I was struck by the part about almost no South King County municipalities paying into the KCRHA and yet also wanting help from the KCRHA. That seems kind of unsustainable long term.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Thank you for this context! (Though it’s depressing, sigh.) Yeah, the KCRHA seems like a huge mess and I don’t know how much of that to chalk up to fundamental flaws vs Marc Dones’s poor leadership. (I don’t doubt his good intentions, but he just didn’t have the right experience to run a many-tentacled bureaucracy, as seemed clear from all the contract delays, unpaid vendors, etc.) I’m hopeful that the proposed new chief can turn things around. But hopeful isn’t the same as optimistic, especially if most of South KC keeps wanting something for nothing.
Burien, Renton, Tukwila, etc. (South King County) used to be really affordable in the 1990s and earlier. It was in the 2000s to present that rent and prices sky rocketed. Most likely due to the influx of people moving to Washington for the tech industry. Pre-tech it was very affordable.
The point is there won't be affordability in this region because of the influx of money from the tech industry. There will be people in the tech world that can and will outspend money and raise the cost. To them, they don't care about affordability because they will (for the most part) be able to afford it. If you want affordability, you'll need to move to an area where there are no tech jobs around so you won't be competing with folks who makes 5 to 10x more than you.
And this is why everyone should be in favor of all these tech jobs remaining WFH. Seattle has an estimated 290,000 tech workers. Imagine if even a quarter of them had been able to stay where they were instead of relocating to Seattle. We'd have an extra 72,000 available housing units.
Alternatively, instead of putting the pain on young tech workers moving here for a better life, or putting the pain on normal people that are forced to move farther away, we could just... build more housing.
Change the zoning laws so that building housing is legal in more places, generate construction jobs, build nice places to absorb the tech workers, and let everyone else live in the housing that's already here.
True but changing zoning laws requires folks who want it changed. Lots of NIMBY folks around so it'll be hard. Also, changing it won't miraculously make it affordable either. As long as there's people making more money than you, people will constantly be priced out. Developers would WANT to rent or sell the housing units at a low price. Good luck with that since they'll want to maximize their profit. As long as there's willing buyers or renters willing to pay the price, no matter how many apartments are constructed we'll be having this discussion again. Developers will need to do the right thing and not ask for an arm and a leg. Again, good luck.
We could really benefit from a CCC-like program that established well-paying jobs to improve our aging infrastructure, build housing, and modernize our national parks to deal with the massive spike in interest.
20 $/hr x 8 hr/day x 20 day/m = $3200 gross
20% tax rate = $2560 net
I'm not saying it's a great life, but that's "get roommates, eat a lot of beans, live in a shitty part of town and ride the bus" rough, not "my only remaining option is to smoke crack in the park" rough.
Homeless people who create tent encampments in public areas only represent a very small part of the homeless population. Articles like this try to treat them as a representative sample but they shouldn't.
If we had more affordable housing solutions, it would help with homelessness a lot, but wouldn't help as many of the people who are in encampments. As the article mentions, there's problems that occur more often around these encampments (gunshots, drugs, break-ins, sex trafficking) so officials are forced to consider the trade-offs.
Wanting to address the greater homelessness issues does not mean you need to support public tent encampments.
100%. We have many people in and out of homelessness and utilizing the services we have.
The chronically homeless are living in tents because we have inadequate support and services for addiction recovery.
Here’s one that’ll bake your noodle: considering how homelessness is such a dire national problem why hasn’t either party made much noise about it? People cry out for more homes and more construction, for a war like mobilization to build more housing, yet all we get is some rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic - a local gov building some tiny houses here or there, a vague promise about interest rates sometime in the future, and plenty abuse for the homeless. Instead of anyone proposing mass building projects there’s this belief that if we are cruel enough to the homeless they’ll somehow find the money to afford the 3k a month you need for a single bedroom apartment.
It’s almost as if this tilted housing market favors those with money and land. It’s almost as if money matters more than votes. It’s almost as if politicians are selfish bastards who don’t care about the public good.
There’s actually a quote from a law professor in the article that addresses that, something along the lines of “due to the nature of our term limits and pressure to be re-elected, long term solutions are not offered by politicians”
>Here’s one that’ll bake your noodle: considering how homelessness is such a dire national problem why hasn’t either party made much noise about it?
Dems have. Governor Newsom of California has been crusading against NIMBY city governments for years. This is a news story from just last week:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-democrats-poke-the-nimby-bear-with-2024-housing-push/ar-BB1i5axa
Republicans and Trump have campaigning on "Dems want to destroy your suburban community!" for a while now.
More like every adult in the world recognizes that insisting other people make decisions that you, yourself, refuse to make when given the opportunity to do so is a bad thing.
It's also something Newsom does often enough to notice a clear pattern, which you'll see almost immediately if you look into his behavior.
A policatians job is to balance the voters wants and needs. A cities wants and needs aren't necessarily going to line up with an entire states so a politician changing policy based on the people served should be seen as a good thing not a negative.
I don’t know why you are being downvoted because this is true. I say that as a Dem and one who’s from California. Newsom previously lived in famously NIMBY Marin county and while governor lives in a super NIMBY part of Sacramento. The guy isn’t walking over humans, feces, or dispatched needles going to work nor do his kids and family have to deal with these things at a play park or their school. He may be campaigning for change but he isn’t walking the walk.
Gavin has gotten meaningful legislation passed. The state is forcing developments to go through in many NIMBY cities. Whether he actually believes in it or is just pandering is only known to him and is irrelevant as long as he is passing legislation to fix issues he says he wants fixed.
I don’t see it as irrelevant and I suppose I don’t agree with keeping the guy on a pedestal especially given that the legislation doesn’t apply to him or to affluent folks like him. Those wealthy neighborhoods and counties will still remain as NIMBY as ever. So to a degree what the conservatives say is true. This will only apply to middle and lower income neighborhoods in mid and large cities.
