a lot of these people, having destroyed SF as a livable city, are now moving on to Seattle. Which is rapidly also turning into a city with feces laden sidewalks and a tech dystopia.
San Franciscans, Californians in general, and "transplants" writ large did not cause this problem. We did it to ourselves with quite a few different inputs.
Ultimately what people who live here--in Seattle, I mean--is that we cannot stop new arrivals from, well, arriving. Freedom of movement is a right in the United States so they're coming, whether we like it or not. And that means we have to scoot over a bit, make a little room, and say hi to our new neighbors. That we've not done that is a huge reason why our arts, our humanities, and our not-white-collar-professional jobs are all decamping to the next cheap place.
However, it's not just housing. Seattle is a city having to go it almost alone trying to fix all of the region's ills, from traffic to mental health to substance abuse to tents on WSDOT's medians. It's not something Seattle can do alone and it's not a burden Seattle taxpayers should bear all by ourselves.
But it's also not the fault of the new arrival from San Francisco. She has a reasons to suspect we'd have our act together, and we've failed her just as much as we've failed the person who winds up in a tent next to the onramp to highway 520.
One of my exes actually came here from Spokane, as its much easier going out here as a homeless gay 17 year old then living with his abusive brothers. Many suburbs and towns are all too happy to encourage the least well to do to head towards the nearest major town, generally involving the police corralling those less fortunate than us and giving them a ride towards said major town.
I hear Tacoma is still relatively inexpensive and nice, one of my old professors moved down there and finds it rather decent. Not sure how many not-white-collar-professionals will continue to be able to afford to live in and around Seattle (outside of a handful of "Affordable" aka heavily subsidized housing complexes).
An article I read recently (https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness)
> According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman, and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened, with more addiction, more crime, and more tent encampments in residential neighborhoods.
That statistic should shock people who think that the problem is insufficient government spending or a type of rabid, rich eating the poor Dickensian dystopia.
That article also mentions "pathological altruism", which roughly translates into paying $ for guilt in a way that harms the people who are supposed to be helped. It's sad too, because most tech workers I know would not advocate behaviors/policies for themselves that they advocate for the homeless. Any tech startup that basically was content with no standards, endless spending, and no accountability in the corporate or personal sphere would be bankrupt.
Rufo's platform, just before he enter-exited the race, can best be described as "arrest them all and do it enough times that they move to Eugene." He's only one in a long line of brief candidates who want to immediately ramp up all kinds of law enforcement activity while we "consider proper funding levels" for social services, with no professed idea for what happens when the people we've arrested for vagrancy walk out of the King County Jail in downtown Seattle.
The one thing he and I agree on is that the outputs for our inputs are not at all acceptable but I don't agree at all with what little he proposed to do about it.
I didn't say that Mr. Rufo was incorrect in his numbers; I said I vehemently disagreed with the proposals he made in his brief campaign. I agree with Mayor Durkan that we need a comprehensive understanding of what the money is being spent towards and the results it is having, something her office is supposed to be working on. But we can't just say "spending is paused until we figure that out." We also can't continue with Seattle being the only government entity spending appreciable money on the problem while surrounding cities and counties cluck their tongues in disdain. This is also the State of Washington's and King County's problem, if nothing else. They should act like it.
One last bit, I did not engage in any ad hominems against Rufo; I called him no names (unless you mean "very conservative," which is a label he adopted for himself in his campaign). I denigrated his policy proposals and related an observer's view of what happened to his campaign.
You brought the character of the person making a claim about a statistic into a tangent that had nothing to do with my comment. That's an ad hominem.
With respect to the $100K a homeless person, I quite frankly find that absurd. If it was a spending problem, you could pay them the money directly and they'd be richer than most Americans.
Thats why Utah just started paying for housing. They figured out that the follow on costs to homelessness were huge and for many subgroups of the homeless population it's much cheaper to just pay for their shelter than to pay for all the other things that are certain to go wrong that will require state intervention anyway.
He than turns and donates millions/billions ONCE, but that’s specks of sand compared to what would be generated over time yearly and consistently.
So... no faith in that city either and no faith in tech in general. Super sad.
The problem is taxing job headcounts regardless the amount. That creates a horrible precedent for any company trying to do business in a city. It's basically telling business owners that the jobs they are creating are not welcomed. It's penalizing the core of what makes an economy productive.
Let's put Amazon out of the picture for a minute. Since the head tax was meant to tax large employers, it's kind of hard to see in the micro context what imposing a job headcount tax actually means. So for the sake of the example let's say that the head tax applied for any business owner (not hard to imagine since implementing it for large employers create precedence for taxing small employers).
Let's imagine that the business that we are talking about is Mommy's Bakery. The head tax in Seattle was the equivalent of telling mommy to pay a USD 750 ransom for her three employees or to fuck off. Mommy is already collecting and paying taxes and fees.
She is employing people that are putting money back into the local economy, but the city feels that the act of job creation is adding to their problems. So they decide that they want to tax those headcounts.
This is more or less the equivalent of you helping a friend or relative with some money and they coming back and telling you, "hey thanks for the hundred bucks, but because I'm gonna get wasted tonight and gonna spend it all on drinks, I'd need 6 bucks more to get back home".
Yeah sure, six bucks are not too much but just asking for them after you gave them a USD 100, it's utterly ridiculous.
This is how the Seattle city employers felt when the head tax was proposed. They already contribute millions of dollars to the city economy in taxes and jobs, but the city still wanted to get more to justify their gross incompetence when it comes to dealing with the homelessness crisis.