Walking through downtown Seattle at night with a suitcase trying to find my hotel is the first time in my life I thought I was about to be attacked or robbed, but thankfully I only had stuff thrown at me by the junkies.
Portland and Seattle in the past few years look completely different than they did even a few years ago. Both cities have always had run down parts, but now it feels like the blight permeates almost everything. Some of my favorite places to visit have either closed entirely or now have limited hours and require me to buzz in at the front door so someone can visually verify that I'm not a threat. I can't explain how strange it feels for this shift to have happened in a matter of years.
Honestly, it’s much better than I’m used to. In a day of walking around, only one drugged out person was screaming uncontrollably. When he saw me, he politely asked for a light, and I said no, so he went back to screaming at nothing in particular.
It’s not like I was tripping on human feces (SF, post-pandemic, though they seemed to have cleaned things up a bit for APEC) or needles (various cities in Europe, pre-pandemic).
I don’t mean to trivialize the problems in Seattle. It is much worse than it was. However, it’s better than average these days.
At least in California, housing shortages are a big root cause, as is the broken approach to mental health care: It’s basically illegal to treat someone during a psychotic episode until they’ve already committed some serious violent crimes.
The law does not allow citizens to protect their property, and the police won't, either. So what to do? Leave.
Even then, the clerk watched the whole thing while not calling 911. The police didn’t come out and would only take a report if they went to the station, which they ended up not doing.
If something like that isn’t even making it into the crime stats…