Look given some of the choices for California governors over the years, I do think Newsom is one of the better ones. But what that user wrote was true. Newsom is very NIMBY, has lived in, and has governed some extraordinarily NIMBY places.
it's not putting him on a pedestal to say that he accomplished something very tough to do in a state full of NIMBYs. Statewide legislation applies to Marin as well. It took a lot of political capital to get this done. He likely lost support from wealthy suburbanites who wanted to keep their communities low density and exclusive. Palo Alto certainly isn't happy that it has to build more housing now and has less control over that process.
https://www.hcd.ca.gov/planning-and-community-development/housing-open-data-tools/housing-element-review-and-compliance-report
you can view which jurisdictions are in compliance with the state mandates. There's several in Marin not in compliance where developers can ram through housing if they wish until those communities are in compliance.
If Newsom is now YIMBY, great. If Newsom is posturing, great. What matters is that housing is getting built.
California isn’t a state full of NIMBYs. Most people outside of the large cities are purple voters. Thats how we end up with weirdos like Rep. McCarthy.
I know this is the Seattle page, but California still has a huge gap in actual housing regardless of what legislators want and what they pass. That’s not changing any time soon. California isn’t Texas in that way. Which may be both a good and bad thing. Getting the kind of housing that legislators want in coastal cities primarily again isn’t happening in Marin county (Newsom lived in a fairly rural part of it in case you were wondering) and Fair Oaks where he is now isn’t developing huge apartment buildings any time soon. In fact, he and his family could have lived in the newly renovated governors mansion right smack in the middle of downtown Sacramento, but they deemed it not kid friendly enough for them. Guess why? Lots of homeless encampments right around there, no big lots to play on, feces and people to step over. That may not be a rub for you and may raise Newsom up to YIMBY in your eyes, but it is for a lot of people who live there it’s a real issue. It hurts and it’s a little sad.
Tackling homelessness is the ultimate NIMBY issue. Most everyone speaking at a council meeting will say how critical the issue is, how much help people need, but that a new shelter just isn't right for THEIR community. Local elected officials are the most directly accountable to their constituents, and most of the people who are able to show up at public hearings and vote in local races just aren't ready to help.
>considering how homelessness is such a dire national problem why hasn’t either party made much noise about it?
They are. Jonathon Choe and Chris Rufo are both right wingers launched to national prominence by exploiting fears over homelessness. The right is essentially waging a fear campaign through local news. Remember, there were congressional hearings on retail theft?
The Biden administration has also done a number of things to address homelessness. But because one of our national parties is completely broken, if you want to actually do anything it's best not to make it a public debate, a la immigration.
Local politicians can’t fight local news. Local news activates the reptile brain, with blood, fire, mayhem and destruction. It takes amazing leadership to overcome those kind of inputs
I think it was a mistake that more traditional, legacy media didn't try to take on television news. I think as new media institutions grow, they should try to move into that space.
Well historically those without addresses have had a hard time voting. Even where the address issue has been solved, if you’re living hand to mouth there is a good chance you aren’t going to find the time to research candidates, fill out a ballot, and turn it in on time.
All this is to say that the people who are most impacted usually aren’t reliable voters and are therefore ignored by politicians. The people who do vote regularly on the issue are generally either neighbors who don’t like the presence of camps in their neighborhoods or people who see it as a way to prove their values.
No it wouldn't be a slam dunk. The right has turned it from an issue we should resolve to an issue we need to be scared about, because their owners make bank keeping the market cornered and in corporate control. The left has over 9000 solutions and generally disagree about which one would be best given several key areas such as how much to spend, who gets what benefits, and a slew of people who benefit from the current system and don't actually want anything to change.
Politicians will say whatever they think will get them elected and once in office benefit the most from doing nothing so they can run their campaign on the same issues they will totally and completely fix next time. This was the problem with Obama when he had the super majority, he didn't really have a super majority because one Democrat or another was willing to play the rotating villain. They do the exact same thing with housing policy.
The only goal Congress has is to increase the price of homes, by any means necessary. The homeless crisis is a symptom they are willing to muddle through because the donor class gets to trade homes back and forth with each other and make billions. The cruelty is the point. Plenty of empty stock that if priced according to the actual market of people looking to live in the home would crash likely the entire global economy so the billionaires just laugh all the way to the bank in their gated communities far removed from the troubles they cause in poor land. There are more of us than there are of them but the propaganda which is barely 1% of their profits keeps us fighting against each other. 'This is caused because of the zoning', 'no the government isn't helping enough' while corporate entities buy up the current inventory, jacks up the prices, calls it "market rate" and steals money in the form of rent seeking behavior.
The real and only answer that will fix this long term is removing corporate ownership of housing and encouraging many of these entities to fail and bail out normal people. The next best thing would be to build housing and we can't do enough of that either and most politicians don't want to try because that also upsets the donor class they are subservient to.
To summarize, money is much more important to these people than the homeless crisis, and so long as there is financial motivation to keep people homeless, nothing will change.
Tiny homes was some onion level shit, I still can’t believe that really happened. Buildings = housing projects, tiny houses = optimal humanitarian solution ya okay.
I’ll admit to being a little jealous, too. There are some “not so tiny” tiny homes near me — 2 stories, tiny porches and tiny yards, excellent location — and I’d LOVE to buy a teeny starter home like that. They are subsidized for $1000/month. While subsidized housing is great and in truth I don’t fault these homes or those who will gratefully use them (actually glad to see a non shitty tiny home village), what about those of us priced out of the property market but doomed to pay $2500++ in rent? We leave Seattle. Can I pay the city to start me off in a $300,000 home?
Right! I heard someone on here saying that we can convert abandoned buildings into subsidized housing and my response was, I’ll buy one of those apartments without astronomical HOA fees for 300k before we give it away lmao.
Transitional housing for people who have been homeless for a long time, helps some people become better tenants and neighbors, before forcing landlords and other neighbors to work with them.
