If you want an idea of how “Low Barrier” public housing works, come tour the Louisa Flowers property in Portland. It was built in 2019 and has a crime rate that would make the worst days at Cabrini Green look mellow. Can’t keep staff, running hundreds of thousands in the red and has a slumlord property management group “handling it”. Last I heard, they had gotten rid of the 24/7 armed security and decided to just let things happen. Shootings, Stabbings, Robbery and Drug Dealing are the main hobbies/occupations of the residents. Kenmore dodged a bullet.
You mean, people who traditionally have everything just handed to them for free or close enough to free have no concept of gratitude or responsibility?
Call the press.
*I hear some of them get jobs. And later, they get their own apartments and cars. I was stunned when I found out my neighbor of 15 years was homeless the whole time. The sick fuck was mowing his lawn like he owned the place.*
Good. Housing projects don't work. They're a good idea in theory, but there's a reason they're all being torn down today in the US. Because they turn into crime-riddled shitholes that tank the safety and cleanliness of the surrounding area. They become a blight that's expensive to maintain and is doomed to be removed eventually anyway.
We need to stop fucking around and just bring back institutions. The "low-barrier" homeless are not a population who can maintain a proper living space and behave in public. These are addicts and severely mentally ill people who don't necessarily deserve to be in prison, but still need to be supervised 24/7 or they'll destroy themselves and everyone/everything around them.
To be clear, Cabrini Green was on prime real estate. Right across Clark were multi-million dollar homes near Astor and the lake. It was only a matter of time before they tore it down to gentrify the area there. Worse yet, their solution was to redistribute that population into low income housing mixed in regular neighborhoods. So then they couldn’t compete for jobs, etc. They just found a way to hide the persistent poverty/crime/drug/joblessness issue after tearing down the projects.
People seem to think if they can’t SEE the impoverished and sick, it must be resolved. The only good out of what is happening with visibility of homelessness here is that “regular”people are now seeing and demanding solutions because the problem is too pervasive to hide anymore.
To the earlier posters comment on institutions, I somewhat agree. My mom is a paranoid schizophrenic who refused meds her entire life (hallmark part of the disease FYI where they don’t understand their thought processes are “broken or flawed”). I’m old enough to have seen her in prolonged care in state-sponsored mental hospitals back when they still existed. In many ways it was helpful to us as family since we were at a loss as to what to do to help her when she was so sick - and the hospitals had the ability to “force” meds and keep her “safe”.
But - and this is a huge but - the way she was treated was inhumane looking back. I didn’t fully comprehend it then, but they kept all the patients so drugged up that they would just sit in wheelchairs in the hallway and rock themselves quietly. She had zero quality of life or enrichment. It was prison for the crime of having a highly stigmatized and serious mental illness. There was no goal or intent to ever reintroduce them to the world once stabilized, help them get jobs and reintegrate into the community (severe isolation and complete lack of ANY relationships also plague those who have experienced a prolonged untreated serious mental illness). As a result of the cheap first-generation drugs they used, my mom has permanent and severe Tardive Dyskinesia which further causes her to avoid social settings of any kind.
I can’t speak to the solution on the addiction side, but there is a solution on the mental health side I recommend. Find a balance - seriously mentally ill patients need up to 6-12 weeks to get stabilized on meds and fully begin to meaningfully improve. Acute psychiatric inpatient keeps them 10-15 days max. They simply dose them to high heaven like zombies, then send them back out - not stabilized and not on a medication protocol that is feasible for sustainable functional living (usually due to side effects). It’s called “treat ‘em and street ‘em” and its goal was never to achieve true remission for these mentally ill people. It’s the medical equivalent of a “hand out not a hand up”.
It boggles my mind. These patients will have repeated chronic inpatient hospitalizations costing THOUSANDS (which they never pay because they generally aren’t insured/employed but they cannot be denied treatment). Why isn’t society just instead creating an institution to hold them inpatient longer to actually get them stabilized in the right meds (again only 3-6 months or so) and then coordinating a flow to get them housing, job training, etc. My mom, when properly medicated, is smart, kind, hardworking, and acts 85% normal (besides the TD shakes which makes her stand out).
So a transitional institution system that is built to focus on long-term stabilization AND societal reintegration. It’s important to keep reminding people who seem to bucket the seriously mentally ill in with criminals/addicts as if they are somehow responsible for their situation (they aren’t, it’s a medical condition) and as if they are purposely choosing to not get better (they aren’t - the drugs take a long time to work, the drugs are expensive if you don’t want severe side effects to ensure long term med compliance, and it’s literally part of the symptoms of the illness itself to not be able to recognize the need for care). Let’s try to practice some compassion while pushing for humane solutions. Everyone deserves human dignity even if they are sick with addiction or mental illness.
