Comments

1

Seattle politics have been dominated by far-left liberals for decades, but homelessness just gets worse every year, despite throwing billions of dollars at the problem. But somehow the right is at fault for this?

5

@1 “far left” according to who? The John Birch Society?

The “far left” that rallied to protect Amazon? You must be one of the far left weed smokers I hear so much about on Fox News if you ymthink Seattle politics is dominated by anything other than mainstream liberals. But of course Americans with an Overton Window to the right of Olie North would think Seattle is “far left.”

7

A good summary of yesterday's sweep: https://seattlecollegian.com/after-delays-4th-avenue-homeless-encampment-swept-on-short-notice/

@6 @1 Seattle is not "far-left" by any metric other than an American conservative's. Liberal politicians ≠ far-left; most of these politicians don't consistently push policy that could be viewed as such, and many are fond of corporate money. Call Sawant far-left but she's one of the few. Maybe "fauxgressive" is the better word for the majority. Look at what the Harrell administration is doing currently and previous administrations that have been perceived as "liberal" have done.

8

@5 Seriously? A socialist has been the most visible member of the Seattle City Council for the better part of a decade. Seattle leaders were among the first in the country to adopt progressive policies like the $15/hour minimum wage, safe injection sites, unions for gig workers, and so on.

9

I disagree, slums and public housing aren't the only answers to the homelessness crisis. It began years ago when states across the nation decided to close all of the institutions that treated mental health and addiction. That was literally the straw that broke the camels back. "We'll just treat them in the community", they said. The flaws in that logic are now painfully obvious.

People need a place to live, this is true whether they can work and function in society or not, so even if we have public housing and slums for those who can engage with society, there are still a very large number of mentally ill and/or addicted people who have nowhere to go. They need treatment for both conditions. Nothing will change unless and until institutions are added back to the equation. Yes, they were expensive, but they worked a hell of a lot better than miles and miles of tents and human shit.

11

Someone here thinks the $15/hour wage is far-left, socialist, progressive politics.

$15/hour was progressive 10 years ago.

But forget about that... did you guys actually read what Charles wrote? Or did you just skim it? From the comments here it appears nearly all of you just skimmed it.

Charles is not blaming the right for this, he's blaming the left. Hell it's in the title. Read it again, but this time actually read it.

15

The Stranger simply will not admit that substance use disorder and/or mental illness, not economic issues, drive the current (seven years and counting) homelessness crisis in Seattle. That is why they, and 'the left,' are losing this policy debate in one of the most liberal cities in the country. Year after year after year, Seattle's citizens provide $100M+ in homeless services, and every year, the problem either stays bad, or gets worse -- a result Seattle could have obtained for free. We saw the results of this chronic policy failure in November's elections, when Seattle's voters utterly crushed the candidates the Stranger had endorsed, and even elected a Republican for the first time in decades.

As the Stranger and its preferred City Council Members have refused to admit the real roots of the problem, there has been no civic debate on how much addiction treatment and mental-health care would cost to provide to the campers in Seattle. That cost will likely be far higher than the cost of housing all of those campers, even in one of the most expensive real-estate markets in the country. With years of expensively failed policy behind them, the Stranger and its preferred politicians will never convince voters to pay for the immense cost of treating all of the homeless, and sweeps will become the only method of removing encampments. That is the predictable result of the Stranger's persistent refusal to admit their policy has failed.

16

@16 and company simply will not admit that economic issues drive most substance use disorder and a substantial chunk of mental illness to boot (poverty inflicts trauma, and poverty makes it difficult to get treatment and care for the conditions you were born with).

17

One reviled and attacked Socialist on a city council in all SCC history does not make Seattle politics “far left.”

Words have meanings. Seattle is liberal to centrist by any metric that has meaning outside Fox News.

This can be easily proven by the damn legislation they pass. The labeling of SCC as some radical faction of leftists is a fear mongering Rightwing tactic. Which we can see has been effective.

18

That’s very humorous. Commenters here are so under educated they had to Google the wiki on “Overton Window” to concoct yet another strained guilt by association strawman and fallacy. That gave me a chuckle.

And $15 an hour wage “far left?” Do you read books? Or is the extent of your knowledge on political and economic history come from shrieking at strangers on the internet?

If the original minimum wage by “far leftist” Franklin Delano Roosevelt has kept up with cost of living as it was designed to do it would’ve reached $15 an hour over two decades ago.

$15 per hour min wage was about as mainstream democratic a policy as there has ever been. Council member Sawant neither invented it nor did most the legwork for it. Though she’d like to believe she did.

It gestated in classic Democratic bastions like unions for well over a decade. And that such a minor tweak to wages garners such an outsider rage response is an even greater example of how far right “democrat” has come to mean on economic policies.

Not that we have any choice. SCC is classically liberal. It’s what they call themselves. It’s Fox News that has successfully equated liberal with left.