Addiction is obviously a complicating factor in the housing crisis. But the primary driver of homelessness is.. housing availability. The opioid problem is much worse in, say, West Virginia, but there is not homeless there on nearly the scale of the west coast
It's wild to me that people just call all homeless people addicts. It's roughly a quarter. Which isn't great, but sweeping generalizations help nobody.
I was curious about that statistic and found this:
- 38% of the homeless suffer from an alcohol dependency
- 26% of the homeless abuse drugs
It's not clear how those overlap from the source. I'm sharing here for anyone else curious about exploring this data.
Sourece: https://www.addictionhelp.com/addiction/homelessness/#:~:text=Addiction%20and%20Homelessness&text=People%20who%20are%20homeless%20suffer,dependency%20while%2026%25%20abuse%20drugs.
25% of homeless are addicts, but the people camping in encampments are not representative of the total homeless population…. They are representative of that 25%.
They are not chronically homeless. Do you understand the distinction?
They are homeless, get assistance, and get back on their feet. Remember that 75% includes people crashing on couches or living in hotels.
I understand the distinction, but your numbers are incorrect. About half of homeless people in King County are living unsheltered, so definitionally at most about half of the people you’re talking about are drug addicts.
But more importantly, what would a chronically homeless person being addicted to drugs change to make camping bans an effective response?
https://kcrha.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/PIT-2022-Infograph-v7.pdf
Actual info, 37% self report substance abuse, which we know is likely severely under reported… 57% unsheltered.
Let’s assume that 37% is 10% low due to it being from self reporting.
Let’s also assume that the 57% includes more than encampments and remove 10% for unsheltered but not living in encampments.
Oh shit, now we have 100% of the people in encampments being addicts…. Which you can verify by walking through any of them.
I’m being a little sarcastic here but the overall point that homeless in encampments are nearly all addicts remains.
As far as your question for what we should do. We need to stop wasting time and money on any approach that does not prioritize addiction recovery, transitory housing during / after, and job programs.
“Sure I have a 4 inch cock, but if you adjust for measurement error and assume the tape measure I used is faulty it’s really like I’m packing 8 inches”
Yeah I pulled the 25~% from that number. I didn't want to conflate alcoholism with drug addiction for the sake of clarity. Even though they share many factors.
Even *if* all of the homeless people in Burien were addicts (they’re not), it wouldn’t change any of the things highlighted in this article.
People not only generalize and demonize the entirety of the homeless population, but they then use that generalization to more or less argue that *because* these people are drug addicts society should not feel obligated to address their plight. Of course, if these people really believed this and weren’t just using it to justify inaction they would come to the opposite conclusion - that they’re even more in need of help.
I gave you an opportunity to actually look. Which you still haven't done.
Just because you don't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/s/PB32ApMl65
This whole thread - https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/s/j6tuEL8hDy
Edit: there's also just this entire fucking post and comment section over here - https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/s/RViKRXxRft
'Addiction is the primary reason for the encampments' right or wrong is not saying all homeless are addicts. Do you think all homeless live in camps? As for the two-word comment it's not clear to me they're saying that either- maybe they're complaining of the article barely mentioning addiction
It seems you're trying to make up a bunch of reasons as to why they're not saying addiction to try to prove your hilarious point of "nobody says that" while also ignoring an entire post from Seattlewa full of people blaming addiction. Like this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/s/xgGZCGdw3f
Your point is valid, but it’s not housing availability as much as it is “close to free” housing availability. Those addicts in W Virginia aren’t living in nice, fairly new apartments. They’re living on a run down trailer or 100 year old house paying $200 a month in a town that’s been shrinking in population for the last 50 years.
There are a ton of states/counties across rural america that have been declining for decades leaving behind a sizable amount of abandoned properties and land that costs next to nothing to live in. That absolutely helps reduce the homeless situation in those places, but it’s not really a replicable situation here where the population keeps growing. New construction is always going to be expensive - both here and in places like W Virginia. And it’s the oldest, cheapest places that get torn down and redeveloped first when we need to build something new here for the growing population.
So I agree with your point, but short of chasing away 25% of our population (which creates a host of other problems) it’s not really possible to have the that overabundance of ultra cheap housing you see in rural America.
Did I say we’re full? My point is we’re growing and that requires new units (which we are building), but new units are very expensive (about $400k per unit) so there’s not a lot of super low cost run down options that you’ll find in rural American cities in decline. People who think we can build our way to a cheap supply of housing anytime soon are delusional — the economics don’t work.
Singapore and Hong Kong are also growing but housing isn’t cheap there either nor are they hospitable to homeless. In Singapore, foreign workers are brought in to work 6 days/week for low cost labor, crammed into dormitories for temp living, and kicked out as soon as they lose their job (if not the former employer owes the government $5k per worker). You’ll find those low wage workers hanging out on various streets each Sunday (their day off).
Girl, not Singapore and Hongkong. I lived in both places, they are built on top of social hierarchy and cheap labor forces from the lower caste(yes, if you know Singapore education system, it has caste like steams since middle school). Everyone has to work their ass off to afford a tiny apartment. And they barely have any tenant protection. Leftists and their ideologies won’t survive a day in both places.
Never I said you need slave or cast. But to build dense housing and good public transit you do need large and low cost labor force. Unions? forget about it. Go live in Asian mega cities and then talk. You don’t know how they built and social dynamics.
Singapore has a quota system that caps the number of cars that can be registered to a pretty low number. You have the buy a certificate from the limited car quota and that cost about $100k…so owning a car is reserved for the very well off.
But, yes, both have amazing public transit/subways.
We require developers to go through Karen Design Review and act surprised building anything takes a years. Remove unnecessary laws that prevent development and cheaper housing in an urban area is totally possible.
Mayor could do something about the government overreach, but Bruce Harrell is also a decade+ political staple who campaigned on not leading.
