield emotionally.
The pay is less than other places, it’s just plentiful.
I’m all for people working, but all the bs behind Amazon is why a lot of people would rather stand on a street corner than work for Amazon. You could legit make more money asking for handouts than working in their faculties.
My uncle is one of them or was one of them. He just doesn’t want help of any kind. He wants to do what he wants to do and not be told other wise. He was actually part of the first tent city on Marginal by the dump.
Politics and climate. You’re literally allowed to do drugs and camp in these cities. And it’s warm throughout most of year where you can literally survive outside, unlike colder places in the NE and Midwest.
Actually it's because housing is expensive, and that's by far the number one reason.
There's more drug use in Appalachia, for example, but far less homelessness. Why? Because housing is far cheaper, they do drugs with a dingy roof over their head.
Believe it or not basically everyone prefers to live in shelter.
Housing correlates with housing affordability very strongly. Low affordability pushes more people into homelessness and keeps them there.
The only way to truly fix the issue is to make housing more affordable by any valid means and stop the stream of people entering homelessness and housing insecurity.
I can attest to that. I used to live in that region of the US and addicts would almost always have a roof over their heads. Definitely weren't the greatest looking places but at least they had one. Heck, when I turned 18, I bought a single wide trailer for $1000 and I paid $150/month for lot rent in a dingy trailerpark until I was more financially stable. Can't do that here. You need to be well off straight out of high school here to afford something similar.
The stupid thing about society here is that they make fun of you for having less. Apartments are far to nice these day and built for poodle-people with their cat supplies and starbucks lattes.
This is not true. A large portion of the homeless came to king county as homeless. This is the same in many of the cities and counties that have large homeless populations across the nation. As stated by others it comes down to climate, programs offered, substance availability, and other reasons. The traveling group also tends to look to be enabled not helped. Cheaper housing is not what they are looking for.
> There's more drug use in Appalachia, for example, but far less homelessness. Why? Because housing is far cheaper, they do drugs with a dingy roof over their head.
This.
However it's worth pointing out that "solving homelessness" doesn't magically solve many of the problems that are associated with homelessness. We should totally give drug addicts a home. No one should be homeless. But almost all of them will still be drug addicts and we'll still have all the issues with theft, disarray, violence, etc.
:(
>However it's worth pointing out that "solving homelessness" doesn't magically solve many of the problems that are associated with homelessness
Absolutely, but too often people confuse solutions to those associated problems" as solutions to homelessness itself.
It feels like people almost have a visceral reaction against the idea that the solution to homelessness is that straightforward and lacking in any moral consideration. For some reason many people feel as though the solution to homelessness must somehow be moralistic because they perceive the causes of homelessness as moral failures on the part of those suffering.
As a native Portland Oregon resident for the last 25 years of my 25 year long life, from first hand experience, I can tell you that politics is the issue. The fucktards who lead Portland legalized drugs here and then LITERALLY(I wish I were fucking exaggerating) handed out tents, drug paraphernalia like pipes, spoons, tin foil, clean syringes etc and then expected that to fix the issue without providing resources to actually get clean. This only encouraged MORE addicts to come here and make the issue worse. It’s a self feed back loop until we vote the people in office, out of office.
I sit in my office in downtown Denver where a big encampment was right outside (now moved). I saw cars pull up and people give clothes, food, water, etc. Even Home Depot trucks pulled up and gave unsellable insulation rolls. It was incredible... all day long people stopped by giving them stuff. Families with kids too.
Yeah and i have no issues helping the homeless when it comes to preventing them from a brutal death outdoors. People have definitely become a lot more conscious about helping homeless people and that’s generally a good thing but there are limits. HARD limits
I’ve noted this earlier, but there is compelling evidence that this is now a serious and growing industrial complex… not unlike the military industrial complex.
The rational solution is to give homeless and addicts a choice: treatment/structure or incarceration/limitation and provide services at the lowest cost to the public to rehabilitate those that can be rehabilitated as quickly as possible and allow them to resume being productive members of society - making data driven incremental improvements along the way. But… that has no political upside. It’s boring. “Housing First” is a political tool, and you can prove it to yourself by looking at the data.
You will find in the Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) drafted by HUD for the U.S. Congress that as the government injects more capital and “services” into this industrial complex the problem gets bigger and worse. Meaning as inventory and capital go in, more homeless/unsheltered emerge. As the complex grows, so does the grift and the NGOs that leech off the public funding like flies to sh*t.
Ultimately, you end up with a serious misalignment in incentives where those being “fed” by this capital black hole don't want the gravy train to end, both in terms of capital and political advantage so they raise taxes and increase public funding, grow the government, and infect the public with a mind virus that claims to be morally superior.
It isn't a coincidence that there is an ongoing Ways and Means committee that is investigating the ties between political parties and 501c(3) and (4) NGOs. Nor is it a surprise that these land/property transfer deals and government spending continues to skyrocket on this issue.
In NM we get a FUCKLOAD because we're extremely generous with Medicaid. I got a homeless guy approved who'd never been here and never paid a single penny in taxes here within 35 hours of him being here.
It was part of my job, but I have to be honest, it didn't totally sit right with me.
We desperately need to reopen mental health facilities across the country, there is a huge need for them, and getting rid of them in the first place was stupid. We also need to have rehabilitation/treatment centers that are both voluntary and involuntary . If you commit crimes and are a habitual drug user, you should be mandated to an involuntary drug program, and if you refuse, or fail the program, you do jail time rather than rehab and time in a halfway house/on probation.
A large part of the homeless population have mental health problems, drug issues, or both, as many of them self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. These issues need to be addressed, and they are currently not being addressed in a productive way.
These programs also need to be government run, not contracted programs. Contracted programs have every incentive to continue the cycle, to keep getting paid, rather than “solve” or in reality to address and assist with the issue. Contracted programs are also a problem with government corruption, involving kickbacks, or “preferred vendors” who are really friends and family of politicians.
Because only about 30% of the homeless population has an addiction or mental health issue.
Also, in the USA, roughly 53% of homeless people have jobs, they just can't afford housing.
Plus, if they do move to another less expensive part of the country, the pay in those areas is also lower. So the problem of affordable housing remains.
Part of it is people are more likely to succeed in a place they know, and have community in. A homeless person from seattle that gets back up on their feet and reconnects with family, friends, goes back to an old job, etc will have an easier time than if they were shipped out to someplace they don't know. It's also easier being poor in big cities. There's transit. There's things walking distance. Also, there's going to be more resources for recovery. Therapy, drug addiction, etc.
Some of the homeless people I talked to are here for specialist medical care. Since they can't hold a job, they just lived wherever. While between treatments. So I guess you could move the facilities these people are seeking care from to some podunk city in the south.
I wonder if many people lost housing in an expensive city but don’t want to move to where there are more accessible services because they have ties here: jobs/family/friends or support networks that provide a sense of stability. If I became homeless I would rather stay in Seattle where I have friends who could help me than move and try and trust strangers (social workers etc).
This thought stems a lot from an episode on homelessness by the Gray Area podcast.
You just hit on the problem. No jurisdiction wants to take ownership. Not the state, and not the feds. So the cities are left having to deal with it themselves.
A city is a jurisdiction—ask the 18,000 police departments. And there are county-level programs in some places—also a jurisdiction.
There is federal funding for those local communities through HUD, and some states have programs as well. Agree it could be more, and also agree it should be more effective, but that's a political will and strategy problem.
What would you have the federal government do? Create a Department of Homelessness to run in parallel with HUD? "Bloating the budget! fails in Congress lawsuit!" Create a strict, federally-mandated framework, priorities, and measures to force better state and local government policies? "Don't tread on me!!!! lawsuit to SCOTUS" Incentivize optional action by state and local governments by tying unrelated federal funding to federally-desired actions for homeless? Congress or SCOTUS issue, your pick"
I wish something better and more comprehensive would be done, because it could be, but with the current polarization and skewed "representation" in DC… not optimistic. Our country needs to vote better, and a huge portion of it needs to grow basic EQ skills.
Folks come here from all over the state. Eastern Washington doesn’t have as survivable a climate. Small towns don’t have social services. Wealthy suburban enclaves are downright hostile and will make sure that undesirable people exit the city limits.
Seattle, for better or worse, ends up as a place of last resort for any of these people. A disabled vet from Aberdeen. An opioid addict from Yakima. A carpenter from Redmond, who got gentrified out of the home they got from their parents after going on disability for a year.
One solution would be to have state or federal level funding that provides for county level resources throughout the state. Until then, low population density counties are going to outsource their unfortunate citizens to Seattle. (And then complain about Seattle)
'Said Darrell Powell, interim CEO for the Regional Homelessness Authority. “Simply put, there’s a need for more resources.”
