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Comment by dogmatic_di | Hacker News Reader

As someone living there right now the article really doesn't properly cover the discontent in the city.

There is an overwhelming sense that Seattle has done too much to encourage homelessness (particularly with the expansion of policies like this one). "Tent City" has spread so far that it's getting into the suburbs and from a residents perspective it's getting far worse not better. I have routinely seen people shooting up and smoking glass pipes (not marijuana) in broad daylight in the Downtown and Pioneer Square areas. There's shouting, theft, property crime at all hours of the night near my apartment (Though strangely compared to SF I know very few people who have had their cars broken into).

Regardless of the tone of this article, Seattle is not a model to follow, it's a cautionary tale.

View on HN

Sounds a bit like Zurich in the 80s and 90s[1]

The problem was, while not solved, massively improved by providing heroin to hardcore addicts[2]

The only argument against it, really, is that it's morally wrong to hand out drugs to addicts. Leaving this argument aside the approach was (and is) widely successful. Not only for the city, as such, but also for the addicts who get a chance to stabilize their lifes, are much healthier and actually can hold down appartments and jobs.

[1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/extern/storytelling/needletraum...

[2] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-12/us-can-learn-lot-zuri...

Further <https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/05/the-case-for-prescriptio...

A short read, a couple of pages. Extract:

" The [heroin] addicts on prescriptions, by contrast, looked like the nurses or receptionists or Dr Marks himself. As a group, you couldn’t tell.

Faced with this evidence, Marks was beginning to believe that many ‘of the harms of drugs are to do with the laws around them, not the drugs themselves’. In the clinic, as Russell Newcombe tells me, they started to call the infections and abscesses and amputations ‘drug war wounds’. So Dr Marks began to wonder: if prescription is so effective, why don’t we do it more? He expanded his heroin prescription programme from a dozen people to more than 400.

The first people to notice an effect were the local police. Inspector Michael Lofts studied 142 heroin and cocaine addicts in the area, and he found there was a 93 per cent drop in theft and burglary. ‘You could see them transform in front of your own eyes,’ Lofts told a newspaper, amazed. ‘They came in in outrageous condition, stealing daily to pay for illegal drugs; and became, most of them, very amiable, reasonable law-abiding people.’ He said elsewhere: ‘Since the clinics opened, the street heroin dealer has slowly but surely abandoned the streets of Warrington and Widnes.’

One day a young mother called Julia Scott came into Dr Marks’s surgery and explained she had been working as a prostitute to support her habit. He wrote her a prescription, and she stopped sex work that day. "

Just a perspective, not saying right or wrong.

Edit: added this:

" And something nobody predicted took place. The number of heroin addicts in the area actually fell. Research published by Dr Marks in the Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh compared Widnes, which had a heroin clinic, to the very similar Liverpool borough of Bootle, which didn’t — and found Widnes had 12 times fewer addicts. "

Faced with this evidence, Marks was beginning to believe that many ‘of the harms of drugs are to do with the laws around them, not the drugs themselves’.

I believe this to be quite self-evident. A heroin addict can be quite a succesful and functioning member in society, provided that she can maintain her habit, without the hassle that comes with bad quality drugs and the stress (and invariably crime), which is required to maintain the addiction.

That all falls away when the drug is made available cheaply, regularely and even paid for by health insurance.

How is this different from what happened with OxyContin and the like —- which when made widely available and widely prescribed, resulted in a massive increase in consumption, overdoses, and deaths.

OxyContin was prescribed by doctors that believed it was not addictive to patients that were not yet addicts. The prescription is temporary and ends, so then there is a new illegal drug addict.

Speculating here, the difference is two-fold:

(1) The drugs shouldn't have been prescribed in the first place. This system was creating the cycle of dependence, not attempting to manage it.

(2) Oxy and other opiates were prescribed for specific medical issues rather than recreationally. That leads to drug-seeking behavior once the normal course of treatment wears off, and eventually when cut off from legitimate supply, illicit alternatives.

Don't forget manufacturers of "long release" versions requiring prescription of fewer higher dosage pills instead of more smaller and incidentally cheaper ones.

Yes, it increased consumption by creating new addicts. Because, as with cigarettes, addicts are good customers. But it was inability to keep getting prescriptions that caused overdoses and death. Because you had all these ~middle class addicts switching to heroin, without a clue how to use illicit heroin at least somewhat safely. That, and the increasing use of fentanyl to increase potency of highly cut heroin.

It is different because you have to prove you are an addict to get the free heroin.

The oxycontin crazy created opiate addicts in droves because it was given out virtually unchecked to non addicts.

But you need some strong incentive structure to not start doing heroin in the first place. For most, that's the knowledge that heroin is going to invariably screw you over in the long term. Not to mention the long-term medical side effects of heroin usage...

Is there a young to middle aged person alive in the Western world that doesn't know that long-term drug use is bad for your health?

This doesn't deter. Besides, most folks don't intend to get addicted and only a portion do. Many more can use opiates medicinally or recreationally without addiction.

It seems decriminalisation works. Safety nets help. Offering free, medical-based addiction help would help. Prudent disussions with doctors when using opiate main meds would help - you know, what to watch out for with addiction, help if it happens, and not treating folks like criminals the rest of their lives if it happens.

I'd personally advocate legalisation of most drugs, even if I wouldn't do them, just to keep folks safe.

The painful truth to this problem seems to be that people who actively use drugs and decimate their bodies when provided a steady supply of drugs will simply die sooner?

It seems hard to argue that supporting someone's heroin habit wouldn't incur a higher than normal cost for healthcare?

This is a rotten post and I'll dissect it.

> The painful truth

You're immediately claiming truth. That blocks other viewpoints. Also 'painful' which is a weasel word.

> people who actively use drugs

as opposed to passively use them?