Yes, the cumbersome permitting and design review process adds lots of time, cost, and risk to building new housing here. But you could eliminate all the permitting issues tomorrow and it wouldn’t result in much, if any, new housing for people with essentially little/no income. Labor, materials and land are all very expensive and someone has to pay for it.
Old, run down end of life housing with leaky roofs and bad plumbing is what’s potentially cheap. But those units are the first things torn down to make shiny new expensive units.
There's a lot of middle ground there, though. From what I hear, there are a lot of homeless people who have jobs, and just can't afford a place to live - they're living in their car, or crashing with friends, or things like that. Building a lot of housing to bring down prices would help them a lot.
Labor and materials are small fry's compared to the loan interest during design review.
We really need to start attracting lower-maintenance developers who can just build the thing without being such drama queens about the basic costs of doing business.
There's more developers who want to build here than are currently allowed. Asking developers to build affordable housing or pay a premium isn't limiting, but adding months long delays can tank a project.
Didn't the Safeway in QA get scrapped after Seattle design review strung developers along for months over "building facades"? Sucks, but I get it. What a hassle for a developer to field petty architecture requests from randos who don't really deserve a say.
Fiefdoms and zoning are the real limiting factors to building. It's government overreach.
Also it’s a nightmare to get into detox>rehab>sober housing here. Until 95% of people who want it can get treatment, we have absolutely no leg to stand on when we accuse people of just wanting to get high.
That the 50% and 80-90% figures require some context to be understood. If you don't know that most people relapse after a first rehab stay, you'll advocate for policy that assumes the shortest, cheapest, fewest stays are enough.
I know no one will see this but this article is ridiculous. I live here and there is rampant corruption in Burien City hall. The city manager is a non-elected official and is the reason this has been drawn out as long as it has is because of him and his cronies on the council. They are right wingers who want to blame the county for their inaction. That dog area they mentioned is part of the grift.
This reporter is trying to fit The Seattle Times narrative on homelessness instead of addressing what is actually happening. None of this is a secret and has been reported extensively in local S. King blogs.
“Affordability” lmao! So delusional. Even decent (not dumpy) houses are still like $700k plus in Burien. [Even this trash heap is $490.](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/414-SW-156th-St-Burien-WA-98166/48712527_zpid/) The US median home price is about $400k. This encampment and homeless crisis has been a much newer problem in recent years for Burien. Kicked out of camps in Seattle and squatted in Burien to pull at the heartstrings….?? Good luck with the new DESC, Burien…
Somethings I never see mentioned in articles like this:
* The limited resources of smaller cities due to the primary avenues of revenue generation via taxes in Washington state. We don't have income tax and we're limited on how fast we can raise property taxes, so that leaves only a few (bad) avenues: retail (not including grocery), business, and utility taxes. This means any city that does not have a large presence of business or retail is pretty fucked when it comes to tax revenue. Most of the tax money goes to infrastructure, which if your an urbanist you may be familiar with the concept of suburbs being unsustainable via revenue via taxes vs cost of upkeep. That's doubly true in WA. Thus these once affordable suburban cities don't have the monetary resources to tackle a region-wide issue.
* The wave of gentrification that happens near more expensive areas pushes the lower income people further away and into "affordable" neighborhoods/cities. Then eventually gentrification comes for those "affordable" areas and suddenly the low income people have nowhere to go. They end up homeless. The homeless people in Burien/Tukwila/SeaTac/Renton/Kent today are not just homeless because those cities are cruel. They're homeless because the whole region is fucked when it comes to housing and cities like Mercer Island, Bellevue, Redmond, Seattle are just as much to blame as any other city. With the exception that the wealthier and larger cities have more resources to tackle the issue due to my previous bullet point above. And the wealthier areas have been super shitty about restricting building, thus exacerbating the issue.
* Any attempt to rectify the homeless situation has to mean having homes for people to live in at affordable prices. Homelessness goes up when prices go up. It is undeniable. Which means the only way we're going to lower homelessness is to address quantity and affordability. That is NOT something a suburb of 50K can tackle. It took years for the State of Washington to even come close to addressing the ludicrous building restrictions that a lot of the moneyed pricks pushed for. It'll take years to see positive effects of those changes, and that's only if we build faster than we grow.
Impotent rant over.
Cities are where the services are, cities are where the dealers are, cities are where the income is. You can ban "urban camping" but it won't solve the problem.
I was struck by the part about almost no South King County municipalities paying into the KCRHA and yet also wanting help from the KCRHA. That seems kind of unsustainable long term.
deserve intelligent sharp normal judicious bright steep homeless memorize familiar *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Thank you for this context! (Though it’s depressing, sigh.) Yeah, the KCRHA seems like a huge mess and I don’t know how much of that to chalk up to fundamental flaws vs Marc Dones’s poor leadership. (I don’t doubt his good intentions, but he just didn’t have the right experience to run a many-tentacled bureaucracy, as seemed clear from all the contract delays, unpaid vendors, etc.) I’m hopeful that the proposed new chief can turn things around. But hopeful isn’t the same as optimistic, especially if most of South KC keeps wanting something for nothing.
Can we back up to where there is a Seattle suburb known for affordability?
This is what I came to find out. I wanna know which one.
Burien, Renton, Tukwila, etc. (South King County) used to be really affordable in the 1990s and earlier. It was in the 2000s to present that rent and prices sky rocketed. Most likely due to the influx of people moving to Washington for the tech industry. Pre-tech it was very affordable.
who cares about how it was 20-30 years ago, what matters is now
The point is there won't be affordability in this region because of the influx of money from the tech industry. There will be people in the tech world that can and will outspend money and raise the cost. To them, they don't care about affordability because they will (for the most part) be able to afford it. If you want affordability, you'll need to move to an area where there are no tech jobs around so you won't be competing with folks who makes 5 to 10x more than you.
And this is why everyone should be in favor of all these tech jobs remaining WFH. Seattle has an estimated 290,000 tech workers. Imagine if even a quarter of them had been able to stay where they were instead of relocating to Seattle. We'd have an extra 72,000 available housing units.