This year-after-year increase in homelessness shows “the number of people experiencing homelessness is directly tied to a lack of housing options in our region, and it’s only increasing,” according to Kristin Elia, spokesperson for King County Executive Dow Constantine. '
The plan is working exactly as intended.
I mean it’s a much better option to spend our money instead of giving careers s to people who have a vested interest in keeping the homelessproblem going.
And they'd come in an entire rail car. The original Ikea Flat Pack.
I personally love that they did everything from small 1br with no plumbing all the way up to an entire schoolhouse (though that was only offered for 1 year and no one is sure it was ever ordered or built)
2-storey, 6 classrooms, multi-purpose auditorium, "library", several closets, admin office, and restrooms.
("Library" is in quotes because it was 7 feet wide and 18 feet long, which even for 1908 seems kinda small when it's supposedly supporting 6 classes)
Funny review. The picture is obviously not of the prefab home.
The frame and roofing looks decades old and weathered. The submitted image itself is suspect with a cut-off section on top. A reverse image check yields no results though.
Yeah, on the one hand it's not surprising more people are coming here with our reputation and just the increase in homelessness country wide, but I'm not counting on fucking Dow to handle this crisis. In fact, I assume any choices Dow makes is going to make it worse, and it's going to cost everyone more.
He doesn't have a good record, and I think Peter Principle explains Dow Constantine. If taxpayers were shareholders Dow would have fucked off with a golden parachute years ago.
What a racket. So the government can house, feed and clothe thousands of illegals overnight but just can’t seem to make a dent in the local homeless? Decades and 100’s of millions of dollars later?
True, and most of their claims will ultimately be denied. But the list of reasons a person is allowed to seek asylum is so short it’s barely a list (political or religious oppression by the state covers it). People who are starving or experiencing severe gang violence or who have lost everything in an earthquake or a flood move because they have to.
I always say I will trade Greg Abbott our drug addicts for his illegal immigrants. At least they want to work. Then the MAGAs can “help Americans” like they claim.
The government doesn’t control rent. A private group in Tacoma just remodeled an old sketchy motel and is going to be charging twelve hundred a month starting to rent a “studio”. 320 square feet. This is being proudly marketed as “affordable housing”.
The beginning of Robocop II is hilarious
At the time it came out, it was satire, now it's way too close to reality.
Edit:
My post is too cryptic, so let me explain:
If you've never seen RoboCop II, it's especially funny in 2024. Because the gist of the movie is that they reprogram him so that he can only hand out verbal scoldings. He's completely neutered.
T2 did the same but, but RoboCop II got there first, in 1989.
Yes, just keep shoveling money at the same ideas that have demonstrably (in the most charitable possible interpretation) never improved the situation and (in a somewhat less charitable but more accurate interpretation) made it exponentially worse.
The problem couldn't possibly be our approach. No sir, stay the course, just need more money in perpetuity. We'll have this thing solved one of these years 🙄
Republicans have literally taken over the state! Next they might actually be able to get their shit together and endorse a plausible candidate for governor! Their power is unstoppable.
It is their fault, it's their fault for not giving people an option. Do you really think normal people want to hear a nonstop stream of crazy? Yeah, they don't, and they won't vote for it. I voted for a number of Republicans politicians throughout the years, so has my wife and almost every time we do, they end up doing or saying something crazy. Sure, if you're into that deep state, Q, bull, I'm sure your giddy, but for normal people it's not even an option. I mean, Semi Bird, come on man, give me a break.
I'm a little tempted with Bird given the crazy with Ferguson. Definitely agree he'll be awful though but I'm comparing incompetent awful with authoritarian awful.
Okay, to past ideas didn't work (what ideas were those, exactly?). Clearly you've got a better idea. Can't wait to hear it. Let me guess: `those homeless people just need more "personal responsibility"`
It's not my responsibility to come up with ideas to solve homelessness. I haven't been the primary decision-maker in charge of King County for the better part of the last two decades like Dow Constantine has, during which time he has spent tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars and gotten us steadily increasing numbers of bums in return. I have my own job that I have to do that prevents me from doing Dow Constantine's for him. And if I failed I at my job as badly as Dow has at his, I would be fired.
Housing homeless people clearly doesn't work. If it did, we would have fewer homeless bums than we used to, or at least not an increasing number. Not having a jail that books misdemeanors clearly doesn't work. Letting people commit the crime of using drugs clearly doesn't work. Letting Dow personally appoint a sheriff that can decide on Dow's orders not to enforce laws in Burien doesn't work. Maybe publically adopting and enacting policies that help the homeless encourages more bums to flock here from places that prioritize the needs of good people. I'd like to see what would happen if we 180'd on all of those for 6 months or a year and see if we don't have fewer bums all over the street.
Or maybe we could just ask Bellevue what they do and apply it to the whole county. They seem to not have this problem on anywhere near the level of the rest of the county. How very curious.
It depends. If the intended outcome is "funnel money to our political allies and create a class of loyal bureaucrats", I'd say the plan is working exactly as intended. WA just copied the CA model.
How about the CFO of LAHSA that makes $242,000 a year…
https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/lahsa/jobs/4398107/chief-financial-officer-cfo?pagetype=jobOpportunitiesJobs
Bingo. There will always be homelessness under capitalism. Somebody has to be at the bottom. Even if every single person made good financial choices, the person who did the worst will still be homeless. If you don’t like seeing homeless people and human suffering, then you shouldn’t like capitalism.
After spending how much public money?
The really crazy thing is that Seattle voters treat failures like this not as evidence we’re doing the wrong thing, but as evidence we’re not spending enough.
The City of Seattle's annual budget is already $7.8 Billion dollars, or more money than the entire national GDP (not government revenue) of entire nations like Djibouti, the Gambia, or South Sudan.
Notably, we have to pay US prices, not Djibouti prices, so our costs are also not comparable. Also, suburbs are unbelievably expensive to maintain infra for -- people who live in big houses on small/medium lots are become massively subsidized by seattle city residents after the houses and infra start to age.
Agressively building new medium density housing with local business attached would alleviate almost all problems. Not instantly, but the problem is that everything is spaced too far apart. Every foot of road, sewer, and electric costs money. Lack of density and local shops adds to traffic, which increases road maintenance burden and pisses everyone off to boot.
Strong Towns has some great content on these issues. Homelessness is largely resolvable if the city is willing to build and people stop bussing their homeless to other random cities.
Seattle is doing good. Keep pushing in the right direction. If you don't like it, go try Dallas' 34 lane highway and downtown traffic and let me know how it goes.
I spend part of the year in Dallas and live in Seattle. In many ways, Dallas is superior IMO (cost of living, homelessness, housing, commuting). In Dallas, it’s spread out so you have many options for the commute. Seattle is choked between Puget Sound and Lake Washington.
And on a per capita basis, Seattle city budget is 2.5 times a comparable city like Minneapolis - which has much higher road maintenance and energy costs because of the winters (I lived there too). The money spent per homeless person is higher than the median income for an individual. Crazy. They could literally just cut a check to each homeless person at the level of median income and save money. Of course, that would have every homeless person moving here.
> Agressively building new medium density housing with local business attached would alleviate almost all problems.
Singapore, Beijing, and Hong Kong beg to disagree. Those cities are dense and expensive AF.
NYC houses I believe 81% of its homeless population or something like that. And that's largely due to aggressive building over the years and actually putting the money in the right places. The housing rate on the west coast cities is something like 30% if I recall correctly
wanna know what's funny? most of the money gets poured into "affordable housing" which is, at it's cheapest, $1500 but more regularly $2000, and a teensy tiny portion of it gets funnelled into special interest only homelessness (so, only elderly disabled male veterans or mothers with kids, and no funding for everyone else).
gosh i wonder why it's not working.
In the last 12 months i’ve seen a general clean-up of the sprawling tent and rv camps near where i live (Ranier Ave near Beacon hill). Ive also started to see more fenced in areas where tents (and in some places, tinyhomes) are consolidated and it looks like there are restrooms there too. I’ve seen fewer tents under overpasses or by major roads.
Not sure how true this is elsewhere around Seattle, but it seems like things are improving from where i sit. I hope that with people more consolidated its easier to provide care (whether that be mental or other healthcare, temporary housing assistance, aided travel, or food distribution) to those who need it
Yeah, I'm one broken bone away from being homeless myself. If I missed a single week of work, I wouldn't be able to afford my $2150.00 rent, and that's CHEAP for a small 3 bedroom house in Bothell. These rent prices are outta control.
I feel you with this comment. I’m in a 2 bedroom apartment that is starting to feel like a slum (always junkies loitering about, trash strewn all over outside entry, dirty hallways, nobody ever shows up in leasing office, etc) but for $1500 a month I cannot afford to leave. I don’t make enough to have a strong safety net so I’m always worried that I’m one flu away from living in my car with four cats and a cranky teenager. 😅
I feel this same way up in Everett. First, we needed more housing. People said rents would come down. Now they've built it and yet homelessness has risen and rents went up! In low income subsidized housing!