> and decimate their bodies

you presuppose what they do 'decimate' their bodies. Maybe they do but it's a bit short on facts innit. And related, does taking copious amounts of alcohol (which I agree does damage bodies) count, what with alcohol being legal and socially acceptable?

> when provided a steady supply of drugs will simply die sooner?

A presumption, although one I'd have real trouble disputing. But facts are needed here.

> It seems hard to argue

dude, more weasel words!

> that supporting someone's heroin habit wouldn't incur a higher than normal cost for healthcare

The article gives examples of higher healthcare (and police) costs for not supporting them. Quite explicitly.

Also

"when provided a steady supply of drugs will simply die sooner" and "incur a higher than normal cost for healthcare" may be incorrect - they may die sooner thus saving the NHS money because pensions and extended healthcare due to old age are avoided. I understand this argument has been made for smoking; smokers are claimed to cost less than non-smokers. I'll see if I can find a proper study for this.

Thanks for your feedback! This is actually more feedback & more meaningful than what I get from my FAANG manager. I'll use this to better form my arguments going forward, thanks friend.

> you presuppose what they do 'decimate' their bodies. Maybe they do but it's a bit short on facts innit. And related, does taking copious amounts of alcohol (which I agree does damage bodies) count, what with alcohol being legal and socially acceptable?

It's pretty hard to get Hepatitis C, AIDS, pulmonary infections, or collapsed veins from a few mixed drinks or beers...

It speaks well of you that you took it constructively! I appreciate that, upvoted.

> It's pretty hard to get Hepatitis C, AIDS, pulmonary infections, or collapsed veins from a few mixed drinks or beers...

I won't argue with the collapsed veins I guess, I don't know if there's a way to avoid that. I didn't know that pulmonary infections were associated with heroin, thanks for the info.

The other stuff is - I presume, and you may disagree - a product not of the drug but of the contaminants and circumstances. Hep & aids from shared needles (and see my other comment, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20165469> actually I presume it was shared needles, she was female so it may have been from prostitution). A proper needle exchange facility will fix that, perhaps.

Bad stuff certainly can happen from booze, stories like this <https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-poisonous-mix-in-in... keep cropping up over the years from India. It's the contaminants which kill. There may have been similar stories from US prohibition but I can only find this <http://www.1920-30.com/prohibition/prohibition-poison.html> but it's actually from that age so its honesty may be suspect.

Regarding the debating style, it comes with practice - keep it up and all the best!

This is one of the most civil and productive exchanges I’ve ever seen on HN. Props to you both.

Pure heroin is not toxic. It's living on the streets, cutting agents, constant withdrawls, additional substance use and injecting material of unknown purity without supervision that kills you. For most addicts, all of these issues can be fixed with a constant supply of medical grade heroin.

Society saves money with heroin programs, see "Chapter 4: Economic evaluation of supervised injectable heroin treatment" of http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/attachements.cfm/att_154996_EN_H...

Leaving them on the streets or in a state of perpetual craving and poverty is expensive, too. The studies others cited says crime rates plummeted. Imagine how much damage local people and businesses might have suffered, imagine how much police efforts might have been spent, and emergency room visits that might have occurred, if those people were not given treatment.

My guess is that since we already have studies where people are given heroin as a form of rehabilitation, there should also be some studies about the cost of such programs. Wish someone could share some of them.

I completely agree! I think the narrative would then become “rich and greedy big pharma gets rich selling legal narcotics to addicts”

I think the narrative would then become “rich and greedy big pharma gets rich selling legal narcotics to addicts”

Why would ?

Look up Purdue Pharma and their colleagues. Pay attention to the shenagigans they applied to get millions of Americans hooked.

Argueably the only difference between that lot and your average street dealer is that the street dealer doesn't buy himself a bunch of politicians.

Why would that matter? Most likely tapering off the drug dosage is a necessary part of the treatment process.

> But you need some strong incentive structure to not start doing heroin in the first place.

You really don't. You seem like a straight-laced individual, if I told you heroin were legal in the US tomorrow would you go get some? I seriously doubt it. Anyone who wants it can already get it. Anyone not using isn't going to start due to legalization.

You know what legal thing I hear is fun but bad for you? Autoerotic asphyxiation -- but you don't see me hanging from the ceiling fan.

I urge you to research the Portuguese model, where all drugs were decriminalized to massive success [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...

I urge you to research the Portuguese model

Also, don't forget to mention that Norway is currently running a test program to give free heroin to its addicts.[0]

[0] https://www.foxnews.com/world/norway-to-test-free-heroin-pro...

That argument doesn't sound well founded. The booming marijuana industry and its popularity among previously non-pot smokers should've been your first clue.

(1) Marijuana is not nearly as bad for you as tobacco or alcohol, whereas I think we all agree hard drugs are worse. This study from a few years back should put things into perspective [1]. I think it's disingenuous to compare a drug that's objectively safe to one that's broadly recognized as objectively harmful.

(2) As of October 2018 (shortly before legalization) 47% of all Canadians have tried pot. [2] Now that it's legal, people are just more willing to fess up to it. Again, it's nothing they couldn't get before if they'd wanted it. Further [3] shows that the percentage of people smoking pot in Canada did not in fact increase after legalization.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/8094759/alcohol-marijuana

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/587689/marijuana-consump...

[3] https://www.countable.us/articles/21403-statistics-show-cana...

From Statistics Canada: "For example, the vast majority (98%) of those who have never consumed cannabis indicated that they would not use in the next three months. In contrast, most daily or almost daily (93%) and weekly (84%) users thought they would continue to use in the next few months at the same frequency." [1]

[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/190207/dq190...

Anecdotal, but I've found more people are simply willing to admit they smoked pot now that marijuana looks to be legal. People simply lied about it.

> that heroin is going to invariably screw you over in the long term

I understand that about 60% of heroin users can use it recreationally in the way you or I would have a few drinks then stop because we know our limit.