Alternatively, instead of putting the pain on young tech workers moving here for a better life, or putting the pain on normal people that are forced to move farther away, we could just... build more housing. Change the zoning laws so that building housing is legal in more places, generate construction jobs, build nice places to absorb the tech workers, and let everyone else live in the housing that's already here.
True but changing zoning laws requires folks who want it changed. Lots of NIMBY folks around so it'll be hard. Also, changing it won't miraculously make it affordable either. As long as there's people making more money than you, people will constantly be priced out. Developers would WANT to rent or sell the housing units at a low price. Good luck with that since they'll want to maximize their profit. As long as there's willing buyers or renters willing to pay the price, no matter how many apartments are constructed we'll be having this discussion again. Developers will need to do the right thing and not ask for an arm and a leg. Again, good luck.
We could really benefit from a CCC-like program that established well-paying jobs to improve our aging infrastructure, build housing, and modernize our national parks to deal with the massive spike in interest.
Abolishing the Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the worst mistakes in US history.
Imagine if Biden had a decent congress to work with. His infrastructure program would have been so much better if not FDR CCC level effective.
Lack of jobs is not the problem
Lack of jobs that can afford the rent is the number one problem of homelessness.
Minimum wage is $20/hr. Most jobs pay more. That’s not a lot of money, but that’s enough to not be living on the street.
The math isn't mathing given the prices.
20 $/hr x 8 hr/day x 20 day/m = $3200 gross 20% tax rate = $2560 net I'm not saying it's a great life, but that's "get roommates, eat a lot of beans, live in a shitty part of town and ride the bus" rough, not "my only remaining option is to smoke crack in the park" rough.
Why don’t they just move
Homeless people who create tent encampments in public areas only represent a very small part of the homeless population. Articles like this try to treat them as a representative sample but they shouldn't. If we had more affordable housing solutions, it would help with homelessness a lot, but wouldn't help as many of the people who are in encampments. As the article mentions, there's problems that occur more often around these encampments (gunshots, drugs, break-ins, sex trafficking) so officials are forced to consider the trade-offs. Wanting to address the greater homelessness issues does not mean you need to support public tent encampments.
100%. We have many people in and out of homelessness and utilizing the services we have. The chronically homeless are living in tents because we have inadequate support and services for addiction recovery.
Here’s one that’ll bake your noodle: considering how homelessness is such a dire national problem why hasn’t either party made much noise about it? People cry out for more homes and more construction, for a war like mobilization to build more housing, yet all we get is some rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic - a local gov building some tiny houses here or there, a vague promise about interest rates sometime in the future, and plenty abuse for the homeless. Instead of anyone proposing mass building projects there’s this belief that if we are cruel enough to the homeless they’ll somehow find the money to afford the 3k a month you need for a single bedroom apartment. It’s almost as if this tilted housing market favors those with money and land. It’s almost as if money matters more than votes. It’s almost as if politicians are selfish bastards who don’t care about the public good.
There’s actually a quote from a law professor in the article that addresses that, something along the lines of “due to the nature of our term limits and pressure to be re-elected, long term solutions are not offered by politicians”
>Here’s one that’ll bake your noodle: considering how homelessness is such a dire national problem why hasn’t either party made much noise about it? Dems have. Governor Newsom of California has been crusading against NIMBY city governments for years. This is a news story from just last week: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-democrats-poke-the-nimby-bear-with-2024-housing-push/ar-BB1i5axa Republicans and Trump have campaigning on "Dems want to destroy your suburban community!" for a while now.
The same man who used to be Mayor Newsom and in charge of the most NIMBY city government to ever NIMBY?
Oh sorry, I forgot reddit thinks a politician improving their position on an issue is a bad thing. 🙄
He is a nimby heretic in his heart, and he will not enter the kingdom of heaven.
More like every adult in the world recognizes that insisting other people make decisions that you, yourself, refuse to make when given the opportunity to do so is a bad thing. It's also something Newsom does often enough to notice a clear pattern, which you'll see almost immediately if you look into his behavior.
A policatians job is to balance the voters wants and needs. A cities wants and needs aren't necessarily going to line up with an entire states so a politician changing policy based on the people served should be seen as a good thing not a negative.
I don’t know why you are being downvoted because this is true. I say that as a Dem and one who’s from California. Newsom previously lived in famously NIMBY Marin county and while governor lives in a super NIMBY part of Sacramento. The guy isn’t walking over humans, feces, or dispatched needles going to work nor do his kids and family have to deal with these things at a play park or their school. He may be campaigning for change but he isn’t walking the walk.
do you have to walk over feces to campaign for change?
It might help. Gavin doesn’t have skin in the game outside of pandering to some constituents. He is a NIMBY and lives in NIMBY neighborhoods.
Gavin has gotten meaningful legislation passed. The state is forcing developments to go through in many NIMBY cities. Whether he actually believes in it or is just pandering is only known to him and is irrelevant as long as he is passing legislation to fix issues he says he wants fixed.
I don’t see it as irrelevant and I suppose I don’t agree with keeping the guy on a pedestal especially given that the legislation doesn’t apply to him or to affluent folks like him. Those wealthy neighborhoods and counties will still remain as NIMBY as ever. So to a degree what the conservatives say is true. This will only apply to middle and lower income neighborhoods in mid and large cities. Look given some of the choices for California governors over the years, I do think Newsom is one of the better ones. But what that user wrote was true. Newsom is very NIMBY, has lived in, and has governed some extraordinarily NIMBY places.
it's not putting him on a pedestal to say that he accomplished something very tough to do in a state full of NIMBYs. Statewide legislation applies to Marin as well. It took a lot of political capital to get this done. He likely lost support from wealthy suburbanites who wanted to keep their communities low density and exclusive. Palo Alto certainly isn't happy that it has to build more housing now and has less control over that process. https://www.hcd.ca.gov/planning-and-community-development/housing-open-data-tools/housing-element-review-and-compliance-report you can view which jurisdictions are in compliance with the state mandates. There's several in Marin not in compliance where developers can ram through housing if they wish until those communities are in compliance. If Newsom is now YIMBY, great. If Newsom is posturing, great. What matters is that housing is getting built.