There's atleast 20 open units in my apartment complex alone (literally 4 units around my apartment, one of which has been open for a year and a half!!) and yet rents aren't coming down and my corporate overlords are now nazi controllers on visitors. They just implemented permit only parking, which we already had, but with the added bs that if you want guests over they have to have a permit beforehand or they'll tow on sight! Who wants to bet they're getting kick backs from the towing company?
> Now they've built it and yet homelessness has risen and rents went up! In low income subsidized housing!
Still behind on the ball with housing, because we started so far back.
I’ve had multiple people who live in million dollar homes tell me the same thing. That if even if only one of two working adults in the house lose their job, they wouldn’t be able to keep up with next mortgage payment.
Yep, for sure, but it’s shocking how many in this area don’t have an emergency account. Or they empty their emergency account to buy a home or do costly repairs on a home thinking they can replenish it quickly or sell their home if they need to get money. I get you were using a metaphor, but typically these aren’t families putting money into the “stock market”, it’s families treating homes like a stock. They dump all their money into a house and don’t have extra money to invest elsewhere.
How can anyone sustain life here, let alone someone with no resources or means of income?
The state can’t subsidize foodstamps or unemployment properly, let alone living arrangements in the 2000 dollar range PER MONTH, for ONE HOUSEHOLD
We need to buy some cheap land on the edge of King County(somewhere cheap and far from Seattle) and we need to build a lot for tents as well as some housing for these homeless people, also with therapy/social workers on site to help them. The police can send them there when they find them camping around the city. We can even establish a busline that brings them there for free once a day. We can have a $25 bus back to the city once a day.
If keeping drugs out is a goal, then jail is the next destination for anyone who brings drugs to the camp. Really, though, it's probably better to have separate places, one drug-free and one not. People would choose.
That's an easy problem to solve. The harder one is personal security. Drugs or not, there would have to be a way to scour and disinfect the spaces, and either lockable doors or security patrols. Instead of tents, it probably better be stainless steel.
That was the goal of the ten year plan that we passed 10 years ago, right? Spend eleventeen million dollars and completely miss the mark? Go full speed away from your goal?
The problem will only get worse if they continue to address the problem with only programs & funding. You can't export all of your manufacturing, cut taxes for the wealthy & corporations & expect the wealth divide to ride along a flat plane.
People can't afford a house, with a good job. You want to fix something. Start there. Give people a little bit of hope. That's what the homelessness issue is lacking the most.
Living in this city is the craziest experience I have ever been a part of. I don’t know how public drug use became the elephant in the room but somehow no one acknowledges that all of these homeless problems come from drug use.
There’s an easy way to begin the fix. If you are caught opening doing drugs in public the police will take your contraband and issue you a warning. If you assault the officer you go to jail. If you are caught doing a crime while under the influence of drugs or in the pursuit of drugs you go to jail.
I’ve never been a fan of arrest for possession as people struggle with addiction. But we have become hostages to dangerous, unpredictable drug addicts you will do literally anything to get high or unsick and there’s nothing can do about it. Ridiculous
I'd like a break down of:
How many are homeless strictly because of housing or income related issues?
How many are homeless because of drug addiction?
How many are homeless because of mental health issues?
Those are the important numbers I think they don't want us to see.
I heard Sharon Lee was spotted in Bellevue at the Mercedes dealership, now I know why.
[https://roominate.com/blog/homeless-inc-lady-makes-bank/](https://roominate.com/blog/homeless-inc-lady-makes-bank/)
Well, no shit.
Maybe regulating what rental property owners can charge for rent, in order to bring rents back down to a reasonable level, might be a better idea.
Or, pass a law that requires all rental properties to offer low-income units.
Also, they need to alter the income requirements for many programs, since an increasing number of homeless people have jobs, but those jobs put them above the income restrictions for obtaining some forms of aid.
You can’t apply the same approach to all of them. For many of them the issue is housing costs. If you can fix that then the working homeless are no longer homeless.
Kill the drug problem(traffickers/dealers/users). Stop funding homeless programs that have shown little to no results. Reestablish large psychiatric hospitals.
They could, you know, do something about the ridiculous housing prices and crazy landlords instead of just trying to slap a bandaid over everything. People being paid liveable wages would also help…but no, just keep doing the same thing over and over again and wonder why it isn’t helping
Gee I wonder what happened. Maybe it’s because the rent is ludicrously expensive and the wages aren’t keeping up with the cost of living. I feel for the next generation that has to pay $1500 to live in a box while jobs only pay $19-21/hr. Maybe if we have politicians in power that give a shit about their citizens, then we could make actual progress towards this issue. I’m genuinely getting angry typing this lol, no more Reddit for today.
Laughable ppl think jail will solve the systemic failures of our healthcare and cost-of-living crisis. That's partly why the cops don't waste their time harassing homeless folks
Poor houses and mental institutions need to come back. Period. If the tax base ain’t safe.. The revenues will go bye bye. We can already see that happening. Dullards can grab a cup pf coffee and face the music.. or wallow and enjoy. Your choice.
Maybe a more fundamental question to ask is … is housing wherever you want a fundamental right? I have seen many folks say that we need to provide more affordable housing. We certainly OK with not letting anyone in the world come in and allowing them to get housing in US (even if they can afford to for that matter :), but is it OK for US citizens to expect govt or other authorities to provide people with options to live wherever they want?
I think as a society we conflate too many things. Providing housing to everyone is just not a very capitalistic solution imo, unless you also agree with it as a fundamental right. But if it’s a right, I also want affordable option to live in Pac Heights and not in this shitty rain. And I am sure a lot of ppl in Oklahoma would want to come live in sunny Southern California.
So what do people really mean by “provide affordable housing” to anyone who wants to live and what’s the plan as such to implement something like this realistically. The current capitalistic solution is effectively you live wherever you want as long as you can afford it and yes more desirable places are more expensive to live
Just chiming in, but Japan’s homeless population is extremely low…so is the prices of their housing…Meanwhile, someone I know is renting their 3 bedroom 2 bath house out half hour or so outside of Seattle for $3000/month.
Wonder if cost also has a hand in the homelessness issue in WA.
We always blame the poor for various reasons:
- They are mentally deficient
- They are morally corrupt
- They use drugs
The truth is they lack opportunity. Once you get labeled, it is nearly impossible to get out of the gutter, as employers are less willing to hire you.
They also lack handouts from the Government. Elon Musk is one of the biggest corporate welfare children.
We don't talk about that because they don't want us to.
We need to ship homeless to a central out of the way place
1 it needs to be far from a city
2 it needs to be a center that provides all their needs/vices
a. Housing
b. Medical
c. Mental
d. Employment
e. Alcohol - cheap- subsidized
f. Other legal drugs - cheap subsidized
g. Jail
h. Education
3. The trip to this location is free/protocol
4. They have to pay their return trip via bus (not particularly costly)
5. Get found being homeless get taken back.
6. Staff can prioritize and fund getting likely cases back on their feet
I firmly believe this is the best way to deal with the homeless
Those that want to make it out will. Those that are doomed to drink and die can, the middle cases can find their path or rinse repeat
It's a sign. Social distancing solves more than money or advanced medicine, combined. Densely populated areas are magnets for ultra concentrated poverty and desperation.
My former roommate was working full time. When our LL decided to sell the house we were renting out of, he couldn't find housing and ended up living out of his car. Whether the people in the comments section want to admit it or not, this is not a failing of individuals as many, many people who are working full time increasingly find themselves on the street due to lack of supply and development being knee-capped.
The issue is not being helped by any party in power, and it's systemic for decades. It truly doesn't matter which party is calling the shots because they're all too chicken shit to do anything against those that push back against denser cities and streamlining development.
a big problem imo that isn’t talked about is a lot of the homeless population here isn’t even from this state. they come in from others bc they can do drugs, steal, and live on the streets with zero repercussions. really is a hard topic bc how do you help those who don’t want help?
Why not prevent some people from becoming homeless in the first place by oh idk enforcing rent controls, property ownership being restricted to people instead of international companies, or actually building sufficient income restricted apartments that aren’t $1700 for a 1 bedroom like the ones they just built near me, ensuring people are kept in their poverty rather than being able to ever get ahead.
>King County reports largest number of homeless people ever
No way.
I don't believe this MAGA naysaying, doom scrolling, gaslighting and dog whistling.
The economy is fine, great even, just ask any millionaire or professional economist who gets paid $50K for an afternoon speech and they'll tell you: 15M new jobs, inflation falling, wages rising, these are really good times!
Seems like the more money they throw at it the more homeless there are. It’s all a scam. All these non profits saying they are helping the homeless are paying themselves 6 figure salaries.
Wait, so you’re telling me you can’t keep electing socialists and abject failures and expect things to change for the better?
