Why is it so hard for the leadership in Seattle to come out and say we have an massive drug problem in Seattle? High rent isn't the reason why the guys in the camps are stealing bikes and breaking into cars. We got the streets flooded with cheap meth & fenty and no one has the courage to come out and call a spade a spade. You can be a democrat and have some sort of expectation that the city can make at least an attempt to keep its streets clean.

Been reading Slog for years, not once has the stranger done a single article attempting to find any critique of the actual drug addicts in our city. It's always someone else's fault, the high rent, the minimum wage, etc. You are turning a blind eye to the fact that this city is letting people slowly kill themselves in tents because it is to uncomfortable to do whatever necessary to force someone to get their shit together be a better person.

Maybe “homeless” is an antiquated term. That would imply that they’re functional members of society looking for housing. They are lifestyle bums not homeless. They already have the homes they want. A tent wherever they can squat without being bothered to continue their unmedicated or self-medicated existence. They could all be sorted into either mental hospitals or “Cool Hand Luke style” work camps where they could learn not to be human garbage through hard work.

@1-3 the fallacy in your assumptions is that the mayor and council actually want to solve homelessness and addiction. Have they ever given the slightest indication that is their goal? Everyone knows what works and yet we go through year after year and plan after plan twiddling our thumbs. So why is that? Mostly because those on the streets are convenient pawns for those in power. There are different agendas to be sure but having a patsy you can either prop up or come down on depending on your aim is a great political tool.

Yeah, there is this brand new drug on the street called "cheap meth" causing all this homelessness. Meth has always been cheap due to its long half life and has been on the west coast since before I was born. "Fenty" as one of you called it isnt really sought after outright by most opiode users. It is a synthetic additive or substitute for heroin that isnt any cheaper or more addictive for the end user, it just kills them easier because dosing is tricky(on the dealer end). It is more profitable for dealers but not cheaper or more desirable to heroin users. Most try to avoid it the best they can. I agree with a lot of you commenting above on other issues but not on your homelessness theories. The more obvious one is that we fucking closed most of our state mental hospitals down without the promised community support leaving the crazies to run wild in the street(until we can arrest them and toss them into jail to be housed). This happened in the 1970's and we havent really been able to catch up or find a better solution since. There are certainly some younger lifestyle homeless in Seattle enjoying the scene but i guarantee that is a negligible minority.

The part about zoning was pretty disappointing. I thought this was about housing and homelessness, not just homelessness. Back in 2014, Seattle pretty much killed congregate housing (those apodments with shared kitchens). These are the most affordable homes to develop. Since then, they've also made SEDUs (small efficiency dwelling units). Between these, they've pretty much made sure microhousing in Seattle won't be scalable. Here's a pretty good writeup:
https://www.sightline.org/2021/02/04/when-is-seattle-going-to-fix-microhousing/

Strangely, we haven't seen the same kind of new regulations coming out against the luxury apartments or townhomes everyone complains that developers build. Go figure, you regulate away the affordable options and you only get the unaffordable ones.

Upzoning more of Seattle isn't a bad idea, it's the kind of thing I'd expect any decently aware 10th grader would come up with. I guess it's a good thing that single family housing is now seen as racist, it's the way to get some attention by our local politicians. It is disappointing that nobody seems to have any real answers about how Seattle can make it profitable to build smaller, cheaper apartments. When city council members suggest that new city built housing should be able to skip the usual regulations and process because they're too expensive and time consuming, it's a sign that some serious changes are needed.

@2: "...this city is letting people slowly kill themselves in tents..."

That's our de facto solution to the homelessness issue. The virtue-signalling compassion brigade is fine with it, because as noted @3, actually solving the problem isn't something they care about; they have other agendas, and parks filled with dirty tents serves those agendas.

If we admitted drug addiction is a primary cause of homelessness, several effects would immediately follow:

-- The price tag for solving it rises exponentially. Drug use and abuse are topics our medical science is just starting to understand; addiction-recovery programs cost a lot of money, have high failure rates, and work slowly if they don't fail.

-- Everyone who has been totally wrong about our homelessness crisis would have to admit it. They've shown absolutely no interest in doing this so far, and I doubt that will ever change.

-- Housing affordability is a great slogan. Building more housing means good jobs at good wages for unionized tradespeople, professional engineers, architects, and so forth. Politicians cut ribbons and make self-important speeches about Me and Progress. By contrast, drug-abuse counseling for homeless persons takes place in dingy rooms with unpleasant, smelly people bitterly fighting their own treatment, then many of them buying drugs the moment they hit the sidewalk. No glamor, no glory, just a lot of hard work and much backsliding. No photo opportunities there, just depressing images of dirty people no one really cares about anyway.