That figure came from a letter in mewscientist mag but I can't find it, so treat with skepticism. I get the impression its reputation for certain and terrible addiction is the from anti-drugs campaigns and they aren't reliable, by design.

Granted, I don't believe that demographic (60% can use recreationally without issue) are the ones already filling the streets...

> Not to mention the long-term medical side effects of heroin usage...

The constipation?

It is a perspective, but I think the culture in most places in the US would render this option unviable.

I can guarantee you that if this were to be attempted in SF, they would have to have the drugs administered by medical staff. They couldn't just hand heroin and crack to the patients. Pimps and dealers would send in mules to get drugs that could be resold for cash. That would also probably cause human trafficking to surge.

Portugal's efforts to reduce addiction and homelessness sound great too, but those won't work here either. We need to find solutions that are workable for our culture... or wait for our culture to change.

> ...they would have to have the drugs administered by medical staff

As they do in the UK I believe. I was once in a branch of boots IIRC (boots is a UK pharmacist) in a midlands city where there was plenty of drugs problem. A rattily-dressed guy came in and they gave him half a measuring cup of some thick green liquid which he drank in half a minute, while he chatted with them. They were watching him carefully, 2 of the pharmacists.

I dunno but I guess that was methadone.

There's no reason to assume that they'd simply hand out the stuff, and if it was by medical staff who expected to be taken as they watched, that's ok I think.

Dunno about the UK, but usually for the more trust-earned patients, they get to take most of their doses home and consume them there.

I believe you're spot-on that culturally that would not be acceptable in the US.

I can guarantee you that if this were to be attempted in SF, they would have to have the drugs administered by medical staff. They couldn't just hand heroin and crack to the patients.

I'm not sure about the logistics, but don't think they're that complicated. Getting into those programs is tied to quite stringent conditions. Like a certain age barrier and a number of attempts to go clean. I'd wager that there's more prescribed Ritalin resold on the black market than heroin obtained through those programs.

In one sense I believe it was fundamentally successul: It turned the drug from having a "hero image" in the 70s and 80s into a complete loser drug.

Harm reduction is one of the pillars in treatment of addiction, which now is widely and generally accepted. Proven by two referendums in which the public had a say on the issue. And harm reduction is unarguably a good thing, when it comes to addiction.

> Pimps and dealers would send in mules to get drugs that could be resold for cash.

Who they are going to resell them to?

When I was in my early 20's a good friend of mine (mid 30's) was on the methadone program.

He functioned more or less fine all things considered, but used to get a little more than he needed and would trade the excess for weed with a guy who used occasionally.

They were only small amounts, and it was methadone rather than heroin so all of those caveats apply, but the situation seemed harmless enough to me at the time.

I remember that sometimes he'd be a little more out of it than normal, though, and it was when he'd have his supervised "usual" dose as a part of the program rather than the takeaway prescription.

Not sure why the weed dealer didn't get on the program himself, but I don't know what's involved -- maybe he really was one of the mythical recreational users, or maybe he was selling it on (seems unlikely in such small amounts, but that would depend on how many people he had that same arrangement with).

Other cities, states or countries.

Then let's let those other cities, states or countries deal with this. Or do you deem those others so incapable that they require a nanny?

Give out only some milligrams of decent, even "organic" stuff per person, once every day - and the logistics will make it impossible to export any amount worth it, even at the todays prices.

I think it’s quite obvious that drugs prescribed this way have to be consumed in front of a supervisor.

No, that's unproductive. This approach will only lead to the black market staying black.

Drugs are recreational. By outlawing, or otherwise restricting drugs, a government admits to a decision to not provide environment and opportunities for recreation, or any other affordable opportunity for fullfillment.

By not removing those restrictions entirely, it admits it still desires the resulting oppression. So it's pointless.

The arguments you make here are identical to those made by politicians that opposed such measures in Spain and Portugal.

It is a perspective, but I think the culture in most places in the US would render this option unviable.

This isn't an excuse to do the right thing, though. I'm sure they've said it about gay marriage, integration of schools, and marriage between "races", women voting, and so on. Culture will move forward.

A less pessimistic take is that it would be unprecedented, and we have no idea what would happen.

Please review Norway's current program of doing just that before you "guarantee" any such thing...

https://www.foxnews.com/world/norway-to-test-free-heroin-pro...

We would need to do something like a wet house https://sfpublicpress.org/news/homelessness/solutions/2017-1.... where only residents get the heroin, on site.

> ... looked like the nurses or receptionists or Dr Marks himself.

That would be because Dr Marks can't see himself. The difference between a high functioning, long term heroin addict and everyone else is that the heroin addicts require large support staffs that keep them high functioning.

The difference between a high functioning, long term heroin addict and everyone else is that the heroin addicts require large support staffs that keep them high functioning.

Not really. They require their regular fixes, but are then able to be quite functional, if highly addicted.

Where the requirement for significant resources come in is initially, vetting an addict for eligeability to enter the program.

After that it's only a question of controling the distribution. Pharmacies can function quite well as gate keepers in the process.

You mean all the people who make and prescribe and administer the heroin? If that’s your meaning, then “everyone else” has much the same problem: it’s a rare person in our society who isn’t dependent on some part of the pharmaceuticals / medical equipment / biochemical industry to keep their life together. You can’t just stop taking SSRIs if you’re on them, insulin if you’re diabetic, antibiotics in the middle of a regimen, immunosuppressants if you’ve had an organ transplant... and you could never be a doctor (without immediately causing a life-threatening incident) without a constant supply of scrub and pre-sterilized instruments.

>You can’t just stop taking SSRIs if you’re on them, insulin if you’re diabetic, antibiotics in the middle of a regimen, immunosuppressants if you’ve had an organ transplant...

These do not constitute such a large portion of the population that you can say that folks who do not require them are rare. If anything it's the opposite.