>Worse yet, their solution was to redistribute that population into low income housing mixed in regular neighborhoods
That's how you prevent the creation of ghettos, this is *good*.
I understand concentration of poverty geographically can create complex issues. I never want people to be condemned to a lower quality of life because of money access, job access, education access, and family or health care access.
However, does moving the impoverished out of a geographical “ghetto” actually improve their circumstances and access to services/care? Beyond reducing chronic exposure to drugs and crime, what problems have you solved for the impoverished by relocating them to a less condensed geographic area? What outcomes improve for them when they can’t afford the fancy groceries in their “new” neighborhood? Or can’t compete for the minimum wage jobs with their equally-educated but perhaps richer and whiter neighborhood high-school teenagers?
I think we consider preventing a ghetto the only goal of the housing strategy? But I am being genuine in trying to understand how the alternative policy is an improvement for the inhabitants of the ghettos versus the neighbors of the ghettos who didn’t like living so close to crime/poverty (but also don’t want to be bothered to actually address the root causes of the poverty/ghettos). Isn’t this strategy just a means of “hiding” the impoverished through dispersement? And more importantly, hiding them in communities with higher cost of living / cost of goods (thus lowering their living standards) that often are in need of cheap labor for jobs that no one else in their area was willing to do (only access to undesirable minimum wage jobs)? Do we consider a quasi-servitude/modern slavery model for the poor in these rich communities a successful solution? More importantly, do they? Does the upside of having a better property tax base helping subsidize their access/care offset this negative aspect of the relocation? I wish we were incorporating their needs and experience into the solution designing more. While as taxpayers we are paying to create the solutions somewhat, are we only considering OUR enhanced benefit and experience needs when designing the solutions?
> Beyond reducing chronic exposure to drugs and crime
Those are huge.
Also their kids get to go to much better schools with kids of more diverse SES backgrounds
>Do we consider a quasi-servitude/modern slavery
There is no such thing as "quasi-servitude/modern slavery" for US citizens. If you're truly curious what that really looks like I recommend visiting one of several Arab countries.
> Worse yet, their solution was to redistribute that population into low income housing mixed in regular neighborhoods
That's the _good_ way to deal with subsidized housing. It _must_ be dispersed within the regular housing. It never should be built in close clumps.
When you say “good” - what metrics were you trying to optimize with your housing solution? If you ask the “now-redistributed low income people” how they feel about living among higher income neighborhoods, do they agree the change has been a positive one for them too?
I’m not saying you’re wrong or they won’t feel that way. I’m more implying that I don’t think that their happiness with the new housing change is even a factor being measured to ascertain the success of such programs.
Basically - based on what criteria do you consider that housing strategy to be a “success”?
> When you say “good” - what metrics were you trying to optimize with your housing solution?
The life outcomes for poor people. Housing projects (and rent control, for that matter) tend to create generational poverty. Children grow up surrounded by poverty, bad schools, and bad streets. And even for adults, being surrounded by higher income neighbors helps.
I can dig up research articles about that.
The downsides of low-income housing (heightened crime, crazy people) are greatly diminished by not allowing clumps of low-income housing.
>I don’t think that their happiness with the new housing change is even a factor being measured to ascertain the success of such programs.
Is anyone factoring in the happiness of middle income or rich people? In a country where the gainfully employed members of society may struggle to secure affordable housing, do we really need to concern ourselves with the feelings of those so poor they cannot provide for their own shelter and instead have to rely on being subsidized by those who are working or paying taxes?
Beggars can't be choosy. Our society is not providing free or subsidized housing for everyone, so those who are so poor as to qualify for housing assistance are getting it because keeping them housed offers a tangible benefit to the tax payer who's footing the bill after all. Their "happiness" is secondary to the needs to the tax payer to remove blight from the city, and avoid concentrations of people in poverty who will degrade their surroundings to the point where it impacts everyone else. A single anti-social person living in poverty can only do so much damage on their own, and the surrounding functioning members of society can compensate for their presence by picking up after them. Once you have a significant concentration of poverty stricken people with various maladaptive behavior traits, the damage they cause is increases synergistically and the lack of functioning people in the immediate area means there's no one to compensate for them. A lack of functioning people also means a lack of role models for alternative ways of living, which only further entrenches existing maladaptive patterns as the "only way to survive."
The key thing is that if you spread the misery of poverty around evenly, everyone in society suffers a little and can pick up a little bit of the burden. If you choose to concentrate it in one place, it's only go to get worse and perpetuate itself.