And apparently an understanding of basic facts, syntax and history is now a bizarro world pejorative “progressive.”

20

@15 what if they aren’t losing so much as playing a different game. Everyone assumes the goal is to solve homelessness yet the one thing progressives and conservatives agree is the city has spent years and untold dollars with little result. Maybe I’m jaded at this point but it feels more like the homeless are just props used by various groups for whatever their goal de jour is. For Sawant it’s a failure of capitalism and the need to socialize everything, for the labor Dems it’s a need to provide more services with union labor, for the public safety proponents it’s a reason to increase headcounts. If homelessness was solved tomorrow there would be a lot of people out of jobs so I’d ask again what is the true goal?

21

@16: Meet Andre! (https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2022/03/04/67776468/the-people-of-3rd-and-pine) Andre was once homeless, dealing in stolen property at 3rd & Pine so he could buy drugs. Now, thanks to Seattle's taxpayers, Andre is stably housed. Thus, he now spends his days dealing in stolen property at 3rd & Pine so he can buy drugs. Can you see the correlation between housing and drug use in his case? I'm sure you can!

@20: Yes, Seattle has built a massive homeless-industrial complex, by focusing on economics instead of substance use disorder and mental illness. And yes, there are plenty of opportunists (e.g. the heads of the homeless service providing organizations, raking in six-figure salaries at public expense) who eagerly exploit this situation for personal reasons. It's not a conspiracy, just a collusion of like interests. First step is to eliminate the complex's enablers on the City Council, like CMs Herbold and Sawant, who routinely exempt SHARE from the standard reporting requirements for receipt of public funds.

22

@21 agree. I don't think there is anything nefarious going on (except for taxpayer dollars getting flushed) just that the homeless are a very useful tool for certain people due to their high visibility and the emotional response they generate in voters good and bad. Maybe voters will have had enough to remove Sawant, Herbold and Morales but given how those districts typically vote I wouldn't count on it and even then whoever replaces them is probably not going to be all that different especially in D2 and D3.

23

@22: There is hope. Sawant almost lost, literally to nobody. Herbold became a Defunderpants Gnome within a year of her campaign promise, for adequate funding of SPD. (Herbold slowly negotiates to remove encampments from sidewalks in West Seattle; when a homeless couple dared to park their RV outside of her West Seattle home, she simply had the SPD haul it away, pronto.)

There's a difference between consistently voting liberal, and tolerating poor performance when other candidates are available.

24

@18 Charles' point was that the right somehow prevents the left from taking action to address homelessness.

But Seattle consistently is among the first cities in the country to adopt progressive policies. Yeah, lots of people were talking about adopting a $15/hour minimum wage: but no one actually did it until we did. Indeed, at this moment only a handful of cities and counties have wages at this level.

The other issues I flagged (safe injection sites, unions for gig workers) are similar: these issues were widely discussed, but few, if any, other jurisdictions actually took action. Again, Seattle led the way.

Seattle's elected officials are consistently on the leading edge of adopting progressive policies. As @19 suggests, this isn't a debatable issue: it's a fact.

26

@25: Cool story, bro.

27

The crux of this homelessness issue is that rich folks don’t care about poor folks, at least from a policy standpoint, so we get these homeless sweeps that make everyone late for work by bricking the downtown corridor during rush hour and allowing Seattle law-enforcement to dick-swing before appalled tax-payers.

Mr. Mudede is more than correct, the homelessness crisis is a predictable manifestation of poor, self-serving public policy that benefits the country club set and lobbyists who control the purse strings that get posers like Mayor Harrell elected.

We need more drug-treatment services and well-supervised public housing where the residents aren’t allowed to do drugs or relieve themselves out the window or destroy public property.

This is the kind of law-enforcement the citizens of Seattle crave, a compassionate solution that gets people out of the cold and into medical treatment, not out on the street, panhandling and pooping in garden areas.

The streets are for the people, absolutely, but not in the sense of camping there and providing photo opportunities for the new Mayor to strut his stuff and look like a tough guy to appease his wealthy Rotary Club inspired donors, only to have the problem reappear overnight, due to lackadaisical law-enforcement and the sheer will of transients who live outside the civilized realm, in very much a zombie-state, seeking illegal drugs and stealing merchandise to help finance their clandestine activities.

We need leadership with big, hairy balls like Lorena González, Nicole Thomas-Kennedy and Nikkita Oliver, to name a few progressives who think, feel and care, while offering pro-active, results-oriented solutions to the ongoing crime and homelessness conundrum in Seattle.

The well-to-do, who live in their own airtight citadels, could give a rip about the plight of the poor, who need humane and professional intervention to redirect their energies to productive, self-fulfilling activities.

Seattle should be a city of outdoor cafes and public performances at the civic centers and parks, not a war zone occupied by the desperate and misguided, a no-man’s land where angels fear to tread.