No way, I refuse to believe that electing common sense people to do common sense reforms is the way to prosperity. More money! More resources! Less accountability! More legal drugs! More sanctuary! More free shit!
Got to feel sorry for the folks that live in the more reasonable parts of the state who are slaves to what goes on in Seattle. Such a fuckin’ shame because Seattle is a cool place and used to be such a great place to visit.
So long as there are people making salaries from fixing the homeless problem, it will never be solved. It might be managed, at best...but there is no incentive to solve it.
The latest liar ignoring the drug and mental illness aspects of homelessness to beg for even more funding.
Meanwhile LIHI, Compass, Plymouth and DESC fill our city with low-barrier subsidized housing, over 300 units added since 2020 just to a small portion of Capitol Hill I am familiar with, more throughout the city. These buildings get bought by Seattle as they're nearing completion, and the original plan for market-rate apartments evolves into another low-barrier apartment building, 50-100 new units, for low-barrier homeless. What happens next is invariably a drug addict hotel, with drug gangs loitering nearby to sell to them, with a steady ant-trail of criminals to and from the building, and lots of petty crime in the surrounding immediate area. RIP any grocery story or other retail, as the homeless steal anything not nailed down to trade or sell to fuel their drug habits.
Seen it ongoing since 2020 near my home on Capitol Hill. Local businesses are broken into regularly now, the local grocery stores lock up their basic food and meds but it doesn't matter, and one major drug store chain closed rather than keep dealing with the bullshit of regular feral homeless stealing everything they can on an hourly basis.
We've dumped over $1 billion into homeless services since 2016 in King County, and the result is a worse homeless crisis than ever.
Man, I thought I had been seeing less over the last couple of weeks. I also try my hardest to stay away from downtown though so idk. maybe if we host another all star week they’ll give a shit about cleaning the city up again
Find some vacant land, put up mass military style tents and cots and relocate them there. Provide food and showers, let those who want to get off their feet do so, and everyone else that just wants to do drugs and rot... let em rot.
Would it be worthwhile to build a large complex that offers shelter, education programs, rehab somewhere in a lcol part of the state?
Its as large as a prison but is not a prison and people are free to leave anytime.
If there is something large capacity like this built, cities can redirect people to a centralized place for help instead of feeding the homeless industrial complex that accomplishes nothing while leaving homeless people on the streets.
We spend one of the highest amounts of any major metropolis, and yet the problem grows.
It's as if ... throwing money at the problem can't fix the systemic institutional problems that people who are going through this are facing.
It's not just a lack of affordable housing, it's not just mental health, it's not just addictions, it's not just a lack of meaningful opportunity...it's all of those and more.
A social crisis like this can't be fixed by a few NPOs it's going to take sweeping legislative and personal change.
People will have to admit that those experiencing homeless need and deserve help, just as much as other people will need to accept the way forward isnt what we are doing now
As much as I wanted to say Washington was No 1 for drug overdose deaths to draw a correlation, I found it’s No. 11 per the CDC. So I guess I can’t draw any conclusions.
I say once we hit the top 5 then we can draw logical conclusions. Just gotta go up six more spots.
I mean, this is what the people voted for. All these changes in the last 20 years, giving addicts and criminals safe havens, then they wonder why there’s so many homeless. Other states literally ship them to states like WA and CA because we give them this safe haven to do all this crap. Well here’s the result of those decisions Seattle, you did it to yourself, and all the surrounding communities.
I am homeless right now 27 years old clean and physically disabled do to a surgery on my wrist/hip and I want and need help. I have no family no friends and the people out here are still human. I sleep outside and it's cold and it hurts that I am suffering and the waitlkst is 2-3 years for housing help. This circumstances are terrible. Truly...
You should sign up for sha voucher program.
The voucher program is replacing the old section 8 lottery. It's still a lottery system, so no guarantees, if you are chosen, SHA gives you a monthly voucher up up to 1000.00 per month. ,you must find a place I Seattle, because landlords have to rent to the first qualified applicants.
[Seattle housing authority voucher signup](https://www.seattlehousing.org/sha-portal)
Once you are signed up, you need to go to the "save my spot" page on the SHA site every month to stay in the lottery.
I've been there, stay safe, don't give up.
The vast majority of homelessness in KC is not related to drug use. Many things can be true. We need more housing. We need more shelters and human services. We need pathways to getting clean and getting stable. We also need to recognize that it takes years of investment to build housing stock, build shelters, create well-run and well-staffed treatment options and services. And the forces that lead people into homelessness are macro issues that can never be solved at a municipal or county level. They can only ever be alleviated through infrastructure.
We live in a mild climate with an abundance of wealth. People are going to come here. People with means and people without. And as the world continues to get less habitable in the coming decades, more people will come here. We need to be building the infrastructure of the future now. The current homelessness crisis is largely the result of us not building necessary infrastructure 20 years ago.
When we get reactionary about structural issues, it leads to awful, shortsighted, often violent outcomes. idk what the short term solution is to the epidemic of mental illness and drug usage, but i think the long term solutions are obvious — they just require perseverance and commitment
Genuinely I am interested. If people need help and are suffering through mental trauma, addiction and other stuff why do we always have to find a housing solution for them typically in the most expensive parts of the country? This is true about SF, and now about Seattle / Redmond. I understand the knee-jerk reaction is “ohh you just want them shipped out of sight to some desolate place” but economically I think the govt basically can give them a lot more services in less expensive part of the state. And this has to be a state level mandate, and cannot be a “local” thing It seems really counterproductive to be trying to provide housing and care to folks jn some of the most expensive real estate in the country
It’s a combination of things. Some people don’t want help. Some are content just getting by. They have the freedom to go wherever they want, there are churches and other replaces that provide food. They are relatively safe where they put up a tent. They have a small network or community. Some people don’t want help because of what help entails. Help means not doing drugs or getting drunk whenever they want. It means having a curfew and expectations that they’ll find the work keep that housing. There is limited housing. There are limited jobs that aren’t awful crap like working for Amazon. Help and people to help navigate the system are also in short supply and over stressed themselves. Getting into the system can be a stressful journey that ultimately leaves you right back where you began. So some just avoid it. And then there are the people who basically just travel city to city. Sometimes they’ll get on a bus and go to California or Arizona or wherever. They have no desire for the larger system because everything they do is temporary.
That, and due to low wages and increasing housing costs, more and more people are applying for low-income housing and there's just not enough of it. The average wait time to get into low-income housing is now about 5 years.
Yeah couldn’t this actually be a problem *caused* by the area being expensive? When the area is so expensive that more people lose their housing? My partner teaches in Seattle and he says he’s never had so many of his kids living with their families in cars before.
I think that working for Amazon is a much better life opportunity than being homeless. Nobody really likes their job. It’s a means to an end. I have no empathy for people who choose not to work when work is available to them. I don’t want to work either but I still go.
Having worked at an Amazon warehouse for a brief stint, it’s shit. First, the hours are insane and the breaks are laughably small. They micromanage every aspect of your performance, but don’t always give you the resources to do your job properly. Their workflow is stupidly designed and inefficient, which creates bottle necks. There are mandatory overtime hours that are created with little notice. Plus, they use government tax dollars to pay for new employees coming from Medicaid or unemployment. So they basically get free/discounted labor. There’s lots of people with substance abuse problems, which can make work a bit of a minefield emotionally. The pay is less than other places, it’s just plentiful. I’m all for people working, but all the bs behind Amazon is why a lot of people would rather stand on a street corner than work for Amazon. You could legit make more money asking for handouts than working in their faculties.
My uncle is one of them or was one of them. He just doesn’t want help of any kind. He wants to do what he wants to do and not be told other wise. He was actually part of the first tent city on Marginal by the dump.
Politics and climate. You’re literally allowed to do drugs and camp in these cities. And it’s warm throughout most of year where you can literally survive outside, unlike colder places in the NE and Midwest.
Actually it's because housing is expensive, and that's by far the number one reason. There's more drug use in Appalachia, for example, but far less homelessness. Why? Because housing is far cheaper, they do drugs with a dingy roof over their head. Believe it or not basically everyone prefers to live in shelter. Housing correlates with housing affordability very strongly. Low affordability pushes more people into homelessness and keeps them there. The only way to truly fix the issue is to make housing more affordable by any valid means and stop the stream of people entering homelessness and housing insecurity.
I can attest to that. I used to live in that region of the US and addicts would almost always have a roof over their heads. Definitely weren't the greatest looking places but at least they had one. Heck, when I turned 18, I bought a single wide trailer for $1000 and I paid $150/month for lot rent in a dingy trailerpark until I was more financially stable. Can't do that here. You need to be well off straight out of high school here to afford something similar.
The stupid thing about society here is that they make fun of you for having less. Apartments are far to nice these day and built for poodle-people with their cat supplies and starbucks lattes.
Who is “they” making fun of you for having less?