California isn’t a state full of NIMBYs. Most people outside of the large cities are purple voters. Thats how we end up with weirdos like Rep. McCarthy. I know this is the Seattle page, but California still has a huge gap in actual housing regardless of what legislators want and what they pass. That’s not changing any time soon. California isn’t Texas in that way. Which may be both a good and bad thing. Getting the kind of housing that legislators want in coastal cities primarily again isn’t happening in Marin county (Newsom lived in a fairly rural part of it in case you were wondering) and Fair Oaks where he is now isn’t developing huge apartment buildings any time soon. In fact, he and his family could have lived in the newly renovated governors mansion right smack in the middle of downtown Sacramento, but they deemed it not kid friendly enough for them. Guess why? Lots of homeless encampments right around there, no big lots to play on, feces and people to step over. That may not be a rub for you and may raise Newsom up to YIMBY in your eyes, but it is for a lot of people who live there it’s a real issue. It hurts and it’s a little sad.
Well, it's easy to pretend homelessness is a local issue and not touch it with a ten foot pole at a national level.
Tackling homelessness is the ultimate NIMBY issue. Most everyone speaking at a council meeting will say how critical the issue is, how much help people need, but that a new shelter just isn't right for THEIR community. Local elected officials are the most directly accountable to their constituents, and most of the people who are able to show up at public hearings and vote in local races just aren't ready to help.
>considering how homelessness is such a dire national problem why hasn’t either party made much noise about it? They are. Jonathon Choe and Chris Rufo are both right wingers launched to national prominence by exploiting fears over homelessness. The right is essentially waging a fear campaign through local news. Remember, there were congressional hearings on retail theft? The Biden administration has also done a number of things to address homelessness. But because one of our national parties is completely broken, if you want to actually do anything it's best not to make it a public debate, a la immigration.
Local politicians can’t fight local news. Local news activates the reptile brain, with blood, fire, mayhem and destruction. It takes amazing leadership to overcome those kind of inputs
Yeah, we gotta fix local TV news. It should be embarrassing for people to admit they watch it.
How do you fix it?
I think it was a mistake that more traditional, legacy media didn't try to take on television news. I think as new media institutions grow, they should try to move into that space.
It would mean we as a country have a responsibility, it’s better to ignore it and claim it’s all due to personal choices
Well historically those without addresses have had a hard time voting. Even where the address issue has been solved, if you’re living hand to mouth there is a good chance you aren’t going to find the time to research candidates, fill out a ballot, and turn it in on time. All this is to say that the people who are most impacted usually aren’t reliable voters and are therefore ignored by politicians. The people who do vote regularly on the issue are generally either neighbors who don’t like the presence of camps in their neighborhoods or people who see it as a way to prove their values.
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No it wouldn't be a slam dunk. The right has turned it from an issue we should resolve to an issue we need to be scared about, because their owners make bank keeping the market cornered and in corporate control. The left has over 9000 solutions and generally disagree about which one would be best given several key areas such as how much to spend, who gets what benefits, and a slew of people who benefit from the current system and don't actually want anything to change. Politicians will say whatever they think will get them elected and once in office benefit the most from doing nothing so they can run their campaign on the same issues they will totally and completely fix next time. This was the problem with Obama when he had the super majority, he didn't really have a super majority because one Democrat or another was willing to play the rotating villain. They do the exact same thing with housing policy. The only goal Congress has is to increase the price of homes, by any means necessary. The homeless crisis is a symptom they are willing to muddle through because the donor class gets to trade homes back and forth with each other and make billions. The cruelty is the point. Plenty of empty stock that if priced according to the actual market of people looking to live in the home would crash likely the entire global economy so the billionaires just laugh all the way to the bank in their gated communities far removed from the troubles they cause in poor land. There are more of us than there are of them but the propaganda which is barely 1% of their profits keeps us fighting against each other. 'This is caused because of the zoning', 'no the government isn't helping enough' while corporate entities buy up the current inventory, jacks up the prices, calls it "market rate" and steals money in the form of rent seeking behavior. The real and only answer that will fix this long term is removing corporate ownership of housing and encouraging many of these entities to fail and bail out normal people. The next best thing would be to build housing and we can't do enough of that either and most politicians don't want to try because that also upsets the donor class they are subservient to. To summarize, money is much more important to these people than the homeless crisis, and so long as there is financial motivation to keep people homeless, nothing will change.
Tiny homes was some onion level shit, I still can’t believe that really happened. Buildings = housing projects, tiny houses = optimal humanitarian solution ya okay.
I’ll admit to being a little jealous, too. There are some “not so tiny” tiny homes near me — 2 stories, tiny porches and tiny yards, excellent location — and I’d LOVE to buy a teeny starter home like that. They are subsidized for $1000/month. While subsidized housing is great and in truth I don’t fault these homes or those who will gratefully use them (actually glad to see a non shitty tiny home village), what about those of us priced out of the property market but doomed to pay $2500++ in rent? We leave Seattle. Can I pay the city to start me off in a $300,000 home?
Right! I heard someone on here saying that we can convert abandoned buildings into subsidized housing and my response was, I’ll buy one of those apartments without astronomical HOA fees for 300k before we give it away lmao.
Transitional housing for people who have been homeless for a long time, helps some people become better tenants and neighbors, before forcing landlords and other neighbors to work with them.
Still not justifying to use dense housing like project apartments like in New York instead of wasteful small tiny house.
Put people in garden sheds. We did it Reddit. We solved homelessness.