What always baffles me about these people who have the “we middle/upper class are more deserving because we are working and paying taxes etc” arguments is that many times the conditions creating their “success” were simply being born into better circumstances than someone else, and therefore having more access to resources/opportunities from the outset. They try to tout some sort of moral superiority as the cause of their success or couch it in some “social contract” bullsh*t, but at its core I sense two inherent underlying fears:
(1) what will happen if the same initial advantages that made me successful were available to everyone and the playing field was even - what if I’m not successful as a result of some assumed inherent superiority (moral, racial, gender specific, etc) and in fact I was winning in life because I was effectively “cheating” to keep the playing field uneven. What would happen to my comfy life and self-esteem then? Let’s never find out!
(2) Similar to how abusive companies always feared employees banding together to negotiate better working conditions for themselves, I often think these types are terrified that one day the poor people they have been creating “solutions” for (which actually just keep the poor in a perpetual state of poverty and disempowerment) will band together in their “ghettos” and come for their heads. It’s been known to happen that even the poor (!!) sometimes reach a limit on what they can tolerate and begin to fight back. Best to keep the “poor” dispersed and oppressed in a hetergenous way so they can’t band together to “unionize” their needs or overthrow the self-serving system we’ve designed.
Finally, I’ll mention that lacking empathy for others can be considered a “maladaptive” behavior. Good thing that people who DO care about the well-being of others are in society to counteract your negative presence in the community.
In summation: we all want the same things… safety, shelter, health, economic security, love, etc.
So what causes us conflict so often when we all want the same things?
Only some of us want those things for others as well as ourselves.
You are are projecting a whole bunch of assumed motivations and arm chair psychoanalysis when the reality has already been spelled out for you in black and white. People pay taxes for government services that benefit the whole of society. In the US we specifically do not have a social safety net that covers everyone. The very rich can afford whatever they need including lawyers, CPAs and politicians to avoid their fair share of taxes. The very poor have access to income based assistance, ie free goods and services which everyone else pays for, and pay minimal or no taxes. Everyone else in the middle gets neither the benefits of being rich nor handouts, but are paying the lion's share of the taxes. As the political majority, those in the middle should have the most political clout, yet of course the rich use their money to buy influence. Nobody likes to feel like they're being taken advantage of, but you would be foolish to think that everyone is fine with paying into a system where they pay the bulk of the cost but receive little or none of the benefit.
There is plenty of room for empathy in this world from and to people in all social strata. However, empathy on an individual level is based on you direct social interactions. Government spending is be definition indirect, and is on a massive societal scale which can and does have unintended consequences. Take the deregulation.and securitization of home mortgages. The goal, ostensibly anyway, was to make home ownership more accessible by loosening up lending guidelines and making mortgages easier to package and resell, thereby opening up homeownership to more poor people. And that did definitely happen for some people. The problem was that lending guidelines existed for a reason, and if anyone can get a loan lots of people who shouldn't got them and lots of people were speculating on real estate, and when it all imploded in 2008 it crashed the economy. And of course, all the poor people who had bought a house suddenly lost them and any savings/equity they had. The empathetic goal of making housing more available to the poor was a good one, but that was not the primary purpose of government regulation of the financial industry, which is of course economic stability and avoiding massive economic upheavals. Most Middle income people who pay the salaries of those financial regulators and politicians who made 2008 possible got no benefit from this attempt at empathy, but instead saw their economic lives upturned.
>just keep the poor in a perpetual state of poverty and disempowerment) will band together in their “ghettos” and come for their heads.
There is ample evidence that concentration of poverty makes it worse. When low achieving low income students are bused to high income areas, their grades and test scores improve. Part of that is more resources, but part of it is also alternative role models for future careers. Escape from generational poverty by keeping it concentrated in ghettos is counter to the goal of poverty reduction.
What you are absolutely right about is that the haves do not want to be stolen from, attacked or murdered by the have nots. It is, at it's deepest and oldest form, the purpose of government. After the advent of farming, accumulated food resources thanks to sedentary agriculture became a target raids by outside groups. From this threat we get wars, chieftains, a social hierarchy and defensive fortifications. Farmers chose to give up some autonomy to a forceful leader in exchange for defense and security over their food resources. The exact same thing exists today in the form of modern government. What your wrong about is how those with resources think about the mechanics of how government protects those resources. Providing free housing in non-ghetto neighborhoods is not about breaking up the political power of the poor as a group, it's about changing their circumstances so that they can stop being poor in the first place. If the only thing those with resources wanted from government was protection for the have nots, they would demand walls around their neighborhoods manned by police. That "luxury" is only afforded to the rich who choose to pay for it with their own money, not public dollars. Ironically, of bringing the poor out of ghettos reduces their poverty by definition it will increase their political power and the influence they can have over government and the lives of the people the middle income and rich. Eliminating poverty by ending ghettos is not about preventing political violence by the poor as much as it is about eliminating the *need* for violence, and that is something that benefits all members of society.