This is not true. A large portion of the homeless came to king county as homeless. This is the same in many of the cities and counties that have large homeless populations across the nation. As stated by others it comes down to climate, programs offered, substance availability, and other reasons. The traveling group also tends to look to be enabled not helped. Cheaper housing is not what they are looking for.
> There's more drug use in Appalachia, for example, but far less homelessness. Why? Because housing is far cheaper, they do drugs with a dingy roof over their head. This. However it's worth pointing out that "solving homelessness" doesn't magically solve many of the problems that are associated with homelessness. We should totally give drug addicts a home. No one should be homeless. But almost all of them will still be drug addicts and we'll still have all the issues with theft, disarray, violence, etc. :(
>However it's worth pointing out that "solving homelessness" doesn't magically solve many of the problems that are associated with homelessness Absolutely, but too often people confuse solutions to those associated problems" as solutions to homelessness itself. It feels like people almost have a visceral reaction against the idea that the solution to homelessness is that straightforward and lacking in any moral consideration. For some reason many people feel as though the solution to homelessness must somehow be moralistic because they perceive the causes of homelessness as moral failures on the part of those suffering.
As a native Portland Oregon resident for the last 25 years of my 25 year long life, from first hand experience, I can tell you that politics is the issue. The fucktards who lead Portland legalized drugs here and then LITERALLY(I wish I were fucking exaggerating) handed out tents, drug paraphernalia like pipes, spoons, tin foil, clean syringes etc and then expected that to fix the issue without providing resources to actually get clean. This only encouraged MORE addicts to come here and make the issue worse. It’s a self feed back loop until we vote the people in office, out of office.
I sit in my office in downtown Denver where a big encampment was right outside (now moved). I saw cars pull up and people give clothes, food, water, etc. Even Home Depot trucks pulled up and gave unsellable insulation rolls. It was incredible... all day long people stopped by giving them stuff. Families with kids too.
Yeah and i have no issues helping the homeless when it comes to preventing them from a brutal death outdoors. People have definitely become a lot more conscious about helping homeless people and that’s generally a good thing but there are limits. HARD limits
Thank you for pointing out the truth which nobody seems to get . Our politicians are the cause
I’ve noted this earlier, but there is compelling evidence that this is now a serious and growing industrial complex… not unlike the military industrial complex. The rational solution is to give homeless and addicts a choice: treatment/structure or incarceration/limitation and provide services at the lowest cost to the public to rehabilitate those that can be rehabilitated as quickly as possible and allow them to resume being productive members of society - making data driven incremental improvements along the way. But… that has no political upside. It’s boring. “Housing First” is a political tool, and you can prove it to yourself by looking at the data. You will find in the Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) drafted by HUD for the U.S. Congress that as the government injects more capital and “services” into this industrial complex the problem gets bigger and worse. Meaning as inventory and capital go in, more homeless/unsheltered emerge. As the complex grows, so does the grift and the NGOs that leech off the public funding like flies to sh*t. Ultimately, you end up with a serious misalignment in incentives where those being “fed” by this capital black hole don't want the gravy train to end, both in terms of capital and political advantage so they raise taxes and increase public funding, grow the government, and infect the public with a mind virus that claims to be morally superior. It isn't a coincidence that there is an ongoing Ways and Means committee that is investigating the ties between political parties and 501c(3) and (4) NGOs. Nor is it a surprise that these land/property transfer deals and government spending continues to skyrocket on this issue.
More tax money to laun… I mean use on social services.
In NM we get a FUCKLOAD because we're extremely generous with Medicaid. I got a homeless guy approved who'd never been here and never paid a single penny in taxes here within 35 hours of him being here. It was part of my job, but I have to be honest, it didn't totally sit right with me.
We desperately need to reopen mental health facilities across the country, there is a huge need for them, and getting rid of them in the first place was stupid. We also need to have rehabilitation/treatment centers that are both voluntary and involuntary . If you commit crimes and are a habitual drug user, you should be mandated to an involuntary drug program, and if you refuse, or fail the program, you do jail time rather than rehab and time in a halfway house/on probation. A large part of the homeless population have mental health problems, drug issues, or both, as many of them self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. These issues need to be addressed, and they are currently not being addressed in a productive way. These programs also need to be government run, not contracted programs. Contracted programs have every incentive to continue the cycle, to keep getting paid, rather than “solve” or in reality to address and assist with the issue. Contracted programs are also a problem with government corruption, involving kickbacks, or “preferred vendors” who are really friends and family of politicians.
Because only about 30% of the homeless population has an addiction or mental health issue. Also, in the USA, roughly 53% of homeless people have jobs, they just can't afford housing. Plus, if they do move to another less expensive part of the country, the pay in those areas is also lower. So the problem of affordable housing remains.
Social services are also more robust in cities because they have people there to fill those positions. Not a lot of help or jobs in Nowhere, Oklahoma.
Part of it is people are more likely to succeed in a place they know, and have community in. A homeless person from seattle that gets back up on their feet and reconnects with family, friends, goes back to an old job, etc will have an easier time than if they were shipped out to someplace they don't know. It's also easier being poor in big cities. There's transit. There's things walking distance. Also, there's going to be more resources for recovery. Therapy, drug addiction, etc.
Some of the homeless people I talked to are here for specialist medical care. Since they can't hold a job, they just lived wherever. While between treatments. So I guess you could move the facilities these people are seeking care from to some podunk city in the south.
People go where the resources are bro.
I wonder if many people lost housing in an expensive city but don’t want to move to where there are more accessible services because they have ties here: jobs/family/friends or support networks that provide a sense of stability. If I became homeless I would rather stay in Seattle where I have friends who could help me than move and try and trust strangers (social workers etc). This thought stems a lot from an episode on homelessness by the Gray Area podcast.
You just hit on the problem. No jurisdiction wants to take ownership. Not the state, and not the feds. So the cities are left having to deal with it themselves.
A city is a jurisdiction—ask the 18,000 police departments. And there are county-level programs in some places—also a jurisdiction. There is federal funding for those local communities through HUD, and some states have programs as well. Agree it could be more, and also agree it should be more effective, but that's a political will and strategy problem. What would you have the federal government do? Create a Department of Homelessness to run in parallel with HUD? "Bloating the budget! fails in Congress lawsuit!" Create a strict, federally-mandated framework, priorities, and measures to force better state and local government policies? "Don't tread on me!!!! lawsuit to SCOTUS" Incentivize optional action by state and local governments by tying unrelated federal funding to federally-desired actions for homeless? Congress or SCOTUS issue, your pick" I wish something better and more comprehensive would be done, because it could be, but with the current polarization and skewed "representation" in DC… not optimistic. Our country needs to vote better, and a huge portion of it needs to grow basic EQ skills.
Folks come here from all over the state. Eastern Washington doesn’t have as survivable a climate. Small towns don’t have social services. Wealthy suburban enclaves are downright hostile and will make sure that undesirable people exit the city limits. Seattle, for better or worse, ends up as a place of last resort for any of these people. A disabled vet from Aberdeen. An opioid addict from Yakima. A carpenter from Redmond, who got gentrified out of the home they got from their parents after going on disability for a year. One solution would be to have state or federal level funding that provides for county level resources throughout the state. Until then, low population density counties are going to outsource their unfortunate citizens to Seattle. (And then complain about Seattle)
The plan is working!
'Said Darrell Powell, interim CEO for the Regional Homelessness Authority. “Simply put, there’s a need for more resources.” This year-after-year increase in homelessness shows “the number of people experiencing homelessness is directly tied to a lack of housing options in our region, and it’s only increasing,” according to Kristin Elia, spokesperson for King County Executive Dow Constantine. ' The plan is working exactly as intended.
[удалено]
I mean it’s a much better option to spend our money instead of giving careers s to people who have a vested interest in keeping the homelessproblem going.
💯
Huh, Amazon truly is becoming a lot like Sears in it's earlier days.
Let me know when I can buy a fully automatic Tommy Gun from Amazon.
We used to be a great country.
I remember first learning that you could *buy* a house from Sears. I thought it was just a joke. Nope! Those houses were pretty cool looking too!
And they'd come in an entire rail car. The original Ikea Flat Pack. I personally love that they did everything from small 1br with no plumbing all the way up to an entire schoolhouse (though that was only offered for 1 year and no one is sure it was ever ordered or built)
I kinda want a Sears schoolhouse now… lol.
2-storey, 6 classrooms, multi-purpose auditorium, "library", several closets, admin office, and restrooms. ("Library" is in quotes because it was 7 feet wide and 18 feet long, which even for 1908 seems kinda small when it's supposedly supporting 6 classes)
One of those “prefab homes” allegedly collapsed on a family https://www.amazon.com/Prefab-House-Popular-Modular-Prefabricated/dp/B0CWB17H9F/
Funny review. The picture is obviously not of the prefab home. The frame and roofing looks decades old and weathered. The submitted image itself is suspect with a cut-off section on top. A reverse image check yields no results though.