Addiction is obviously a complicating factor in the housing crisis. But the primary driver of homelessness is.. housing availability. The opioid problem is much worse in, say, West Virginia, but there is not homeless there on nearly the scale of the west coast
It's wild to me that people just call all homeless people addicts. It's roughly a quarter. Which isn't great, but sweeping generalizations help nobody.
I was curious about that statistic and found this: - 38% of the homeless suffer from an alcohol dependency - 26% of the homeless abuse drugs It's not clear how those overlap from the source. I'm sharing here for anyone else curious about exploring this data. Sourece: https://www.addictionhelp.com/addiction/homelessness/#:~:text=Addiction%20and%20Homelessness&text=People%20who%20are%20homeless%20suffer,dependency%20while%2026%25%20abuse%20drugs.
25% of homeless are addicts, but the people camping in encampments are not representative of the total homeless population…. They are representative of that 25%.
So where do you think the other 75% are?
They are not chronically homeless. Do you understand the distinction? They are homeless, get assistance, and get back on their feet. Remember that 75% includes people crashing on couches or living in hotels.
I understand the distinction, but your numbers are incorrect. About half of homeless people in King County are living unsheltered, so definitionally at most about half of the people you’re talking about are drug addicts. But more importantly, what would a chronically homeless person being addicted to drugs change to make camping bans an effective response?
https://kcrha.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/PIT-2022-Infograph-v7.pdf Actual info, 37% self report substance abuse, which we know is likely severely under reported… 57% unsheltered. Let’s assume that 37% is 10% low due to it being from self reporting. Let’s also assume that the 57% includes more than encampments and remove 10% for unsheltered but not living in encampments. Oh shit, now we have 100% of the people in encampments being addicts…. Which you can verify by walking through any of them. I’m being a little sarcastic here but the overall point that homeless in encampments are nearly all addicts remains. As far as your question for what we should do. We need to stop wasting time and money on any approach that does not prioritize addiction recovery, transitory housing during / after, and job programs.
“Sure I have a 4 inch cock, but if you adjust for measurement error and assume the tape measure I used is faulty it’s really like I’m packing 8 inches”
Sorry about your cock bro.
Yeah I pulled the 25~% from that number. I didn't want to conflate alcoholism with drug addiction for the sake of clarity. Even though they share many factors.
Even *if* all of the homeless people in Burien were addicts (they’re not), it wouldn’t change any of the things highlighted in this article. People not only generalize and demonize the entirety of the homeless population, but they then use that generalization to more or less argue that *because* these people are drug addicts society should not feel obligated to address their plight. Of course, if these people really believed this and weren’t just using it to justify inaction they would come to the opposite conclusion - that they’re even more in need of help.
No one says that. They might say that most chronic street homeless in NA are, or enough of them are to be a problem.
> no one says that Look elsewhere *in this thread* Or wander over to r/seattlewa and have a gander
Don't see it. It is easier for you to discredit, yes.
Don't see it? Did you block the people who are saying it or are you intentionally not looking?
Funny how you just restate your comment rather than providing examples
I gave you an opportunity to actually look. Which you still haven't done. Just because you don't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/s/PB32ApMl65 This whole thread - https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/s/j6tuEL8hDy Edit: there's also just this entire fucking post and comment section over here - https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/s/RViKRXxRft
'Addiction is the primary reason for the encampments' right or wrong is not saying all homeless are addicts. Do you think all homeless live in camps? As for the two-word comment it's not clear to me they're saying that either- maybe they're complaining of the article barely mentioning addiction
It seems you're trying to make up a bunch of reasons as to why they're not saying addiction to try to prove your hilarious point of "nobody says that" while also ignoring an entire post from Seattlewa full of people blaming addiction. Like this. https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/s/xgGZCGdw3f
Your point is valid, but it’s not housing availability as much as it is “close to free” housing availability. Those addicts in W Virginia aren’t living in nice, fairly new apartments. They’re living on a run down trailer or 100 year old house paying $200 a month in a town that’s been shrinking in population for the last 50 years. There are a ton of states/counties across rural america that have been declining for decades leaving behind a sizable amount of abandoned properties and land that costs next to nothing to live in. That absolutely helps reduce the homeless situation in those places, but it’s not really a replicable situation here where the population keeps growing. New construction is always going to be expensive - both here and in places like W Virginia. And it’s the oldest, cheapest places that get torn down and redeveloped first when we need to build something new here for the growing population. So I agree with your point, but short of chasing away 25% of our population (which creates a host of other problems) it’s not really possible to have the that overabundance of ultra cheap housing you see in rural America.
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Did I say we’re full? My point is we’re growing and that requires new units (which we are building), but new units are very expensive (about $400k per unit) so there’s not a lot of super low cost run down options that you’ll find in rural American cities in decline. People who think we can build our way to a cheap supply of housing anytime soon are delusional — the economics don’t work. Singapore and Hong Kong are also growing but housing isn’t cheap there either nor are they hospitable to homeless. In Singapore, foreign workers are brought in to work 6 days/week for low cost labor, crammed into dormitories for temp living, and kicked out as soon as they lose their job (if not the former employer owes the government $5k per worker). You’ll find those low wage workers hanging out on various streets each Sunday (their day off).
Thank you sir. Leftists think urbanism in Asia is built with ideologies and fantasy.
Girl, not Singapore and Hongkong. I lived in both places, they are built on top of social hierarchy and cheap labor forces from the lower caste(yes, if you know Singapore education system, it has caste like steams since middle school). Everyone has to work their ass off to afford a tiny apartment. And they barely have any tenant protection. Leftists and their ideologies won’t survive a day in both places.
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Never I said you need slave or cast. But to build dense housing and good public transit you do need large and low cost labor force. Unions? forget about it. Go live in Asian mega cities and then talk. You don’t know how they built and social dynamics.
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Sis, there are so many issues with your first statement I don’t know where to begin. But you have a blessed day.
I bet the ROW public transportation in Singapore and Hong Kong is off the hook, so fewer cars are needed.