Amazing to think this is all taking place in a wealthy city with well-educated citizens, but there you have it.

The candidates treat these forums like a job interview for a civil administrative position and they don't want to offend anyone, hence the blasé responses. This homeless problem is a real crisis and we need some leaders with balls or ballettes to provide housing for these people so they aren't camping on the streets. With regrets, this issue is like global warming in that we are having extended wilderness fire seasons, but it hasn't shown up in the cities yet, so people are still ignoring it. If anyone ever goes downtown anymore, and I don't blame you if you don't but if you do, you will see people camping in the parks and on the sidewalks and this is bad for public health and urban aesthetics. The executive administration should figure out how to fund housing for these people so they aren't crapping in the gardens and panhandling. The solution may involve some sort of federal funding like the aforementioned FEMA resources. Seattle should not get used to this bizarre scenario that scares away new people and business opportunities. When provided housing, drug-involved or mentally people who need government assistance may drop-trou in the middle of the street and play with themselves, nevertheless they will have some place indoors to sleep at night.

They all fail for not mentioning the real problem: drugs and mental illness and the fact that nobody wants to put them in jail but they also don't want to build the necessary facilities to house these people.
No amount of affordable housing is going to keep Heroin Jane and Meth-head Tom from being a drag on the rest of us.
Let's be real, Compassion Seattle is aimed at sweeping this subsection of the homeless population who the city give zero fucks about other than allowing them to do whatever they want.

If these people really wanted affordable housing, they wouldn't be in fucking Seattle. I mean, huge swaths of Baltimore have houses under $30k for purchase, I can only assume an apartment is astonishingly cheap. I hear the winters suck, but at least you wouldn't be persistently destitute and waiting on Kshama to throw you a taxpayer bone. But to each their own, I guess.

Oh BTW upzoning has been a disaster. They upzoned where I am in South Seattle and literally every formerly affordable SFH on the market or empty lot is being replaced with 3 luxury townhomes. They don't fit the neighborhood, they look like they belong all in a row uptown with some mixed-use bullshit, and also...THEY AIN'T AFFORDABLE THAT'S FOR DAMN SURE!

@11 No need to wish them any further emotional harm, they're plainly hurting enough already.

The humane thing to do with the chuds, of course, is involuntarily confine them to treatment facilities until such time as they can demonstrate full recovery from rage addiction and show some progress toward learning how to cope with poor people being drunk or high in public.

@11 @12 life long democrat life long Seattleite. Seems like your cool with the needle farms in our city and shit on the sidewalks. Come with an actual solution vs blaming big tech and houses being too expensive. Like @10 said if you want cheap rent move out of Seattle. No one has a right to live downtown on the cheap that's not how it works.

FWIW I got one person close to me that od'd and died under and overpass he shit it all away on pills. One more came close to dying twice and another missed the synthetic heroin wave and is still clean thank god. You can sit back an snark all you want but if you are really ok with the fact that people are dying in tents and we as a society should help them get high, give them zero consequences for stealing from you & me and turn a blind eye because that is the new progressive mindset count me the fuck out. History will show and has shown you are on the wrong side of this issue. This has been going on for 5 years, how many people have died in tents? Memba the mass murders in the jungle? Was that because rent was too high or was that over Heroin?

Shorter version: if you want more of the same continual policy failure, vote for the Deputy Mayor. If you don't choose one of the other candidates.

The format of these forums is not the greatest. 90 seconds to answer how you are going to address these issues isn't nearly enough. Unfortunately most candidates use their 90 seconds to talk about how they grew up with nothing and can relate in some way to this issue without ever actually answering the question. With that being said I believe Lance Randall has the best platform and can thoroughly detail what he plans to do. Visit his site at LanceRandall2021.com/platform

Totally agree with # 11 about the comments from right-wing assholes. May they lose their jobs and become homeless.

16 Studies show that forced drug and alcohol treatment doesn't work.

The programs that a country such as Finland has used to address the need for homes is highly successful. The Housing First approach. This program was advised some years ago to the Seattle government that was and is completely ignored. It works so, why not do it?

Poverty is a huge reason folks are on the streets suffering. One tragedy, mistake, loss of job, death can condemn someone to a desperate life.

We have some of the richest people in the world in this area. They benefit immensely from our taxes and services and labor. People are dying under the brutal, labor practices of the Amazon company for example, so why not fight that? TAX THEM.

Lose your job and support system and become homeless or never have a support system - then what? Fine the wealthy for the cheating, hidden bank accounts, brutality they do to the rest of us. Stop being cowards and blaming the victims.

A powerful labor movement in the past addressed the issue of poverty very well. We need that now.