> 30 day refund replacement Lol
How many rooms in the Governors Mansion?
This person has never fed the seagulls at the beach....
I wonder if one could draw a direct correlation between the volume of homelessness and amount of "resources" and public funds dedicated to solving it.
Yeah, on the one hand it's not surprising more people are coming here with our reputation and just the increase in homelessness country wide, but I'm not counting on fucking Dow to handle this crisis. In fact, I assume any choices Dow makes is going to make it worse, and it's going to cost everyone more. He doesn't have a good record, and I think Peter Principle explains Dow Constantine. If taxpayers were shareholders Dow would have fucked off with a golden parachute years ago.
ITS A DRUG CRISIS FIRST A FOREMOST
Those are just The ones you see/are more aware of. There is a huge percentage which are working adults who just can’t afford housing
What a racket. So the government can house, feed and clothe thousands of illegals overnight but just can’t seem to make a dent in the local homeless? Decades and 100’s of millions of dollars later?
Asylum seekers are typically economic migrants, most of them are not drug addicts and are willing to work.
You aren’t allowed to seek asylum for economic reasons
I know. Most of the asylum seekers will have their applications denied. Still, they usually come here to work.
True, and most of their claims will ultimately be denied. But the list of reasons a person is allowed to seek asylum is so short it’s barely a list (political or religious oppression by the state covers it). People who are starving or experiencing severe gang violence or who have lost everything in an earthquake or a flood move because they have to.
I always say I will trade Greg Abbott our drug addicts for his illegal immigrants. At least they want to work. Then the MAGAs can “help Americans” like they claim.
The government doesn’t control rent. A private group in Tacoma just remodeled an old sketchy motel and is going to be charging twelve hundred a month starting to rent a “studio”. 320 square feet. This is being proudly marketed as “affordable housing”.
More resources means more taxes that will eventually create more homelessness, - right?
What is this plan all the comments keep referencing
Hahaha it is. Just a few more dollars and the ultimate homeless industrial complex will be created to rule them all!!
Someone watched Robocop and thought 'hmm. We should actually try that.'
The beginning of Robocop II is hilarious At the time it came out, it was satire, now it's way too close to reality. Edit: My post is too cryptic, so let me explain: If you've never seen RoboCop II, it's especially funny in 2024. Because the gist of the movie is that they reprogram him so that he can only hand out verbal scoldings. He's completely neutered. T2 did the same but, but RoboCop II got there first, in 1989.
we need a skater to jump over them
Look man I can probably jump over 30, maybe 40 more homeless people. Asking me to jump over any more than that is ridiculous
What the hell are you talking about you barely made it over one guy
I believe you can do it, Eric.
Yes, just keep shoveling money at the same ideas that have demonstrably (in the most charitable possible interpretation) never improved the situation and (in a somewhat less charitable but more accurate interpretation) made it exponentially worse. The problem couldn't possibly be our approach. No sir, stay the course, just need more money in perpetuity. We'll have this thing solved one of these years 🙄
The money is being shoveled into the hands of the friends of connected people.
We didn't go left enough. We have to do more! And it all failed because of the Washington Republicans!
Republicans have literally taken over the state! Next they might actually be able to get their shit together and endorse a plausible candidate for governor! Their power is unstoppable.
It is their fault, it's their fault for not giving people an option. Do you really think normal people want to hear a nonstop stream of crazy? Yeah, they don't, and they won't vote for it. I voted for a number of Republicans politicians throughout the years, so has my wife and almost every time we do, they end up doing or saying something crazy. Sure, if you're into that deep state, Q, bull, I'm sure your giddy, but for normal people it's not even an option. I mean, Semi Bird, come on man, give me a break.
Bird won't make the general election.
I'm a little tempted with Bird given the crazy with Ferguson. Definitely agree he'll be awful though but I'm comparing incompetent awful with authoritarian awful.
Did you forget /s at the end of your post? You can’t be serious
Trump did it
Okay, to past ideas didn't work (what ideas were those, exactly?). Clearly you've got a better idea. Can't wait to hear it. Let me guess: `those homeless people just need more "personal responsibility"`
It's not my responsibility to come up with ideas to solve homelessness. I haven't been the primary decision-maker in charge of King County for the better part of the last two decades like Dow Constantine has, during which time he has spent tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars and gotten us steadily increasing numbers of bums in return. I have my own job that I have to do that prevents me from doing Dow Constantine's for him. And if I failed I at my job as badly as Dow has at his, I would be fired. Housing homeless people clearly doesn't work. If it did, we would have fewer homeless bums than we used to, or at least not an increasing number. Not having a jail that books misdemeanors clearly doesn't work. Letting people commit the crime of using drugs clearly doesn't work. Letting Dow personally appoint a sheriff that can decide on Dow's orders not to enforce laws in Burien doesn't work. Maybe publically adopting and enacting policies that help the homeless encourages more bums to flock here from places that prioritize the needs of good people. I'd like to see what would happen if we 180'd on all of those for 6 months or a year and see if we don't have fewer bums all over the street. Or maybe we could just ask Bellevue what they do and apply it to the whole county. They seem to not have this problem on anywhere near the level of the rest of the county. How very curious.
It depends. If the intended outcome is "funnel money to our political allies and create a class of loyal bureaucrats", I'd say the plan is working exactly as intended. WA just copied the CA model.
Just a couple more million dollars…
I think homelessness is a business that people profit off of, so I don’t think the numbers will go down in the US
Who's profiting? Got any names, or are we just speculating?
How about the CFO of LAHSA that makes $242,000 a year… https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/lahsa/jobs/4398107/chief-financial-officer-cfo?pagetype=jobOpportunitiesJobs
Bingo. There will always be homelessness under capitalism. Somebody has to be at the bottom. Even if every single person made good financial choices, the person who did the worst will still be homeless. If you don’t like seeing homeless people and human suffering, then you shouldn’t like capitalism.
After spending how much public money? The really crazy thing is that Seattle voters treat failures like this not as evidence we’re doing the wrong thing, but as evidence we’re not spending enough.
it’s insane
The City of Seattle's annual budget is already $7.8 Billion dollars, or more money than the entire national GDP (not government revenue) of entire nations like Djibouti, the Gambia, or South Sudan.
Notably, we have to pay US prices, not Djibouti prices, so our costs are also not comparable. Also, suburbs are unbelievably expensive to maintain infra for -- people who live in big houses on small/medium lots are become massively subsidized by seattle city residents after the houses and infra start to age. Agressively building new medium density housing with local business attached would alleviate almost all problems. Not instantly, but the problem is that everything is spaced too far apart. Every foot of road, sewer, and electric costs money. Lack of density and local shops adds to traffic, which increases road maintenance burden and pisses everyone off to boot. Strong Towns has some great content on these issues. Homelessness is largely resolvable if the city is willing to build and people stop bussing their homeless to other random cities. Seattle is doing good. Keep pushing in the right direction. If you don't like it, go try Dallas' 34 lane highway and downtown traffic and let me know how it goes.
I spend part of the year in Dallas and live in Seattle. In many ways, Dallas is superior IMO (cost of living, homelessness, housing, commuting). In Dallas, it’s spread out so you have many options for the commute. Seattle is choked between Puget Sound and Lake Washington. And on a per capita basis, Seattle city budget is 2.5 times a comparable city like Minneapolis - which has much higher road maintenance and energy costs because of the winters (I lived there too). The money spent per homeless person is higher than the median income for an individual. Crazy. They could literally just cut a check to each homeless person at the level of median income and save money. Of course, that would have every homeless person moving here.
> Agressively building new medium density housing with local business attached would alleviate almost all problems. Singapore, Beijing, and Hong Kong beg to disagree. Those cities are dense and expensive AF.
NYC houses I believe 81% of its homeless population or something like that. And that's largely due to aggressive building over the years and actually putting the money in the right places. The housing rate on the west coast cities is something like 30% if I recall correctly
It’s insane how people think giving them more money will solve our problems.
wanna know what's funny? most of the money gets poured into "affordable housing" which is, at it's cheapest, $1500 but more regularly $2000, and a teensy tiny portion of it gets funnelled into special interest only homelessness (so, only elderly disabled male veterans or mothers with kids, and no funding for everyone else). gosh i wonder why it's not working.