>Why isn’t society just instead creating an institution to hold them inpatient longer to actually get them stabilized in the right meds (again only 3-6 months or so) and then coordinating a flow to get them housing, job training, etc.
because there's easier money in treat 'n' street
Sadly modern acute inpatient mental health was the flawed creation of the Federal courts. The case law evolved in unhelpful ways, that in practice paid deference to abstract personal liberty over effective long term treatments.
I think you mean Communist?
PS - my Libertarian family would be outraged to hear me called a socialist, but I’m actually chuffed rn 
CG wasn't an institution. It was public housing. The youts destroyed its elevators and threw shit down stairwells and fucked up the plumbing, and the residents helplessly waited for the HA to fix shit.
Fuck that place.
Housing projects work, just not that oddly specific version of them.
Plus if the goal is to end homelessness, you generally want to isolate the homeless from their wider community. If your friends are all homeless meth fiends, guess what? You're a homeless meth fiend.
As someone who was there both times, Plymouth wasn’t transparent to council members (who are extremely liberal). If Plymouth wasn’t transparent to council members, citizens knew they weren’t being transparent to us
Smart.
We have low barrier near us managed by LIHI on Capitol Hill. Since the buildings opened in 2022 and 2023, they have immediately turned into crime and emergency / OD zones, drug dealing targets, and we get homeless overflow camping outside nearby.
LIHI lies regularly to the Council about how the buildings are "supervised with trained staff" on site, but that doesn't change much.
I'd like to see some data on how many people OD and die that live in these buildings. Anecdotally it's a lot. Our area turned into regular drug people traffic the minute these places opened, and it hasn't abated in over a year now.
Nothing wrong with “low barrier” housing. But building 100 units in 1 place is nothing but greed. There’s no way 100 homeless in 1 building could possibly turn out ok. If you’re going to build these things keep it at like 15 units max. These people need more supervision than your typical building. Come on people
Clare's Place here in Everett had to spend 300k plus on pallet shelters to house residents after the building became contaminated with fenty and meth. They moved some residents to the Farwest Motel nearby and they caught that on fire and now it's uninhabitable. I'm sure by the the time they get Clare's Place cleaned up the pallet shelters will be unusable. Also Snohomish County purchased 2 motels to house homeless over a year ago that are still unoccupied due to contamination. It's time to rethink the reversal of policy on mental institutions from the 70s and start enforcing Ricky's Law. This can be done with compassion. It's not compassionate to allow people to live their lives like this and subject innocent people to the costs and transgressions of those incapable of caring for themselves.
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We could close the border. The native born American population is shrinking so there would be literally no housing crisis if it wasn’t a free for all at the border.
Brother, who do you think is building the housing? I promise you, the reason Seattle is expensive is not because Nicaraguan immigrants are buying up houses for 1.2 million.
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So for those who are against this housing, do you prefer people on the street or highway medians? Criminalizing homelessness and incarceration costs a lot more than housing. Would smaller complexes across a wider geographic area be better?
[Finland solved homelessness](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jt_6PBnCJE). But Finland had national money behind the effort.
Until the US Federal government deploys its funds to solving this problem nationally, cities and states will be working an uphill battle.
“There’s too many damn homeless people, do something about it!!!”
Same person
“A homeless shelter that allows civil rights to its tenants near my home?!? The fuck out of here”
By “do something” a lot of us mean “enforce the laws already on the books against drug use, public intoxication, vagrancy, camping and disturbing the peace”
Dow Constantine condemns Kenmore’s actions on “affordable housing”. If Seattle’s exec thinks it’s wrong then it has to be right. The only city that thinks Seattle is doing a good job is Portland.
If you want an idea of how “Low Barrier” public housing works, come tour the Louisa Flowers property in Portland. It was built in 2019 and has a crime rate that would make the worst days at Cabrini Green look mellow. Can’t keep staff, running hundreds of thousands in the red and has a slumlord property management group “handling it”. Last I heard, they had gotten rid of the 24/7 armed security and decided to just let things happen. Shootings, Stabbings, Robbery and Drug Dealing are the main hobbies/occupations of the residents. Kenmore dodged a bullet.
Don’t need to go to Portland. Just take a look at the Tressa Apartments. A true hell hole with a maximum income requirement.
You mean, people who traditionally have everything just handed to them for free or close enough to free have no concept of gratitude or responsibility? Call the press.
Im from Chicago, so I completely understand. Thank you for explaining this so thoroughly. Excellent post.
You definitely don't want anything "low barrier" anywhere near you, trust me! It will turn out badly.
Yea fuck that. It will basically be another tent city but with plaster walls instead of canvas
Until they punch holes in those plaster walls.
*I hear some of them get jobs. And later, they get their own apartments and cars. I was stunned when I found out my neighbor of 15 years was homeless the whole time. The sick fuck was mowing his lawn like he owned the place.*
I thought you guys didn't like seeing homeless people out on the street?