The point I make is that heroin addicts require everything that everyone else requires, plus medical support staff that provide them with cheap and safe sources to feed their addiction. Equating this with the tools of the trade of medical professionals is absurd.

The point I make is that heroin addicts require everything that everyone else requires, plus medical support staff that provide them with cheap and safe sources to feed their addiction.

Pharmacies serve quite well and rather cost efficient for this purpose. It's not really that far away of their core business of dispensing prescrition drugs. The substance is different, but the logistics are exactly the same.

You may think that pharmacy robberies are a concern, but it's not really an issue. I accept that this may not universally be the case.

Pharmacists (at least in the US) can give intramuscular injections, but are not licensed to give intravenous injections. That has to be done by nurses, or M.D's. I'm unsure as to a phlebodomist. Unless you're talking Oxycodone (sp?) or oral heroine (long release) or something of that nature. At which point, my point is mute =)

>...plus medical support staff that provide them with cheap and safe sources to feed their addiction.

These systems are already in place. Maybe I'm being presumptuous but they have pharmacies where you come from, right?

I thought it clear point well made in the text that when prescriptions were given, people could continue with normal lives. Sans such support they had other major medical problems (I knew a heroin addict that got hep from needle sharing).

If they didn't need to rob for their habit then the large 'support staff' of police is reduced.

You seem to have ignored the facts in the article. That, or there's more about your position that is not obvious, perhaps you know or have worked with some addicts and have additional experience I haven't?

So you're saying doctors are doing their job properly is a problem? How many people with bad eyesight could be high functioning individuals without their eye doctor?

what do you mean by this? it sounds like Dr marks's approach is quite resource efficient. many people are served by each clinician.

> ‘Since the clinics opened, the street heroin dealer has slowly but surely abandoned the streets of Warrington and Widnes.’

Is there any doubt, then, about who is bankrolling support for prohibition and why?

I completely agree. I have told this to people for years. You have this population addicted to this drug we would produce for pennies and instead of working with them we make it illegal and challenge them through theft, prostitution, and street dealing just so they can supply their habit. Furthermore, I heard that in the countries that started the dealers dry up and new heroin addicts are simply few and far in between. I suspect that laws were not originally designed to help these people but rather to exert control over them. On a side note, with all the problems alcohol causes it amazes me we sell it but worry so much about others such as marijuana.

I don't think it should be assumed that the homelessness is caused by the addiction, rather than both being comorbid to some third condition. Certainly some homelessness is caused by addiction, but for some a mental illness could be the cause of the homelessness and the drug-use may be an attempt to self-medicate that mental illness. In that scenario, providing clean and safe heroin would improve their quality of life, but wouldn't address the underlying condition or the subsequent homelessness. The family living next to the tent city will probably still feel pretty upset about the state of things.

The family living next to the tent city will be much happier without its property being constantly broken into ($300 window repair for the sin of leaving $5 in change in the cup holder), or the other acts that the opioid-dependent are willing to do to avoid withdrawals.

Happier is relative; living next to a tent city is still awful, even if there aren't any associated burglaries.

Patiently waiting for this to expand into a mainstream program here in Vancouver... Meanwhile, the streets near where I work are literally mayhem 24/7. Take the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, enlarge, enhance, and shittify and you're only part way to how bad parts of downtown Vancouver are these days.

If homelessness is a problem, why should the alternative be to put them in jail or prison? For something as simple as car camping, it seems like an unjustifiable punishment for a simple offense. Without getting into much of a semantics argument, this post itself puts off a sense of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” attitude when it comes to homelessness. In a city that has a GDP of $231 billion in 2010[1], it seems ineffective to punish the homeless instead of trying to rid the city of the problem in a more productive manner than hauling offenders away. While public consumption of drugs should still be a citational offense, the simple possession of a drug should not be a jail sentence. There are many users that have deeper issues that need to be worked out to rid them of their addiction and putting them into confinement is not always the most effective way. Seattle needs to invest in safe injection sites, public health programs, and they need to build more shelters for their homeless. In today’s society, homeless are looked at as the bottom of the feeder chain, but when we do that, we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance.

1: http://www.greyhilladvisors.com/gross-metropolitan-product/

A tremendous amount of these homeless don't want to quit heroin. They don't want to live in shelters. They want to live in a tent and shoot heroin.

There is a heroin addict that lives on one street I use to walk to work. He can't have more than a few years to live, he's as broken as humans get. The street he lives on is littered with literally hundreds of his used needles across bus stops, gardens, yards, paths. He defecates on the street and in bags that he leaves around.

Letting people do this legally, which Seattle now de facto does, is not appropriate.

> A tremendous amount of these homeless don't want to quit heroin.

That’s sort of how addiction works. Drugs are a lot of fun and feel good for a long time and that lets you ignore negative consequences way past the point that someone not on drugs would make a change in their life.

People who are addicted to heroin would rather do heroin in a muddy ditch than be sober in a 5 star hotel.

Unless you have been addicted to something yourself _AND_ realised the fact, you have no say.

The psychological problems that lead to addiction of any kind are very deep. The addiction itself is just a symptom.

What this decision is - is just a declaration of "let's stop fighting symptoms, maybe that will allow us to see the root problem".

I did a lot of club drugs in my 20s and knew a lot of addicts and alcoholics (although personally once I decided to quit everything around 30, I just stopped cold turkey with no problems), and although I personally avoided opiates I knew people who didn’t and had very hard lives as a consequence.

You are correct that most of them had hard lives to begin with. Happy people with strong support networks don’t tend to use heroin, I wouldn’t think.

> A tremendous amount of these homeless don't want to quit heroin.

Their addictions would be better managed if they lived anywhere but the street.

> They don't want to live in shelters.

They don't want to live in dry shelters.

> They want to live in a tent and shoot heroin.

No, they want to shoot heroin, and when given the option between tent and heroin, versus a dry shelter, they'll take the former.