Prisons and brutality are no answer to the pain of poverty and despair. My family has borne the loss of loved ones due to addiction and decent help unless you are wealthy is damned hard to get.

Finland only has 5 million total people in it and doesn’t share a 2000 mile border with a third-world toilet shipping tons of illegal narcotics across everyday. There’s 50,000 unemployable, dangerous, mentally deficient transients just in LA of which many will resist or refuse any help.

@16, Yeah, sounds good, I'd be for that as long as the facilities actually got built. Attach them to tiny house villages or whatever else gets built. I actually think everyone here agrees.

However, it's disappointing that at a candidate forum on homelessness, nobody mentioned drug use or mental health. I get it, bring up drug use and people start wishing harm to your family. However, if you're going to make progress with the chronically homeless, you're going to need to deal with addiction and mental health problems, not ignore them.

@25: Behold the Seattle Compassion Brigade in full flower! All anyone did here was state the totally obvious: drug addiction is a huge contributor to homelessness in Seattle, and the total failure of our political establishment even to admit this means we're not treating a root cause of homelessness. Therefore, our homeless will continue to suffer from addictions and die in tents.

Rather than just agree with these obvious points, and participate in our civic dialog about what to do, we get (@9) more straight-up denial, (@11) vicious insults hurled against our families (!), and (@12) some grand old Soviet-style musings about the glories of abusing medicine to torture (us) dissidents into silence. The virtue, it signals.

Part of the problem with any discussion like this is that by "homelessness" we are conflating two problems. My understanding is that most of the homeless population are people who can (and did/do) hold jobs and are simply in a bad place economically, for whatever reason. Simply providing housing for them, either through affordable private construction or public housing, would solve the bulk of their problems.

There is another (I believe much smaller) group with obvious mental health and addiction problems. They are the ones camping in the parks, shooting heroin on the sidewalk, and ranting at passersby. Blaming Amazon is not going to help this crowd. They need meaningful treatment opportunities, and for the ones who are so mentally ill that they just can't function, some kind of supervised environment. Unfortunately, the hospitals were all closed leaving them with nowhere to go.

@27: The numbers actually skew very far in the other direction: the number of homeless persons with chronic issues far outnumbers any who are just temporarily down on their luck. The City conducted a survey of the homeless in 2016, and published the results about four years ago. (http://coshumaninterests-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/City-of-Seattle-Report-FINAL-with-4.11.17-additions.pdf) Here's some of what it reported:

68.7% of the homeless reported not being from Seattle. A majority reported having arrived in Seattle already homeless. A majority reported drug use. A majority reported themselves as being unemployed or unable to work; only 11% said a rent increase had caused them to become homeless. "The highest percent (71%) of respondents reported that they could afford a monthly rent of less than five hundred dollars, followed by 24% who reported they could afford between $500 and $1,000 monthly."

To put that last sentence in context, $500/month apartment rentals were last seen in Seattle about twenty years before the survey was taken. Fully 95% of our homeless were telling us they hadn't been able to afford living here in a long, long time; they had not recently been driven out into the street.

@29: You're welcome. It's amazing how many commenters here respond with denial (@9) or with rage and personal attacks (@11, @12) to anyone who dares state the obvious about Seattle's homelessness crisis. It's not surprising to see the two conflated @19, who wishes harm upon us dissenters and then airily declares, "Studies show that forced drug and alcohol treatment doesn't work." No actual studies were cited, for a very obvious reason:

"Interestingly, those who were mandated demonstrated less motivation at treatment entry, yet were more likely to complete treatment compared to those who were not court-ordered to treatment. While controlling for covariates known to be related to treatment completion, the logistic regression analyses demonstrated that court-ordered offenders were over 10 times more likely to complete treatment compared to those who entered treatment voluntarily (OR=10.9, CI=2.0-59.1, p=.006). These findings demonstrate that stipulated treatment for offenders may be an effective way to increase treatment compliance."

(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23192219/)

"That there exists an ecosystem that will marginally sustain him..."

Or, very simply, Seattle's homeless policy is enabling your family member's addiction. When we could instead arrest the people who commit crimes, and offer them a choice: mandatory treatment, possibly with a short stay in confinement at the start, or serious jail time with no treatment. If we did this to persons who are still housed, but losing housing stability due to addiction, we might even prevent them from becoming homeless in the first place.

I wish you the best of luck with your family member. Hopefully you can help him escape from addiction before the self-described Compassion Brigade here succeeds in killing him.

It's so funny watching the non Seattle suburbanites pushing their far right agenda.

Fun fact: all cities up and down the East Coast, the West Coast, and the Gulf Coast have problems with homelessness and drugs. You're not going to fix this by "cracking down on drugs", they've tried that and it doesn't work.