Remember to support progressive candidates with real-world solutions like Kshama Sawant, who have the bullishness and intellectual chops to deal with these pressing civic issues.

Don’t fall prey to the dystopian horse-pudding proffered by the rich folks on both sides of the aisle, who merely wish to perpetuate the madness of poverty and deprivation so they can control the middle and lower classes, with urban decay, recreational wars overseas that serve no real purpose and higher energy costs, while driving around in Cadillac SUVs and flipping everyone the bird.

Mr. Mudede provides compelling evidence from his foray deep into L.A. that we are entering some sort of public policy purgatory due to our over-reliance on capitalist mechanisms to solve urgent public problems brought about by lop-sided wealth distribution and asinine civic leadership.

The insidious cow-towing to Trump and his big, orange buttocks, as we saw in the election of City Attorney Ann Davison, who is a socially-regressive butt-hole, should provide ample warning that troglodyte conservatism is alive and well in the rarified air of Seattle, and we must demonstrate due diligence against it’s ongoing threat of reemergence, like Nazism and the provocations of post-Soviet Russia and President Putin, the Stalinist shithead that will-not-die, like an evil zombie that is continually reanimated by the negative energy of head-up-the-ass social policy and dipshit materialism that feeds upon selfishness.

28

@27 - "well-supervised public housing where the residents aren’t allowed to do drugs or relieve themselves out the window or destroy public property."

Hear, hear. But when the homeless industrial complex hears you calling for anything except no-barriers, anything goes shelters, they're going to go ape shit.

29

In all seriousness, how do we provide some kind of meaningful way for people with zero skills and moderate ambition at best to make a living? I can't see bringing back Oliver Twist's workhouse, but there is an issue with the disappearance of butt-simple, pick-this-up-and-put-it-over-there type labor jobs.

30

@25,

"It's time for some tough love. The vagrants need to straighten up or leave. I don't give a shit where they go, as long as they kill themselves somewhere else."

American education, folks.

It's not even the middle of March and already I've read the stupidest thing I'll see all year.

Do you know you're an idiot or do you need people like me to inform you of how dumb you are?

In case it's the latter, you're an idiot.

31

There are not just the 2 solutions you mentioned Charles. There is a 3rd. Did you visit the Catholic Worker "hippy kitchen" while on Skid Row? Certainly a good Marxist like yourself would be hip to the legacy of Dorothy Day. Personalism is the 3rd way. Inviting the poor into your own midst. Going beyond outsourcing the responsibility of housing housing poor onto the state, and doing it yourself. Praxis too heavy though. We all like our comfort don't too much.

32

31: Thanks for mentioning personalism and mutual aid. It's not just a question of spending money- it's also a question of making sure no one is treated as valueless, unworthy of any respect, unworthy of any chance.

It's got to be about seeing all people as connected to us, as part of us in some small way. And of making sure all people have not only a share- and a decent share- in the harvest of what Guy Carawan called "The Tree of Life", but a real say, not only in their own existence but in the decisions that affect us all.

And it means accepting that people both have a right to be different and a right to made welcome in life.

When we find the way to do that, no one will choose the path of substance abuse or the infliction of harm on themselves or others.

33

@32: "When we find the way to do that, no one will choose the path of substance abuse or the infliction of harm on themselves or others."

No one "choose[s] the path of substance abuse..." Substance Use Disorders arise from a combination of factors, many of them internal to the individual, e.g. genetics. Claiming an alcoholic chooses to abuse herself with alcohol comes perilously close to victim-blaming, and does her no good otherwise.

Substance Use Disorders can also co-exist with other mental disorders, including ones which lead to other forms of self-harm, or to harming other persons. Again, no one chooses this path, and blaming the individual (or the external society) for making the "wrong" choices does much harm and no good. Sometimes treating a Substance Use Disorder is as simple as making the correct diagnosis and providing the appropriate treatment:

"Effective medications exist for treating opioid, alcohol, and nicotine addiction and lessening the symptoms of many other mental disorders."

(https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/substance-use-and-mental-health)

You might want to educate yourself on this topic, lest you make other misleading and/or harmful comments about it.

34

@30: In 2005, Seattle began implementing a "Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness." In 2015, this plan collapsed into a Homelessness Crisis. Since then, Seattle (not "Seattle and King County," or, "Seattle, King County, and the State of Washington," just "Seattle") has spent over half a billion dollars (!) on homeless services, and the problem has gotten much worse. @25 expressed some understandable frustration with this dismal result.

Rather than address the commenter's frustration with the underlying issues of homelessness and Seattle's utterly failed responses to homelessness, you engaged in misdirection and ad hominem attacks, down to and including name-calling. You have added nothing of value to any dialog here, and therefore your absence has not been missed.

35

@33- OK, I'll read the link.