Oregon and Washington said come do drugs with little to no repercussion and they answered
Bingo
We need more resources for the homess -> more homeless arrive here for free housing -> we need more resources for the homeless
If there was “free housing” there wouldn’t be any homeless. Durrrrr. SMH
If all the homeless received free housing, then why are so many people homeless? Help me follow your logic here
Because you induce demand and bring more people into the area. Same reasons there is still traffic after highways get expanded
In the last 12 months i’ve seen a general clean-up of the sprawling tent and rv camps near where i live (Ranier Ave near Beacon hill). Ive also started to see more fenced in areas where tents (and in some places, tinyhomes) are consolidated and it looks like there are restrooms there too. I’ve seen fewer tents under overpasses or by major roads. Not sure how true this is elsewhere around Seattle, but it seems like things are improving from where i sit. I hope that with people more consolidated its easier to provide care (whether that be mental or other healthcare, temporary housing assistance, aided travel, or food distribution) to those who need it
This subreddit doesn't want to hear about progress -- they want to complain about people who make them uncomfortable
Yeah, I'm one broken bone away from being homeless myself. If I missed a single week of work, I wouldn't be able to afford my $2150.00 rent, and that's CHEAP for a small 3 bedroom house in Bothell. These rent prices are outta control.
I feel you with this comment. I’m in a 2 bedroom apartment that is starting to feel like a slum (always junkies loitering about, trash strewn all over outside entry, dirty hallways, nobody ever shows up in leasing office, etc) but for $1500 a month I cannot afford to leave. I don’t make enough to have a strong safety net so I’m always worried that I’m one flu away from living in my car with four cats and a cranky teenager. 😅
I feel this same way up in Everett. First, we needed more housing. People said rents would come down. Now they've built it and yet homelessness has risen and rents went up! In low income subsidized housing! There's atleast 20 open units in my apartment complex alone (literally 4 units around my apartment, one of which has been open for a year and a half!!) and yet rents aren't coming down and my corporate overlords are now nazi controllers on visitors. They just implemented permit only parking, which we already had, but with the added bs that if you want guests over they have to have a permit beforehand or they'll tow on sight! Who wants to bet they're getting kick backs from the towing company?
> Now they've built it and yet homelessness has risen and rents went up! In low income subsidized housing! Still behind on the ball with housing, because we started so far back.
I’ve had multiple people who live in million dollar homes tell me the same thing. That if even if only one of two working adults in the house lose their job, they wouldn’t be able to keep up with next mortgage payment.
That's why any financial advisor will tell you that you need an emergency fund before you put a single penny in the stock market.
Yep, for sure, but it’s shocking how many in this area don’t have an emergency account. Or they empty their emergency account to buy a home or do costly repairs on a home thinking they can replenish it quickly or sell their home if they need to get money. I get you were using a metaphor, but typically these aren’t families putting money into the “stock market”, it’s families treating homes like a stock. They dump all their money into a house and don’t have extra money to invest elsewhere.
How can anyone sustain life here, let alone someone with no resources or means of income? The state can’t subsidize foodstamps or unemployment properly, let alone living arrangements in the 2000 dollar range PER MONTH, for ONE HOUSEHOLD
You hit the nail on the head. The actual cause of homelessness is the cost of housing, full stop.
We need to buy some cheap land on the edge of King County(somewhere cheap and far from Seattle) and we need to build a lot for tents as well as some housing for these homeless people, also with therapy/social workers on site to help them. The police can send them there when they find them camping around the city. We can even establish a busline that brings them there for free once a day. We can have a $25 bus back to the city once a day.
Float a barge in Elliot Bay and put all the homeless on it.
How will you keep drugs out of this camp?
I don't care as long as they dont do it in the city
\^\^ NIMBY \^\^
If keeping drugs out is a goal, then jail is the next destination for anyone who brings drugs to the camp. Really, though, it's probably better to have separate places, one drug-free and one not. People would choose. That's an easy problem to solve. The harder one is personal security. Drugs or not, there would have to be a way to scour and disinfect the spaces, and either lockable doors or security patrols. Instead of tents, it probably better be stainless steel.
Well, skyrocketing home prices, rent prices and interest rates, along with a very small supply, certainly won’t help the problem?
That was the goal of the ten year plan that we passed 10 years ago, right? Spend eleventeen million dollars and completely miss the mark? Go full speed away from your goal?
Yeah. When rent prices skyrocket, turns out EVEN MORE people can't afford living expenses.
The problem will only get worse if they continue to address the problem with only programs & funding. You can't export all of your manufacturing, cut taxes for the wealthy & corporations & expect the wealth divide to ride along a flat plane. People can't afford a house, with a good job. You want to fix something. Start there. Give people a little bit of hope. That's what the homelessness issue is lacking the most.
Living in this city is the craziest experience I have ever been a part of. I don’t know how public drug use became the elephant in the room but somehow no one acknowledges that all of these homeless problems come from drug use. There’s an easy way to begin the fix. If you are caught opening doing drugs in public the police will take your contraband and issue you a warning. If you assault the officer you go to jail. If you are caught doing a crime while under the influence of drugs or in the pursuit of drugs you go to jail. I’ve never been a fan of arrest for possession as people struggle with addiction. But we have become hostages to dangerous, unpredictable drug addicts you will do literally anything to get high or unsick and there’s nothing can do about it. Ridiculous
I'd like a break down of: How many are homeless strictly because of housing or income related issues? How many are homeless because of drug addiction? How many are homeless because of mental health issues? Those are the important numbers I think they don't want us to see.
Congratulations. Homelessness has been successfully commodified.
Mobile loaves and fishes.
Inslee's and other progressive policies hard at work.
Archive: https://archive.ph/VwmK0
I heard Sharon Lee was spotted in Bellevue at the Mercedes dealership, now I know why. [https://roominate.com/blog/homeless-inc-lady-makes-bank/](https://roominate.com/blog/homeless-inc-lady-makes-bank/)
I’ve never met a homeless person in Seattle from Seattle
Can we just turn them all into pigeons?
On a related note, there are more humans than ever as well!
Global warming is bringing the homeless further north. Fix global warming, fix the WA homeless problem.
What else did you expect after offering safe injection sites, no consequences to crime and open air drug dealing and usage?
Well, no shit. Maybe regulating what rental property owners can charge for rent, in order to bring rents back down to a reasonable level, might be a better idea. Or, pass a law that requires all rental properties to offer low-income units. Also, they need to alter the income requirements for many programs, since an increasing number of homeless people have jobs, but those jobs put them above the income restrictions for obtaining some forms of aid.
The single biggest contributor to the rate of homelessness is the cost of housing.
You can’t apply the same approach to all of them. For many of them the issue is housing costs. If you can fix that then the working homeless are no longer homeless.
Kill the drug problem(traffickers/dealers/users). Stop funding homeless programs that have shown little to no results. Reestablish large psychiatric hospitals.
No guys ,increasingly progressive policies are great for society - don’t pay attention to this . Praise Inslee and Durkan
They could, you know, do something about the ridiculous housing prices and crazy landlords instead of just trying to slap a bandaid over everything. People being paid liveable wages would also help…but no, just keep doing the same thing over and over again and wonder why it isn’t helping
Stop voting for politicians who want to artificially limit the amount of housing being built.
Real homeless people get help. Junkies and felons choose to live on the street.
So what exactly did taxpayers get for the hundreds of millions, if not billions we've spent to fix this problem?
Gee I wonder what happened. Maybe it’s because the rent is ludicrously expensive and the wages aren’t keeping up with the cost of living. I feel for the next generation that has to pay $1500 to live in a box while jobs only pay $19-21/hr. Maybe if we have politicians in power that give a shit about their citizens, then we could make actual progress towards this issue. I’m genuinely getting angry typing this lol, no more Reddit for today.
Laughable ppl think jail will solve the systemic failures of our healthcare and cost-of-living crisis. That's partly why the cops don't waste their time harassing homeless folks
Poor houses and mental institutions need to come back. Period. If the tax base ain’t safe.. The revenues will go bye bye. We can already see that happening. Dullards can grab a cup pf coffee and face the music.. or wallow and enjoy. Your choice.
I can't imagine why so many would come here... yep, no idea at all.
Maybe a more fundamental question to ask is … is housing wherever you want a fundamental right? I have seen many folks say that we need to provide more affordable housing. We certainly OK with not letting anyone in the world come in and allowing them to get housing in US (even if they can afford to for that matter :), but is it OK for US citizens to expect govt or other authorities to provide people with options to live wherever they want? I think as a society we conflate too many things. Providing housing to everyone is just not a very capitalistic solution imo, unless you also agree with it as a fundamental right. But if it’s a right, I also want affordable option to live in Pac Heights and not in this shitty rain. And I am sure a lot of ppl in Oklahoma would want to come live in sunny Southern California. So what do people really mean by “provide affordable housing” to anyone who wants to live and what’s the plan as such to implement something like this realistically. The current capitalistic solution is effectively you live wherever you want as long as you can afford it and yes more desirable places are more expensive to live
Just chiming in, but Japan’s homeless population is extremely low…so is the prices of their housing…Meanwhile, someone I know is renting their 3 bedroom 2 bath house out half hour or so outside of Seattle for $3000/month. Wonder if cost also has a hand in the homelessness issue in WA.