That doesn't mean that they wouldn't prefer having a managed addiction, and not living on the streets. [1]

There are people with therapists, homes, loving families, and good jobs, that are also opiate addicts. They have a hard enough time breaking their addictions. In light of that, condemning someone living in a tent by the on-ramp for failing to just drop their addiction, so they can live in a shelter is lunacy.

[1] Yes, there is a small percentage of the homeless population that can't reasonably be housed, period, regardless of whether their addictions are managed. I'm not talking about them - I'm talking about everyone else.

Ultimately I don't care about blame or condemnation, it's irrelevant. What I care about is the state doing it's job and not letting anyone, for any reason, egregiously pollute and destroy our shared living environments. As far as fundamental solutions, they can and should try many things, as a first order condition, this must be forcibly prohibited.

Storing your addicted+homeless population in a prison is not only inhumane, it's not effective. And just moves the costs elsewhere. (And often increases them, since incarcerating someone is not cheap. Where will this money come from?) The problem has been swept under a rug, not actually solved.

There are two conflicting claims floating around in this thread:

> "And just moves the costs elsewhere" / "the good old 'bus them out of town, let them be someone else's problem' non-solution."

And

> "The King County homeless census[1] found the overwhelming majority of homeless in the area were living in the area before becoming homeless."

It's pretty obvious both aren't true. Either Seattle's homeless are produced primarily by Seattle, or Seattle's homeless supply is from other cities. If the homeless are coming from other cities, that supports the idea that Seattle is making itself attractive to the nation's homeless (and should stop doing that.) If Seattle's homeless are predominately from Seattle, not other cities, then Seattle should seek to emulate cities that produce fewer homeless.

Personally I believe the later theory is false. I don't believe that most of the homeless in Seattle are originally from Seattle. However many in Seattle buy into that narrative. I think Seattle is filled with homeless because other cities kick them out and Seattle welcomes them with open arms.

> If Seattle's homeless are predominately from Seattle, not other cities, then Seattle should seek to emulate cities that produce fewer homeless.

The way to do that is to just stop having well-paid jobs be created.

You're gonna need to expand on this for anyone to understand your point.

Are you suggesting that gentrification from an influx of out of state people looking for work are to blame?

The problem is homeless are ruining my city and negatively impacting my day to day life. How is getting them away from here somewhere else not effective at literally solving my only problem with them?

Because you live in a society and a society isn’t all about just your needs.

What do you want to do, execute them?

Well, in some sense what I want doesn't matter. I'd like us as a join group to have some hypotheticals and test them empirically.

But in a more direct sense, I think this all requires the government to take some sort of ownership over these people. That is to say, you are not free to live on the streets. Depending on your state (e.g. down on luck, or ill, or addicted), the treatment is different. We may have more holding centers for the government to keep people against their will who otherwise would use heroin and live on our streets. We could have some mechanism for them to go up for 'parole' so to speak, every 6-12 months. Otherwise they are treated humanely and given make-work type projects (e.g. farming or wood-working), or the opportunity to learn, should they take it.

Of course if they are truly severely mentally ill, they will just be taken care of by the government.

But none of this starts until we all agree that it is, ultimately, illegal to abuse drugs, sleep, and shit, on the streets of a city. Once we can agree on that, we can explore a entire solution set closed off from us.

Unfortunately, the 9th circuit doesn't... share my views.

> Otherwise they are treated humanely and given make-work type projects (e.g. farming or wood-working),

So you’re proposing we turn addicts into slaves. Interesting.

I'd prefer you didn't impose uncharitable inferences on what I said, and use it to imply I'm maligned. If you feel I'm unclear, or think what I said may propose something negative, feel free to politely ask for clarification.

The fundamental reason I suggested that is humans, particularly the type who suffer from mental illness or lack the ability to care for themselves, to the extent they end up destitute and addicted living in filth and on the sidewalk, require some sort of structure imposed on them. In the past that was done by the family, in our current world many of these family bonds are, sadly, falling apart.

Putting people in an asylum, only to sit around on a bed all day and take copious amounts of anti-psychotics is a miserable existence. Having the opportunity, if one chooses, to engage in meaningful work, can provide structure and meaning to life.

I'd prefer to think of it more as a therapeutic sort of work program, where those under conservatorship by the state learn how to live with structure, learn what it means to make something, and could even be compensated for their efforts.

In my mind at least, I am contrasting the reward of a hard days work tending to, say, an organic vegetable garden, with the mundane horror of sitting on a bed in between distributions of anti-psychotic medicine.

I hope my clarification gives you more context to realize I'm not suggesting slavery.

> That doesn't mean that they wouldn't prefer having a managed addiction, and not living on the streets.

Why would it matter what they prefer? The homeless person in the parent post is clearly breaking multiple laws, is a public nuisance and a health hazard. We can optimize society so that people like that are happy or we can optimize society for people who aren't a constant burden on others. There should be intense societal pressure to not do these things. Have you been to Seattle or SF lately? Their homeless problem is out of control compared to places like New York that took a more aggressive and productive stance toward dealing with the homeless.

Many, not all but many, of the addicts I've seen seem to genuinely no longer have agency anymore. Their addiction has totally taken over their life. The person you describe will likely be dead in a few years. The state stepping in and taking control, at least for a short time, could potentially save them. Instead, I think we've over indexed on assuming that if we put enough opportunities in front of people like that they'll volunteer themselves into getting clean. I don't think that's true.

What he is doing is not legal at all. He's littering. He's defecating in public. He's tresspassing presumably in some instances. He's perhaps doing these drugs in public. All of these things can get him in trouble if a cop cited him.

However, the one thing that won't get him in trouble is just having heroin in his pocket. All the other problems you list are still illegal.