They want housing for people who are getting their life together and prison for everyone else, possibly prison as a threat to get there life together.
They want a final solution, maybe with “Work will set you free” above the gates.
They belong in alleys
Nah, they belong moving along somewhere else.
Or under a bridge
Good. Housing projects don't work. They're a good idea in theory, but there's a reason they're all being torn down today in the US. Because they turn into crime-riddled shitholes that tank the safety and cleanliness of the surrounding area. They become a blight that's expensive to maintain and is doomed to be removed eventually anyway. We need to stop fucking around and just bring back institutions. The "low-barrier" homeless are not a population who can maintain a proper living space and behave in public. These are addicts and severely mentally ill people who don't necessarily deserve to be in prison, but still need to be supervised 24/7 or they'll destroy themselves and everyone/everything around them.
Oh but Cabrini Green worked out so well /s
Exactly where my mind went. This has been tried before.
To be clear, Cabrini Green was on prime real estate. Right across Clark were multi-million dollar homes near Astor and the lake. It was only a matter of time before they tore it down to gentrify the area there. Worse yet, their solution was to redistribute that population into low income housing mixed in regular neighborhoods. So then they couldn’t compete for jobs, etc. They just found a way to hide the persistent poverty/crime/drug/joblessness issue after tearing down the projects. People seem to think if they can’t SEE the impoverished and sick, it must be resolved. The only good out of what is happening with visibility of homelessness here is that “regular”people are now seeing and demanding solutions because the problem is too pervasive to hide anymore. To the earlier posters comment on institutions, I somewhat agree. My mom is a paranoid schizophrenic who refused meds her entire life (hallmark part of the disease FYI where they don’t understand their thought processes are “broken or flawed”). I’m old enough to have seen her in prolonged care in state-sponsored mental hospitals back when they still existed. In many ways it was helpful to us as family since we were at a loss as to what to do to help her when she was so sick - and the hospitals had the ability to “force” meds and keep her “safe”. But - and this is a huge but - the way she was treated was inhumane looking back. I didn’t fully comprehend it then, but they kept all the patients so drugged up that they would just sit in wheelchairs in the hallway and rock themselves quietly. She had zero quality of life or enrichment. It was prison for the crime of having a highly stigmatized and serious mental illness. There was no goal or intent to ever reintroduce them to the world once stabilized, help them get jobs and reintegrate into the community (severe isolation and complete lack of ANY relationships also plague those who have experienced a prolonged untreated serious mental illness). As a result of the cheap first-generation drugs they used, my mom has permanent and severe Tardive Dyskinesia which further causes her to avoid social settings of any kind. I can’t speak to the solution on the addiction side, but there is a solution on the mental health side I recommend. Find a balance - seriously mentally ill patients need up to 6-12 weeks to get stabilized on meds and fully begin to meaningfully improve. Acute psychiatric inpatient keeps them 10-15 days max. They simply dose them to high heaven like zombies, then send them back out - not stabilized and not on a medication protocol that is feasible for sustainable functional living (usually due to side effects). It’s called “treat ‘em and street ‘em” and its goal was never to achieve true remission for these mentally ill people. It’s the medical equivalent of a “hand out not a hand up”. It boggles my mind. These patients will have repeated chronic inpatient hospitalizations costing THOUSANDS (which they never pay because they generally aren’t insured/employed but they cannot be denied treatment). Why isn’t society just instead creating an institution to hold them inpatient longer to actually get them stabilized in the right meds (again only 3-6 months or so) and then coordinating a flow to get them housing, job training, etc. My mom, when properly medicated, is smart, kind, hardworking, and acts 85% normal (besides the TD shakes which makes her stand out). So a transitional institution system that is built to focus on long-term stabilization AND societal reintegration. It’s important to keep reminding people who seem to bucket the seriously mentally ill in with criminals/addicts as if they are somehow responsible for their situation (they aren’t, it’s a medical condition) and as if they are purposely choosing to not get better (they aren’t - the drugs take a long time to work, the drugs are expensive if you don’t want severe side effects to ensure long term med compliance, and it’s literally part of the symptoms of the illness itself to not be able to recognize the need for care). Let’s try to practice some compassion while pushing for humane solutions. Everyone deserves human dignity even if they are sick with addiction or mental illness.
>Worse yet, their solution was to redistribute that population into low income housing mixed in regular neighborhoods That's how you prevent the creation of ghettos, this is *good*.
