One of the things that frustrates me the most about our local homeless crisis--if that's what it is, or maybe it's just become more visible--is how lacking the regional response to it is. Seattle seems to be the only city in the north King County/south Snohomish County area that is actually trying to do anything about homelessness versus shuffling the problem off to another city.
This is frustrating for two reasons: one, it puts all of the burden on the backs of the Seattle taxpayers. All the surrounding 'burbs need to do is come up with enough to pay their police departments to round up the "troublemakers"--because that's usually how someone sleeping on a bench in Bellevue or Redmond[0] is deemed--and then ship them off to the King County Jail, conveniently located in downtown Seattle. Once the "miscreant" (in quotes because, usually, their only crime is sleeping on a bench or maybe smelling of pot) sleeps it off, that person walks out into the drizzly daylight of now being in Seattle, so he or she heads to Pioneer Square or Ballard or Lake City or Rainier Valley and begins anew.
Two, and this is where I get selfish, as a result of this the suburbs "get to" (more like create a situation) enjoy things like clean parks, outdoor bathroom facilities that aren't overused to the point of despair, streets and other public spaces unencumbered by tents and other makeshift encampments...all the while, their residents cluck their tongues about how dirty and run down and depressing Seattle is and aren't their cities so much nicer for not having all of the street people around? But Seattle, for all of the money we residents pour into housing programs and social services, are the bad people if we try to insist that tents not be located on public property or broken-down RVs move every 72 hours.
To continue my rant, speaking of money we pour into all of these things, now I turn to what I've been told by homeless people and their advocates about our broken shelter system. A big problem is that such services are concentrated into a couple of small areas (Pioneer Square and Ballard) and there's neither the funding nor the will to integrate them into surrounding neighborhoods so any new siting proposal meets significant resistance. On top of that, our shelters are unattractive for a laundry list of reasons (security, insufficient storage for personal goods, deliberately separating couples into same-sex housing, disallowing pets) that, while are good for efficient operation of dormitories, don't account for the humans who are trying to exist--or choosing not to exist--in them.
So yeah, it's frustrating all the way around, for the housed and the unhoused. While I'll still vote yes on the housing levy in August--because what does voting no accomplish? Cuts in public services to those who need it most and no impetus to build better facilities--I wish our response, our regional response would be better.
0 - I pick on Bellevue and Redmond but they're not the only ones, just the most recent target of my ire. Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, Kirkland, Bothell, Kenmore, Woodinville...they're all just as complicit in "oh no, we can't possibly build any more public facilities but if you dare take a nap on the grass in one of our parks off to 5th and James you go."