In Seattle the police have stopped arresting for public defecation, as the city won't prosecute it anymore, as they don't wish to give the homeless a criminal record. The police don't arrest for using drugs in public, as the city won't prosecute if it's a small amount. The police won't arrest for minor trespassing, they'll just ask them to move along, as the city has stopped prosecuting homeless for small indiscretions, and just release them the same day. I recently had a homeless person trespassing near my home, using drugs openly, and the real tough part of this was he was manically cackling and yelling late at night, so that we couldn't sleep. We called the police, and they just told him to go do it somewhere else.

It's effectively legal to trespass, scream, and use drugs openly in Seattle.

Now, in addition to the above, if someone has illicit narcotics, the police won't arrest them.

This has become a situation where our police, who want to do their job, are being effectively restricted.

Shelters aren't meaningful places to exist in. They generally are just a big hall filled to the brim with bunk beds. All you can do there is sleep, nothing else. The people inside shelters are still lacking a home.

I agree with you in principal, but at the same time:

> we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance.

Where I live, the groups of car campers (or often times falling apart RV's) seem to attract crime, drug use, theft, vandalism, etc. I stopped going to one park in the middle of a city with a large group of car campers, when I found a used syringe in the fenced in dog play area, and saw two different heroin deals go down while playing with my dog. (one of them involved prostitution right in the back seat of the car in the middle of a city park)

>For something as simple as car camping

I have personally witnessed a car camper leave their vehicle and barefoot chase an ambulance in the road, screaming profanities at the ambulance (right across from houses with small children). Through their own profanity-laced words, the person was trying to start a fight with the ambulance. Any reasonable person would assume that this car camper was some combination of a) beyond high on some drug, or b) suffering from severe mental health issues (if so, please revoke their license and get him proper help?). My neighbors and I both witnessed the situation, and called the police. Five police cars show up, get a statement from the ambulance driver, and sit the camper down. After talking to the camper for about 5 minutes, the police left with no action.

This _exact_ same car camper 3 weeks later threw a stolen bike at a moving car, out of the blue. 1 week later, I again saw this car camper kicking cars that were stopped at a traffic light, all the while swearing profanities at them. This person is still on the street, likely ready to harass the next underserving victims.

Here's another experience, which you might just write off as another anecdote. I was with my pregnant wife for a normal pregnancy checkup. A person who again was either high or suffering severe mental problems was being restrained by hospital security for breaking the hospital entrance door. The reason? The person was screaming that "the door was not supposed to be guarded by an evil spirit". Again, this person was clear high or mentally ill, or some combination of the two. However, NO ONE, including THIS PERSON, benefits from being left on the streets.

Oh, another anecdote you might write off. I take the bus to work. One morning, there was a school field trip that shared this bus. There was another person on the bus who one might assume was homeless, but agreed, looks can be deceiving. This person was drinking from a handle of cheap vodka, and then spitting back into the bottle. In between swigs, the person was swearing. What a great environment for children. We need to feel compassion for these troubled people, and provide help, but that DOES NOT mean that we should normalize these harmful behaviors.

Anyways, just some first person anecdotes to balance this thread out. It's easy to preach when you're not the one raising children around these folks.

*edit for newline

Intervention and interning street addicts in rehab centers is a very effective program for Rhode Island. They prosecute drug crimes and misdemeanors, and offer a choice between prison or rehab. Many people who go through the program say it saved their life.

West coast states have similar alternative drug courts and rehab available, but they are underutilized, because there is no prosecution in the regular court system and therefore no incentive.

>Many people who go through the program say it saved their life.

That's great!

Theoretically though, if someone were to state publicly that it was completely ineffective, will they still get the option to stay out of jail next time?

> something as simple as car camping

It's not that simple. (Problems are never that simple.) I live in Ballard which has a lot of people living out of RVs and tents. Many of those people don't cause problems for anyone, however, I have personally experienced:

* People shitting in our alley.

* People pissing on our garage.

* Someone shitting in a medical commode on the side of the road in broad daylight. (I admit a certain admiration for this person's self-confidence.)

* In the middle of the night, someone standing at our fence gazing into our kitchen for several minutes while gesticulating wildly.

* Furniture stolen from our front porch.

* Someone rifling through our trash. (Presumably for identity theft. In Seattle, food goes into separate compost bins.)

* Finding used needles on the lawn. (I have small children, so I had to teach them that the shiny bright orange plastic things are not toys.)

* Frequent fights and people screaming at each other at all hours of the night.

* Multiple car break-ins from car prowlers. My wife caught and yelled at one car prowler before they were able to get into one.

* When they people relocate, they typically leave a pile of trash and human waste behind. Often, RVs will dump their blackwater tank directly on the street or sidewalk. This is, obviously, a health issue.

This is just what has happened directly to my wife and I. Other nearby events:

* My neighbor owns an RV in his backyard. Someone broke into it and stole several things, including an urn containing his father's ashes. He chased after the guy, who responded by pulling a knife on him. [1]

* A couple of blocks away, someone was stabbed in the chest when they confronted someone slashing tires (in what I heard was some sort of turf disagreement).[2]

* Another neighbor found a discarded gun in their bushes. They have small children too.

* Our neighbors are constantly finding trash that's been dumped in their bushes.

* Many neighbors have been screamed at, harassed, or assaulted by people that are either mentally ill, in the throes of meth psychosis, or both.

* Public parks that used to be places to play with the kids but now are effectively off-limits. [4]

All of this is just in a couple block radius, just in the past few years. And this is in a nice part of town. Residents in the city have had a lot of compassion and a lot of patience for many years, but the city has failed to actually come up with any effective solutions. In the past year or two, people have simply run out of. It's hard to get people to empathize with someone who is actively causing them harm.

Fundamentally, humans cannot safely live at urban density without access to the full range of residential services. You can't just "car camp". Humans produce waste. Without clean water, garbage pick up, and sewage services, each of those humans is a walking disease vector [3].