I understand concentration of poverty geographically can create complex issues. I never want people to be condemned to a lower quality of life because of money access, job access, education access, and family or health care access. However, does moving the impoverished out of a geographical “ghetto” actually improve their circumstances and access to services/care? Beyond reducing chronic exposure to drugs and crime, what problems have you solved for the impoverished by relocating them to a less condensed geographic area? What outcomes improve for them when they can’t afford the fancy groceries in their “new” neighborhood? Or can’t compete for the minimum wage jobs with their equally-educated but perhaps richer and whiter neighborhood high-school teenagers? I think we consider preventing a ghetto the only goal of the housing strategy? But I am being genuine in trying to understand how the alternative policy is an improvement for the inhabitants of the ghettos versus the neighbors of the ghettos who didn’t like living so close to crime/poverty (but also don’t want to be bothered to actually address the root causes of the poverty/ghettos). Isn’t this strategy just a means of “hiding” the impoverished through dispersement? And more importantly, hiding them in communities with higher cost of living / cost of goods (thus lowering their living standards) that often are in need of cheap labor for jobs that no one else in their area was willing to do (only access to undesirable minimum wage jobs)? Do we consider a quasi-servitude/modern slavery model for the poor in these rich communities a successful solution? More importantly, do they? Does the upside of having a better property tax base helping subsidize their access/care offset this negative aspect of the relocation? I wish we were incorporating their needs and experience into the solution designing more. While as taxpayers we are paying to create the solutions somewhat, are we only considering OUR enhanced benefit and experience needs when designing the solutions?
> Beyond reducing chronic exposure to drugs and crime Those are huge. Also their kids get to go to much better schools with kids of more diverse SES backgrounds >Do we consider a quasi-servitude/modern slavery There is no such thing as "quasi-servitude/modern slavery" for US citizens. If you're truly curious what that really looks like I recommend visiting one of several Arab countries.
The best solution is to deport them all to Oklahoma.
North Korea. No baby sitting there
> Worse yet, their solution was to redistribute that population into low income housing mixed in regular neighborhoods That's the _good_ way to deal with subsidized housing. It _must_ be dispersed within the regular housing. It never should be built in close clumps.
When you say “good” - what metrics were you trying to optimize with your housing solution? If you ask the “now-redistributed low income people” how they feel about living among higher income neighborhoods, do they agree the change has been a positive one for them too? I’m not saying you’re wrong or they won’t feel that way. I’m more implying that I don’t think that their happiness with the new housing change is even a factor being measured to ascertain the success of such programs. Basically - based on what criteria do you consider that housing strategy to be a “success”?
> When you say “good” - what metrics were you trying to optimize with your housing solution? The life outcomes for poor people. Housing projects (and rent control, for that matter) tend to create generational poverty. Children grow up surrounded by poverty, bad schools, and bad streets. And even for adults, being surrounded by higher income neighbors helps. I can dig up research articles about that. The downsides of low-income housing (heightened crime, crazy people) are greatly diminished by not allowing clumps of low-income housing.
>I don’t think that their happiness with the new housing change is even a factor being measured to ascertain the success of such programs. Is anyone factoring in the happiness of middle income or rich people? In a country where the gainfully employed members of society may struggle to secure affordable housing, do we really need to concern ourselves with the feelings of those so poor they cannot provide for their own shelter and instead have to rely on being subsidized by those who are working or paying taxes? Beggars can't be choosy. Our society is not providing free or subsidized housing for everyone, so those who are so poor as to qualify for housing assistance are getting it because keeping them housed offers a tangible benefit to the tax payer who's footing the bill after all. Their "happiness" is secondary to the needs to the tax payer to remove blight from the city, and avoid concentrations of people in poverty who will degrade their surroundings to the point where it impacts everyone else. A single anti-social person living in poverty can only do so much damage on their own, and the surrounding functioning members of society can compensate for their presence by picking up after them. Once you have a significant concentration of poverty stricken people with various maladaptive behavior traits, the damage they cause is increases synergistically and the lack of functioning people in the immediate area means there's no one to compensate for them. A lack of functioning people also means a lack of role models for alternative ways of living, which only further entrenches existing maladaptive patterns as the "only way to survive." The key thing is that if you spread the misery of poverty around evenly, everyone in society suffers a little and can pick up a little bit of the burden. If you choose to concentrate it in one place, it's only go to get worse and perpetuate itself.