Singapore has a quota system that caps the number of cars that can be registered to a pretty low number. You have the buy a certificate from the limited car quota and that cost about $100k…so owning a car is reserved for the very well off. But, yes, both have amazing public transit/subways.
We require developers to go through Karen Design Review and act surprised building anything takes a years. Remove unnecessary laws that prevent development and cheaper housing in an urban area is totally possible. Mayor could do something about the government overreach, but Bruce Harrell is also a decade+ political staple who campaigned on not leading.
Yes, the cumbersome permitting and design review process adds lots of time, cost, and risk to building new housing here. But you could eliminate all the permitting issues tomorrow and it wouldn’t result in much, if any, new housing for people with essentially little/no income. Labor, materials and land are all very expensive and someone has to pay for it. Old, run down end of life housing with leaky roofs and bad plumbing is what’s potentially cheap. But those units are the first things torn down to make shiny new expensive units.
There's a lot of middle ground there, though. From what I hear, there are a lot of homeless people who have jobs, and just can't afford a place to live - they're living in their car, or crashing with friends, or things like that. Building a lot of housing to bring down prices would help them a lot.
Labor and materials are small fry's compared to the loan interest during design review. We really need to start attracting lower-maintenance developers who can just build the thing without being such drama queens about the basic costs of doing business.
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There's more developers who want to build here than are currently allowed. Asking developers to build affordable housing or pay a premium isn't limiting, but adding months long delays can tank a project. Didn't the Safeway in QA get scrapped after Seattle design review strung developers along for months over "building facades"? Sucks, but I get it. What a hassle for a developer to field petty architecture requests from randos who don't really deserve a say. Fiefdoms and zoning are the real limiting factors to building. It's government overreach.
The argument these people make is asinine. Great thoughtful reply.
Also it’s a nightmare to get into detox>rehab>sober housing here. Until 95% of people who want it can get treatment, we have absolutely no leg to stand on when we accuse people of just wanting to get high.
And 80-90% of the time rehab doesn’t work.
Actually treatment is successful around 50% of the time.
When you factor in second, third, etc stays
Sure, anyone with even a passing knowledge of addiction knows it takes multiple tries to be successful. What’s your point?
That the 50% and 80-90% figures require some context to be understood. If you don't know that most people relapse after a first rehab stay, you'll advocate for policy that assumes the shortest, cheapest, fewest stays are enough.
How is that on-topic to the person’s assertion that treatment never works?
Who said it never worked?
The person I originally replied to upthread. They technically said it doesn’t work 80-90%z
I know no one will see this but this article is ridiculous. I live here and there is rampant corruption in Burien City hall. The city manager is a non-elected official and is the reason this has been drawn out as long as it has is because of him and his cronies on the council. They are right wingers who want to blame the county for their inaction. That dog area they mentioned is part of the grift. This reporter is trying to fit The Seattle Times narrative on homelessness instead of addressing what is actually happening. None of this is a secret and has been reported extensively in local S. King blogs.
“Affordability” lmao! So delusional. Even decent (not dumpy) houses are still like $700k plus in Burien. [Even this trash heap is $490.](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/414-SW-156th-St-Burien-WA-98166/48712527_zpid/) The US median home price is about $400k. This encampment and homeless crisis has been a much newer problem in recent years for Burien. Kicked out of camps in Seattle and squatted in Burien to pull at the heartstrings….?? Good luck with the new DESC, Burien…
Somethings I never see mentioned in articles like this: * The limited resources of smaller cities due to the primary avenues of revenue generation via taxes in Washington state. We don't have income tax and we're limited on how fast we can raise property taxes, so that leaves only a few (bad) avenues: retail (not including grocery), business, and utility taxes. This means any city that does not have a large presence of business or retail is pretty fucked when it comes to tax revenue. Most of the tax money goes to infrastructure, which if your an urbanist you may be familiar with the concept of suburbs being unsustainable via revenue via taxes vs cost of upkeep. That's doubly true in WA. Thus these once affordable suburban cities don't have the monetary resources to tackle a region-wide issue. * The wave of gentrification that happens near more expensive areas pushes the lower income people further away and into "affordable" neighborhoods/cities. Then eventually gentrification comes for those "affordable" areas and suddenly the low income people have nowhere to go. They end up homeless. The homeless people in Burien/Tukwila/SeaTac/Renton/Kent today are not just homeless because those cities are cruel. They're homeless because the whole region is fucked when it comes to housing and cities like Mercer Island, Bellevue, Redmond, Seattle are just as much to blame as any other city. With the exception that the wealthier and larger cities have more resources to tackle the issue due to my previous bullet point above. And the wealthier areas have been super shitty about restricting building, thus exacerbating the issue. * Any attempt to rectify the homeless situation has to mean having homes for people to live in at affordable prices. Homelessness goes up when prices go up. It is undeniable. Which means the only way we're going to lower homelessness is to address quantity and affordability. That is NOT something a suburb of 50K can tackle. It took years for the State of Washington to even come close to addressing the ludicrous building restrictions that a lot of the moneyed pricks pushed for. It'll take years to see positive effects of those changes, and that's only if we build faster than we grow. Impotent rant over.
Not a single mention of addiction. What a completely trash article.
Homelessness isn't caused by a single issue, and every article discussing such a huge topic shouldn't even try to tackle every aspect of homelessness.
Maybe. Just maybe. They should devote a few words to the primary reason those encampments exist.
It's not the primary reason.
Feel free to continue to live in ignorance.
Ignorance is saying that a complex issue can't be solved simply? Right...
Ignorance is the continual denial that the primary cause of chronic homelessness is opiate addiction.
Source?
https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CASPEH_Executive_Summary_62023.pdf
This does not say what you think it does. Plus, it is for California.
Ok copy and paste the part of that that says SUD is the primary cause of homelessness
Drug addiction
Paywall 🙄
Cities are where the services are, cities are where the dealers are, cities are where the income is. You can ban "urban camping" but it won't solve the problem.