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Comment by smaili | Hacker News Reader

At last count, there were 4,500 people living on the streets of Seattle and King County. It wasn’t always this way

Couldn't this be said about San Francisco, New York, and every other major city? Homelessness is certainly an issue in Seattle, but I would be more interested to look at it holistically and what as a country and world we can do to help solve this problem.

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You're not wrong, but the impulse to recontextualize responsibility on a larger scale probably gets in the way of exploring what communities can do to alleviate the problem locally. It also assumes that the causes are the same in all cases where the symptoms appear similar, and that all communities or cities have equivalent resources they can marshal to address homelessness.

My understanding is that the homelessness crisis facing Seattle is more pronounced and more rapidly worsening than similar issues in other major urban areas. I recently relocated to Seattle from New York and never saw anything like Seattle's tent cities and encampments back in Manhattan.

Also happening in Portland.

It is rapidly getting worse. It doesn't help that many cities are shipping their homeless people to Seattle. Literally buying them bus tickets.

http://www.kiro7.com/news/local/portland-begins-sending-home...

> Literally buying them bus tickets.

This is one of those stories that I've heard or read everywhere I've lived or been (Austin, Honolulu, Seattle, San Fran) that I just assume it's an urban legend used to obfuscate the real issues.

Part of the reason is that in the Pacific NW, the elements don't threaten death in the summer and/or winter. You can sleep outside without dying to subzero frost, or heat stroke in the day.

Well to be fair the police in Seattle are a lot more hands off with the homeless than in NYC. You probably didn't perceive the problem because it was out of sight, out of mind as police routinely will move the homeless to less desirable areas.

Contrast that to Seattle where, for example, there is a homeless camp about 2 blocks from the Ballard farmers market.

Agreed. San Francisco, for example, still has many SROs in operation, and it's not even remotely clear whether they're a net benefit.

That said, I think they might be onto something with respect to affordable places to live. I'm not sure that SROs and the like are the answer, but it doesn't seem quite right that your lowest cost option to live near the core of any major city is a studio that costs on the order of thousands a month to rent.

Not all solutions are best when it's one size fits all. What may cause homelessness in one area may not be the root cause in another. Also people local to the community have a vested interest in fixing it vs. bureaucrat who will be treating it as a number on a balance sheet(i.e. not have to experience the problem themselves).

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