Comment by russdpale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by russdpale | Hacker News Reader

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This sounds like something right out of the "Seattle is dying" propaganda documentary that released lately. Living in White Center, I don't experience any of this. People act like its the lower 9th ward or chiraq or the walking dead around here, and it just isn't.

Seattle, by itself, cannot solve the homeless problem, we can only hope to maintain it to some extent, many of its root causes are far outside of our city limits. 80% of our nation is paycheck to paycheck, until that changes neither will homelessness. We need more housing of all kinds immediately, even if it means imminent domain, and we need clean needle facilities. We also need to give the wealthiest employers in king county a choice, pay better wages or get taxed, and ownership and investors must take the pay cut and the cost cannot be passed to the consumer. Landlords need to have some limits, they are driving the costs up enormously. Free markets were supposed to be free from usury and rentiering, not protections for them.

I live in Seattle, and have for years. I’ve lived in several different cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and South.

King County has one of the highest minimum wages in the United States. There are several organizations giving out clean needles in King County. We are building new housing at a very rapid rate and many areas of the county were upzoned just this year so we can build even more housing.

To me your comment is asking for us to do more of what we are already doing, even though what we are doing is barely slowing the growth of homelessness. There is no amount of taxation on businesses the city, county and state can impose that will provide a home for everyone that needs it. This approach will not produce positive change.

I have no idea how you got that from my comment. No where did I say we need to shuffle people around the city forever as we currently do. The city can only do so much (the up-zoning was badly needed), the state won't act, the federal government obviously won't act primarily because of attitudes such as yours, so the problem persists meanwhile you wonder why nothing changes.

Our national economy is a ponzi scheme, and our homeless are its primary victims. Until we solve the scheming, the homeless problem will only get worse.

White center is gentrifying fast – it's significantly better than it used to be. It's also significantly better, at the sidewalk level, than pioneer square and 3rd/pine.

The downtown spots have a high and constant density of mostly undangerous people, involved in low level anti social behavior.

White center has a low and volatile density of somewhat dangerous people, doing some nutty stuff. Just in the past few months, I can recall: A guy got his throat slit, while driving his car, because he had given his passenger's girlfriend a ride earlier. There was an armed robbery outside of Triangle. A 59 year old got shot in the bathroom of Tug on St Patrick's Day. I lived on 16th until recently, and would flip the scanner on every time I heard sirens, just to keep a pulse. It's not chicago, but it's legitimately dicey sometimes.

With that said, I agree that we need more housing, though I think seattle is doing an excellent job of that compared to SF, and it's reflected in the flattening rent prices. We could be doing more, though. No reason we can't have significant multistory buildings in west seattle.

City planning and zoning are much more on the side of planned economy than free market. If building was unrestrained, I'm sure there would be a lot more new housing coming online than there is.

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