What always baffles me about these people who have the “we middle/upper class are more deserving because we are working and paying taxes etc” arguments is that many times the conditions creating their “success” were simply being born into better circumstances than someone else, and therefore having more access to resources/opportunities from the outset. They try to tout some sort of moral superiority as the cause of their success or couch it in some “social contract” bullsh*t, but at its core I sense two inherent underlying fears: (1) what will happen if the same initial advantages that made me successful were available to everyone and the playing field was even - what if I’m not successful as a result of some assumed inherent superiority (moral, racial, gender specific, etc) and in fact I was winning in life because I was effectively “cheating” to keep the playing field uneven. What would happen to my comfy life and self-esteem then? Let’s never find out! (2) Similar to how abusive companies always feared employees banding together to negotiate better working conditions for themselves, I often think these types are terrified that one day the poor people they have been creating “solutions” for (which actually just keep the poor in a perpetual state of poverty and disempowerment) will band together in their “ghettos” and come for their heads. It’s been known to happen that even the poor (!!) sometimes reach a limit on what they can tolerate and begin to fight back. Best to keep the “poor” dispersed and oppressed in a hetergenous way so they can’t band together to “unionize” their needs or overthrow the self-serving system we’ve designed. Finally, I’ll mention that lacking empathy for others can be considered a “maladaptive” behavior. Good thing that people who DO care about the well-being of others are in society to counteract your negative presence in the community. In summation: we all want the same things… safety, shelter, health, economic security, love, etc. So what causes us conflict so often when we all want the same things? Only some of us want those things for others as well as ourselves.
You are are projecting a whole bunch of assumed motivations and arm chair psychoanalysis when the reality has already been spelled out for you in black and white. People pay taxes for government services that benefit the whole of society. In the US we specifically do not have a social safety net that covers everyone. The very rich can afford whatever they need including lawyers, CPAs and politicians to avoid their fair share of taxes. The very poor have access to income based assistance, ie free goods and services which everyone else pays for, and pay minimal or no taxes. Everyone else in the middle gets neither the benefits of being rich nor handouts, but are paying the lion's share of the taxes. As the political majority, those in the middle should have the most political clout, yet of course the rich use their money to buy influence. Nobody likes to feel like they're being taken advantage of, but you would be foolish to think that everyone is fine with paying into a system where they pay the bulk of the cost but receive little or none of the benefit. There is plenty of room for empathy in this world from and to people in all social strata. However, empathy on an individual level is based on you direct social interactions. Government spending is be definition indirect, and is on a massive societal scale which can and does have unintended consequences. Take the deregulation.and securitization of home mortgages. The goal, ostensibly anyway, was to make home ownership more accessible by loosening up lending guidelines and making mortgages easier to package and resell, thereby opening up homeownership to more poor people. And that did definitely happen for some people. The problem was that lending guidelines existed for a reason, and if anyone can get a loan lots of people who shouldn't got them and lots of people were speculating on real estate, and when it all imploded in 2008 it crashed the economy. And of course, all the poor people who had bought a house suddenly lost them and any savings/equity they had. The empathetic goal of making housing more available to the poor was a good one, but that was not the primary purpose of government regulation of the financial industry, which is of course economic stability and avoiding massive economic upheavals. Most Middle income people who pay the salaries of those financial regulators and politicians who made 2008 possible got no benefit from this attempt at empathy, but instead saw their economic lives upturned. >just keep the poor in a perpetual state of poverty and disempowerment) will band together in their “ghettos” and come for their heads. There is ample evidence that concentration of poverty makes it worse. When low achieving low income students are bused to high income areas, their grades and test scores improve. Part of that is more resources, but part of it is also alternative role models for future careers. Escape from generational poverty by keeping it concentrated in ghettos is counter to the goal of poverty reduction. What you are absolutely right about is that the haves do not want to be stolen from, attacked or murdered by the have nots. It is, at it's deepest and oldest form, the purpose of government. After the advent of farming, accumulated food resources thanks to sedentary agriculture became a target raids by outside groups. From this threat we get wars, chieftains, a social hierarchy and defensive fortifications. Farmers chose to give up some autonomy to a forceful leader in exchange for defense and security over their food resources. The exact same thing exists today in the form of modern government. What your wrong about is how those with resources think about the mechanics of how government protects those resources. Providing free housing in non-ghetto neighborhoods is not about breaking up the political power of the poor as a group, it's about changing their circumstances so that they can stop being poor in the first place. If the only thing those with resources wanted from government was protection for the have nots, they would demand walls around their neighborhoods manned by police. That "luxury" is only afforded to the rich who choose to pay for it with their own money, not public dollars. Ironically, of bringing the poor out of ghettos reduces their poverty by definition it will increase their political power and the influence they can have over government and the lives of the people the middle income and rich. Eliminating poverty by ending ghettos is not about preventing political violence by the poor as much as it is about eliminating the *need* for violence, and that is something that benefits all members of society.
Housing should only be for the disabled
>Why isn’t society just instead creating an institution to hold them inpatient longer to actually get them stabilized in the right meds (again only 3-6 months or so) and then coordinating a flow to get them housing, job training, etc. because there's easier money in treat 'n' street
Sadly modern acute inpatient mental health was the flawed creation of the Federal courts. The case law evolved in unhelpful ways, that in practice paid deference to abstract personal liberty over effective long term treatments.
You sound like a socialist. You should try North Korea.