Safe injection sites are not a solution. If you don't address the crimes that addicts commit to afford drugs, then your injection site just becomes a crime magnet. Mental health and addiction treatment centers are good. Shelters are somewhat good but many homeless people choose not to use them because most shelters prohibit drug use.

It's not about jailing homeless people or drug addicts. It's about jailing people who repeatedly commit property or violent crime. The root cause is usually drugs, and should be treated as part of a solution. But, at the same time, other people in the city (including many other homeless people who are one of the most common victims of crime) need to be protected and feel safe. Being a drug addict should not be a blank check to steal from, vandalize, and assault people.

[1]: https://q13fox.com/2019/05/06/a-seattle-dad-frustrated-over-...

[2]: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/ballard-business-owner-hail...

[3]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/infectiou...

[4]: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/camping-in-the-end-zone-how...

What do you propose?

1. Safe injection sites, free drugs, and housing? This will solve most of your property crime + health issues, at high cost, and some moral hazard.

2. Safe injection sites and locking people up forever for property crime? If you ever let them out, without addressing the reasons for why they are breaking into cars, they'll be right back at it. This is also incredibly expensive.

3. No safe injection sites and some combination of the above? You get the same costs + problems, but also more overdoses.

4. Some other option?

The reason this is an issue is because it's a local problem that requires a national intervention.

1. The War on Drugs still exists, creating an expensive black market for addicts where they have to commit crimes to feed their addiction - money that goes to gangs/cartels. Researching treatments is difficult due to drug scheduling. Treatment options are limited (like "free drugs").

2. When a particular locality attempts to address these issues in a callous way (like busing), it "solves" the problem for locals, but of course the people still exist and just move to the next town that is not cutthroat. This leaves a disproportionate amount of the problem to those living in cities, where the most services/shelter options are available.

To truly solve the problem, we need to end the War on Drugs, build housing, and properly fund treatment centers on a national level.

Your first option is about as good as it can get when trying to solve this problem using local tools. Safe injection sites, methadone/similar, and housing are all far cheaper than just a subset of what the chronically/drug-addicted homeless cost already and they actually attempt to address the issues of addiction and homelessness. Without housing, drugs/treatment, and injection sites you get: people on the street buying from the black market spreading disease that have numerous emergency room visits and nights in jail, costing everyone far more money than the housing/treatment. But folks in cities will still be paying far more than their fair share to do so and they'll be treating a lot of outsiders from places that don't offer those services, but should - the causes of the problems will still exist elsewhere.

Treat everyone the same. My local bar recently got in trouble for allowing people to smoke weed on the patio. Meanwhile there's someone shooting heroin in the parking lot.

If you commit property or violent crime you go to jail. Rehabilitation services should be made available there.

Aside from rehabilitation services, that's what already happens: they go to jail. It's extremely expensive and does not actually solve the problems, just takes the addict off the street for a few days and adds to their record. Then they are back on the street, still an addict, with even less money. Guess what happens next.

Yes that's why I mentioned rehabilitation services. That is critical and I do not believe it should be optional.

This sounds like something right out of the "Seattle is dying" propaganda documentary that released lately. Living in White Center, I don't experience any of this. People act like its the lower 9th ward or chiraq or the walking dead around here, and it just isn't.

Seattle, by itself, cannot solve the homeless problem, we can only hope to maintain it to some extent, many of its root causes are far outside of our city limits. 80% of our nation is paycheck to paycheck, until that changes neither will homelessness. We need more housing of all kinds immediately, even if it means imminent domain, and we need clean needle facilities. We also need to give the wealthiest employers in king county a choice, pay better wages or get taxed, and ownership and investors must take the pay cut and the cost cannot be passed to the consumer. Landlords need to have some limits, they are driving the costs up enormously. Free markets were supposed to be free from usury and rentiering, not protections for them.

I live in Seattle, and have for years. I’ve lived in several different cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and South.

King County has one of the highest minimum wages in the United States. There are several organizations giving out clean needles in King County. We are building new housing at a very rapid rate and many areas of the county were upzoned just this year so we can build even more housing.

To me your comment is asking for us to do more of what we are already doing, even though what we are doing is barely slowing the growth of homelessness. There is no amount of taxation on businesses the city, county and state can impose that will provide a home for everyone that needs it. This approach will not produce positive change.

I have no idea how you got that from my comment. No where did I say we need to shuffle people around the city forever as we currently do. The city can only do so much (the up-zoning was badly needed), the state won't act, the federal government obviously won't act primarily because of attitudes such as yours, so the problem persists meanwhile you wonder why nothing changes.

Our national economy is a ponzi scheme, and our homeless are its primary victims. Until we solve the scheming, the homeless problem will only get worse.

White center is gentrifying fast – it's significantly better than it used to be. It's also significantly better, at the sidewalk level, than pioneer square and 3rd/pine.

The downtown spots have a high and constant density of mostly undangerous people, involved in low level anti social behavior.

White center has a low and volatile density of somewhat dangerous people, doing some nutty stuff. Just in the past few months, I can recall: A guy got his throat slit, while driving his car, because he had given his passenger's girlfriend a ride earlier. There was an armed robbery outside of Triangle. A 59 year old got shot in the bathroom of Tug on St Patrick's Day. I lived on 16th until recently, and would flip the scanner on every time I heard sirens, just to keep a pulse. It's not chicago, but it's legitimately dicey sometimes.

With that said, I agree that we need more housing, though I think seattle is doing an excellent job of that compared to SF, and it's reflected in the flattening rent prices. We could be doing more, though. No reason we can't have significant multistory buildings in west seattle.

City planning and zoning are much more on the side of planned economy than free market. If building was unrestrained, I'm sure there would be a lot more new housing coming online than there is.

Could someone please explain what it means to "encourage homelessness"? At a first glance, it looks like a passive aggressive implication that homeless people, if they just tried harder, wouldn't be homeless. Can anyone help me see what I'm missing?

