If you’re too much of a scaredy cat to go down to the goddamn Market, you shouldn’t be on the Seattle city council. Instant disqualification due to lack of urbanity.

"But one downtown neighborhood has not only found a few solutions, it's managed to expand them during the pandemic. For forty years, Pike Place Market has taken on the problems that the rest of Seattle struggles with — and they may have a few lessons for other neighborhoods."

First, the Pike Place Market is not a neighborhood; it is on the edges of two very affluent actual neighborhoods, Belltown and Downtown. Second, it should be immediately obvious that most of Seattle's actual neighborhoods can't have a convenient, taxpayer-subsidized tourist attraction to bring in money from visitors. Third, many of the services described in the article are either paid for from Market revenues (in other words, by that same expensive "tourist trap" the article repeatedly derides), or are otherwise derived from the Market being there (e.g. food bank gets the Market's abundant daily leftovers). Finally, the number of low-income housing units in the Market is so small that, as the article notes, many visitors to the Market don't even know they exist.

Other that that, though, yeah, the rest of the city should look to the Pike Place Market for answers to reclaiming their parks from campers. ;-)

This is also disrespectful and hurtful to the folks who work in that neighborhood who:
1. are there every day (including at 3am), proving that clearly it's not THAT unsafe.
2. depend on folks coming to that neighborhood for their paychecks.

My wife worked a tourist-trap bakery in the area for four years, and had some shifts that started 3-5am. She was fine. And the tendency of idiots to say shit like this hit us right in the pocketbook. Ugh.