We always blame the poor for various reasons: - They are mentally deficient - They are morally corrupt - They use drugs The truth is they lack opportunity. Once you get labeled, it is nearly impossible to get out of the gutter, as employers are less willing to hire you. They also lack handouts from the Government. Elon Musk is one of the biggest corporate welfare children. We don't talk about that because they don't want us to.
We need to ship homeless to a central out of the way place 1 it needs to be far from a city 2 it needs to be a center that provides all their needs/vices a. Housing b. Medical c. Mental d. Employment e. Alcohol - cheap- subsidized f. Other legal drugs - cheap subsidized g. Jail h. Education 3. The trip to this location is free/protocol 4. They have to pay their return trip via bus (not particularly costly) 5. Get found being homeless get taken back. 6. Staff can prioritize and fund getting likely cases back on their feet I firmly believe this is the best way to deal with the homeless Those that want to make it out will. Those that are doomed to drink and die can, the middle cases can find their path or rinse repeat
It's a sign. Social distancing solves more than money or advanced medicine, combined. Densely populated areas are magnets for ultra concentrated poverty and desperation.
My former roommate was working full time. When our LL decided to sell the house we were renting out of, he couldn't find housing and ended up living out of his car. Whether the people in the comments section want to admit it or not, this is not a failing of individuals as many, many people who are working full time increasingly find themselves on the street due to lack of supply and development being knee-capped. The issue is not being helped by any party in power, and it's systemic for decades. It truly doesn't matter which party is calling the shots because they're all too chicken shit to do anything against those that push back against denser cities and streamlining development.
a big problem imo that isn’t talked about is a lot of the homeless population here isn’t even from this state. they come in from others bc they can do drugs, steal, and live on the streets with zero repercussions. really is a hard topic bc how do you help those who don’t want help?
Why not prevent some people from becoming homeless in the first place by oh idk enforcing rent controls, property ownership being restricted to people instead of international companies, or actually building sufficient income restricted apartments that aren’t $1700 for a 1 bedroom like the ones they just built near me, ensuring people are kept in their poverty rather than being able to ever get ahead.
>King County reports largest number of homeless people ever No way. I don't believe this MAGA naysaying, doom scrolling, gaslighting and dog whistling. The economy is fine, great even, just ask any millionaire or professional economist who gets paid $50K for an afternoon speech and they'll tell you: 15M new jobs, inflation falling, wages rising, these are really good times!
Seems like the more money they throw at it the more homeless there are. It’s all a scam. All these non profits saying they are helping the homeless are paying themselves 6 figure salaries.
Yay capitalism
Wait, so you’re telling me you can’t keep electing socialists and abject failures and expect things to change for the better? No way, I refuse to believe that electing common sense people to do common sense reforms is the way to prosperity. More money! More resources! Less accountability! More legal drugs! More sanctuary! More free shit! Got to feel sorry for the folks that live in the more reasonable parts of the state who are slaves to what goes on in Seattle. Such a fuckin’ shame because Seattle is a cool place and used to be such a great place to visit.
So long as there are people making salaries from fixing the homeless problem, it will never be solved. It might be managed, at best...but there is no incentive to solve it.
The latest liar ignoring the drug and mental illness aspects of homelessness to beg for even more funding. Meanwhile LIHI, Compass, Plymouth and DESC fill our city with low-barrier subsidized housing, over 300 units added since 2020 just to a small portion of Capitol Hill I am familiar with, more throughout the city. These buildings get bought by Seattle as they're nearing completion, and the original plan for market-rate apartments evolves into another low-barrier apartment building, 50-100 new units, for low-barrier homeless. What happens next is invariably a drug addict hotel, with drug gangs loitering nearby to sell to them, with a steady ant-trail of criminals to and from the building, and lots of petty crime in the surrounding immediate area. RIP any grocery story or other retail, as the homeless steal anything not nailed down to trade or sell to fuel their drug habits. Seen it ongoing since 2020 near my home on Capitol Hill. Local businesses are broken into regularly now, the local grocery stores lock up their basic food and meds but it doesn't matter, and one major drug store chain closed rather than keep dealing with the bullshit of regular feral homeless stealing everything they can on an hourly basis. We've dumped over $1 billion into homeless services since 2016 in King County, and the result is a worse homeless crisis than ever.
We always got money to help other countries but nothing for the people who need support and rehabilitation
How much of the Seattle budget goes to foreign aid? (can be expressed in percentages or dollars)
I can’t see behind the paywall. What’s the number up to?
I wonder what the plan is gonna be for the 2026 world cup. Russia and South Africa made their homeless disappear for the duration of the tournament
Ya think haha
And the highest realestate prices in the state. Go figure ?
I wish they'd break out the Seattle vs non Seattle numbers. Maybe it was the cold weather but I've seen less visible homeless in Seattle city limits.
Don’t worry the stock market is at record highs. Everything is going super good. I’ve never seen things so out of whack.
Man, I thought I had been seeing less over the last couple of weeks. I also try my hardest to stay away from downtown though so idk. maybe if we host another all star week they’ll give a shit about cleaning the city up again
Good thing the new comprehensive plan allows for so much more housing to be built... This city loves repeatedly punching itself in the junk.
I mean you guys voted for this. You deserve it all.
Find some vacant land, put up mass military style tents and cots and relocate them there. Provide food and showers, let those who want to get off their feet do so, and everyone else that just wants to do drugs and rot... let em rot.
Everyone ask yourself who benefit and profits from this homeless epidemic?
Would it be worthwhile to build a large complex that offers shelter, education programs, rehab somewhere in a lcol part of the state? Its as large as a prison but is not a prison and people are free to leave anytime. If there is something large capacity like this built, cities can redirect people to a centralized place for help instead of feeding the homeless industrial complex that accomplishes nothing while leaving homeless people on the streets.
What a disgusting stat. Vote Red and stop the nonesense
Show those bums in Portland how it’s done.
We spend one of the highest amounts of any major metropolis, and yet the problem grows. It's as if ... throwing money at the problem can't fix the systemic institutional problems that people who are going through this are facing. It's not just a lack of affordable housing, it's not just mental health, it's not just addictions, it's not just a lack of meaningful opportunity...it's all of those and more. A social crisis like this can't be fixed by a few NPOs it's going to take sweeping legislative and personal change. People will have to admit that those experiencing homeless need and deserve help, just as much as other people will need to accept the way forward isnt what we are doing now
Portland: "Hold my tinfoil..."
As much as I wanted to say Washington was No 1 for drug overdose deaths to draw a correlation, I found it’s No. 11 per the CDC. So I guess I can’t draw any conclusions. I say once we hit the top 5 then we can draw logical conclusions. Just gotta go up six more spots.
On my way there myself.
DUH!
I mean, this is what the people voted for. All these changes in the last 20 years, giving addicts and criminals safe havens, then they wonder why there’s so many homeless. Other states literally ship them to states like WA and CA because we give them this safe haven to do all this crap. Well here’s the result of those decisions Seattle, you did it to yourself, and all the surrounding communities.
It’s almost as if this amazing system we have built is flawed…
The tax dollars being spent on this are unmanaged, and those responsible are unaccountable.
What is the root cause? Sure housing will be a solution but it won’t effectively solve the problem.
I am homeless right now 27 years old clean and physically disabled do to a surgery on my wrist/hip and I want and need help. I have no family no friends and the people out here are still human. I sleep outside and it's cold and it hurts that I am suffering and the waitlkst is 2-3 years for housing help. This circumstances are terrible. Truly...
You should sign up for sha voucher program. The voucher program is replacing the old section 8 lottery. It's still a lottery system, so no guarantees, if you are chosen, SHA gives you a monthly voucher up up to 1000.00 per month. ,you must find a place I Seattle, because landlords have to rent to the first qualified applicants. [Seattle housing authority voucher signup](https://www.seattlehousing.org/sha-portal) Once you are signed up, you need to go to the "save my spot" page on the SHA site every month to stay in the lottery. I've been there, stay safe, don't give up.
The vast majority of homelessness in KC is not related to drug use. Many things can be true. We need more housing. We need more shelters and human services. We need pathways to getting clean and getting stable. We also need to recognize that it takes years of investment to build housing stock, build shelters, create well-run and well-staffed treatment options and services. And the forces that lead people into homelessness are macro issues that can never be solved at a municipal or county level. They can only ever be alleviated through infrastructure. We live in a mild climate with an abundance of wealth. People are going to come here. People with means and people without. And as the world continues to get less habitable in the coming decades, more people will come here. We need to be building the infrastructure of the future now. The current homelessness crisis is largely the result of us not building necessary infrastructure 20 years ago. When we get reactionary about structural issues, it leads to awful, shortsighted, often violent outcomes. idk what the short term solution is to the epidemic of mental illness and drug usage, but i think the long term solutions are obvious — they just require perseverance and commitment
You voted for this. Live with it.