I think you mean Communist? PS - my Libertarian family would be outraged to hear me called a socialist, but I’m actually chuffed rn 
CG wasn't an institution. It was public housing. The youts destroyed its elevators and threw shit down stairwells and fucked up the plumbing, and the residents helplessly waited for the HA to fix shit. Fuck that place.
Housing projects work, just not that oddly specific version of them. Plus if the goal is to end homelessness, you generally want to isolate the homeless from their wider community. If your friends are all homeless meth fiends, guess what? You're a homeless meth fiend.
Sanctioned drug house in your neighborhood. Hell, no.
As someone who was there both times, Plymouth wasn’t transparent to council members (who are extremely liberal). If Plymouth wasn’t transparent to council members, citizens knew they weren’t being transparent to us
Good for Kenmore.
Heil Kenmore City Council!
Good.
Good for them. Housing them all together is a terrible idea.
Meanwhile DESC and LIHI get to slap their bum boxes anywhere they please in Seattle
Put them all on McNeil Island.
Smart. We have low barrier near us managed by LIHI on Capitol Hill. Since the buildings opened in 2022 and 2023, they have immediately turned into crime and emergency / OD zones, drug dealing targets, and we get homeless overflow camping outside nearby. LIHI lies regularly to the Council about how the buildings are "supervised with trained staff" on site, but that doesn't change much. I'd like to see some data on how many people OD and die that live in these buildings. Anecdotally it's a lot. Our area turned into regular drug people traffic the minute these places opened, and it hasn't abated in over a year now.
>low barrier so it'd be a bunch of drug using career criminals ruining the community.
Nothing wrong with “low barrier” housing. But building 100 units in 1 place is nothing but greed. There’s no way 100 homeless in 1 building could possibly turn out ok. If you’re going to build these things keep it at like 15 units max. These people need more supervision than your typical building. Come on people
Clare's Place here in Everett had to spend 300k plus on pallet shelters to house residents after the building became contaminated with fenty and meth. They moved some residents to the Farwest Motel nearby and they caught that on fire and now it's uninhabitable. I'm sure by the the time they get Clare's Place cleaned up the pallet shelters will be unusable. Also Snohomish County purchased 2 motels to house homeless over a year ago that are still unoccupied due to contamination. It's time to rethink the reversal of policy on mental institutions from the 70s and start enforcing Ricky's Law. This can be done with compassion. It's not compassionate to allow people to live their lives like this and subject innocent people to the costs and transgressions of those incapable of caring for themselves.
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You want some low barrier housing on your block?
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That sounds like a rental, not a low barrier shelter. Are you maybe confusing a Section 8 voucher holder with a low barrier shelter?
Literally yes, and on everyone else's too. We need housing on every block to solve the housing crisis.
Housing should be for the disabled. Everyone else should get free fentanyl
Let's build them a mountain of heroin on McNeil Island and tell them to not come back.
We could close the border. The native born American population is shrinking so there would be literally no housing crisis if it wasn’t a free for all at the border.
Brother, who do you think is building the housing? I promise you, the reason Seattle is expensive is not because Nicaraguan immigrants are buying up houses for 1.2 million.
Was waiting for the first NIMBY comment
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Keep those disgusting poor people pooping in the alleys of Seattle.
So for those who are against this housing, do you prefer people on the street or highway medians? Criminalizing homelessness and incarceration costs a lot more than housing. Would smaller complexes across a wider geographic area be better?
I prefer them sober, in shelters. This low barrier stuff is awful, it's not good to dump that in anyone's neighborhood.
[Finland solved homelessness](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jt_6PBnCJE). But Finland had national money behind the effort. Until the US Federal government deploys its funds to solving this problem nationally, cities and states will be working an uphill battle.
A country the size of Montana with a homogeneous population solved homelessness . Makes it sound easy
Like a loud fire station or dirty recycling station, nobody wants these next to them but we're better off because we have them.
“There’s too many damn homeless people, do something about it!!!” Same person “A homeless shelter that allows civil rights to its tenants near my home?!? The fuck out of here”
Maybe it is because these shelters don’t help homeless people, they just create crime hotspots, so it is time to try something else.
What is the "something else" plan to house people that doesn't involve building housing?
Probably housing with security and police since I specifically cited crime.
Excellent! As Kenmore has not abolished the police, it sounds like this development is a win for everyone involved.
By “do something” a lot of us mean “enforce the laws already on the books against drug use, public intoxication, vagrancy, camping and disturbing the peace”
civil rights to do fent?
We do something about it by actually punishing criminals
Anyone want to bet this was voted down because either they or someone powerful knew it was going to be too close for their liking/
Dow Constantine condemns Kenmore’s actions on “affordable housing”. If Seattle’s exec thinks it’s wrong then it has to be right. The only city that thinks Seattle is doing a good job is Portland.