If there is an involuntary component to substance abuse- and there is-, then why do you keep pushing for punitive, paternalistic methods and continually use rhetoric that comes close to describing all of the houseless as subhuman? Who are you to lecture anyone on "victim-blaming" when you continually treat people with substance issues as if they only have those issues because they all woke up one morning and decided to trash their lives for grins and giggles? And why do you join those who act as if it would be a solution to houselessness to either throw the houseless in cells or drive them out of town, presumably to just die somewhere else?

I'll agree that, instead of "choose the path", I should have said "end up on the path"...people are far less likely to end up on that path when society includes them, values them offers them respect and hope, than when it offers them nothing but contempt & the back of its hand.

These are people in need of healing and social acceptance, not coercion or anything involving any sort of judgmental, authoritarian treatment.

36

"If there is an involuntary component to substance abuse- and there is-, then why..."

... did you claim that persons "choose the path of substance abuse or the infliction of harm on themselves or others"?

"...then why do you keep pushing for punitive, paternalistic methods and continually use rhetoric that comes close to describing all of the houseless as subhuman?"

Please provide the quotes, with urls, showing I ever wrote anything of the kind.

Persons suffering from Substance Use Disorder need interventions, not victim-blaming lies about how they chose their sufferings. (And if some of those interventions get described by you as "coercion," then so be it. It's still better than letting them rot in tents.)

37

@36: You have no right to claim about people with Substance Use Disorder. You discredited yourself on that when you admitted your agenda was to prove that corporate greed and the increases in poverty corporate greed cause play no role in houselessness- that it's ALL just about drugs.

Nobody ever claimed drug use played no role. Nobody. We need humane, non-coercive means of getting people with what you call Substance Use Disorder into a more survivable mode of life.

But it is nothing but obscene for you to pretend that growing economic inequality and growing concentration of wealth play no role in houselessness, that the rich should be let off the hook and simply assumed to be everyone's "betters".

People with what you call Substance Abuse Disorder are much less likely to end up on the worst paths that condition leads them to if society values and respects them, as it should respect all of us, and if they have actual hope.

It is not a question of "Just saying 'NO!'" and it never was.

Drug use is a product of pain and hopelessness. Hope is the cure.

It's not an "individual effort" question and law enforcement and the courts have no positive role to play in it.

38

"And it means accepting that people
both have a right to bedifferent and
a right to [be] made welcome in life.

When we find the way to do that, no
one will choose the path of substance abuse
or the infliction of harm on themselves or others."

Y E S.

"But it is nothing but obscene for you to pretend that growing economic inequality and growing concentration of wealth play no role in houselessness, that the rich should be let off the hook and simply assumed to be everyone's 'betters'.

BINGO Bravo &
Thank You
Alaskan...

Concentrated Wealth
Will be the End
of the fucking
Free World.

the Fascists are Busy
Banging Down the
fucking Door

39

@37: "You have no right to claim about people with Substance Use Disorder. "

Better angry than grammatical, I guess.

"You discredited yourself on that when you admitted your agenda was to prove that corporate greed and the increases in poverty corporate greed cause play no role in houselessness..."

Blah, blah, blah. Quotes or it didn't happen.

"Nobody ever claimed drug use played no role. Nobody."

Really? Right here, Charles published an entire headline post about homelessness, which doesn't mention drugs at all. The Stranger has repeatedly claimed that poverty alone drives homelessness. A recent post here even claimed that homeless persons steal liquor -- not to drink it, mind you, but to sell or trade it for food! (https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2022/03/04/67765640/slog-am-downtown-is-scawwy-politicians-cant-resist-fucking-over-trans-kids-the-state-wants-to-make-it-harder-for-frats-to-kill-young-men) So I'd say the Stranger has done a really, really good job of claiming "drug use played no role" in Seattle's homelessness crisis.

"...what you call Substance Use Disorder."

While I'd happily accept credit for having coined the term, I have to admit medicine is not my field. "Substance Use Disorder" is a common clinical term, and your woefully-ignorant claim about persons choosing drug use shows you didn't know anything at all about this common diagnosis. Therefore, your comments on how to help persons suffering from it -- as a large number of Seattle's homeless clearly are -- range from the merely ignorant to the potentially harmful. You're the one who should not be speaking on this topic.

"Drug use is a product of pain and hopelessness. Hope is the cure."

So, have you been writing prescriptions for "hope," and handing them out to Seattle's homeless persons? (You know, I can actually believe you'd really be that cruel.)

Faced with facts which contradict your opinions, you reject those facts, and re-state your ignorant opinions. This is the real reason "the left will continue to lose on homelessness."

@38: Victim-blaming homeless persons for having Substance Use Disorder, eh? That's low, even for you, but I guess you just can't help yourself.

40

'low'
for a
person
sans bottom
el tentsores?

ha-ha
good one


Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.