Maybe attracting homeless would be a better way of putting it. Homeless people aren't inherently irrational. Given an option, many of them will choose a place they like better than one they don't. Add in politicians who see a chance to solve the issue by encouraging the homeless to move somewhere better for them (which lets them even sell the measure as a benefit for the homeless), it means that places that make it much better to be homeless see homeless from other areas moving in.

The King County homeless census[1] found the overwhelming majority of homeless in the area were living in the area before becoming homeless.

[1] http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/

The most common zip code they get on the questionaire is for the Pioneer Square area, where many homeless services are provided and the price of rent is higher than average. They don't require any evidence of being housed previously and, even if they did, coming to Seattle with the promise of friend hosting them on their couch counts as "living in the area" before becoming homeless.

That data is highly disputed. The question had a significantly lower response rate, and living could mean on a couch etc.

80% of our population lives paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford a 400 dollar car repair bill. That is instant homelessness for a lot of people. So much wealth is hoarded in so few hands that we are squandering vast amounts of economic potential.

This is a myth: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40...

Thanks for posting this. I've been repeating this stat quite a bit lately without knowing that it's misleading.

However, I still think we're in pretty dire straits:

> The report finds, in 2018, that 61% of adults would cover a $400 unexpected expense using cash (or its equivalent). Politicians and many in the media seem to be subtracting 61 from 100, and concluding that 39% of people, to use Warren’s phrase, “can’t come up with” the money they’d need to handle this situation.

> Instead, as the Fed report makes clear, though “the remaining 4 in 10 adults” “would have more difficulty covering such an expense,” many of them would be able to make it work by carrying a credit card balance or borrowing from friends and family."

That's still really bad. 39% of people can't cover an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing money from someone else, or effectively taking out a loan at 20%+ interest.

And the 12-14% figure for people who actually would be unable to come up with that $400 via any means is also troubling.

>The report finds, in 2018, that 61% of adults would cover a $400 unexpected expense using cash (or its equivalent).

I guess the key question is, does the other 39% not have liquid assets to cover it and thus have to take on debt, or would they choose to cover it for other reasons? I have $400 in the bank but would likely put it on a credit card because I don't like carrying that much cash nor using my debit card (to reduce risk of it being leaked). So would I be in the 39% or the 61%?

I don't really see anywhere in your post where any refutation is concrete. They hem and haw over semantics, but nothing worth note is presented contrary to the my view. In fact, in the opinion piece he quotes anecdotal things I would hear frequently from my lower wage employees, such as being unable to purchase a new tire, $400 dollars is a lot of money for a lot of people.

One example is decriminalizing possession of heroin / crack, which makes it far easier and safer for dealers (who can hold below the limits and resupply frequently), which then increases the availability and drives down the price (less risk) of those drugs. Ignoring petty crime increases it as well.

Important to note that it’s often a funnel, homelessness -> addiction, so you have to work on both sides.

I don’t have the perfect solution, nobody seems to, but Seattle and a few other cities seem to be going down the wrong path with vigor.

Canada prescribes Heroin to some addicts... costly, $24K/year, but potentially ROI positive given the break-ins, petty crime, and cost of responding to it (police, insurance costs, etc.)

With methadone programs being about 1/4 the cost.

Probably lots of room to cut costs too.

We had a post here last week about soda taxes in Philadelphia and it seemed like common sense that by making sugary drinks more expensive, you are encouraging people to consume it less, which results in fewer people drinking it.

We can discuss this with no implication that there's a static amount of soda consumption in the world, or that people want to be obese from consuming it. We understand life is a series of choices, "when to consume sugary drinks" makes up some of them, and that by disincentivizing that choice, people are more likely to choose a different beverage.

Nobody "chooses" homelessness, but like anything else, becoming / staying homeless often is the result of numerous choices, some of which are easier than others for various reasons. When you artificially remove bad consequences from some of those choices, it is not surprising that those choices are made more often.

The big difference is, you can simply stop consuming soda drinks if the habit becomes too expensive, but if you are a homeless person, you cannot really just stop being homeless.

The claim isn't that you can "just stop being homeless."

> Nobody "chooses" homelessness, but like anything else, becoming / staying homeless often is the result of numerous choices, some of which are easier than others for various reasons. When you artificially remove bad consequences from some of those choices, it is not surprising that those choices are made more often.

Consuming soda is just one way people can become obese. The problem is obesity. If you are an obese person, you may not really be able to "just stop" being obese, but if policy leads to people choosing healthier beverages, it helps fight obesity.

...and the opposite is true, too. It would not be difficult to imagine what might happen if we subsidized soda until it was free, for example. Except we probably wouldn't have advocates claiming that because nobody wants to be obese, the incentives can't possibly be affecting the increase in soda consumption.

I see your point. I agree that we shouldn't incentivize drug consumption. However, the current way of de-incentivizing drug consumption through making it illegal doesn't seem to work well. Luckily, there is more than one way to de-incentivize something like that (look at the soda tax, for example!).

The issue with drugs (as opposed to soda) is that the illegality in itself a lot of times tends to make people homeless by heavily limiting their hosing/employment/etc. perspectives. De-incentivizing drug consumption by heavily taxing them and making the proceeds go towards rehabilitation for addicts and helping those people get on their feet and find employment? I am with you on that. But I cannot really support, in good conscience, punishing drug users to the point where they are pushed to become homeless.

> But I cannot really support, in good conscience, punishing drug users to the point where they are pushed to become homeless.

To a large extent I agree with your point here, but these cities are well beyond simply not punishing drug users.

Mobile safe injection sites, needle exchange programs, cash handouts, unfettered defecation in streets, naloxone handouts, lack of enforcement of petty crimes like vehicle break-ins and theft. There are plenty of policy decisions being made here that affect the choices people make, and none of that even touches on actually enforcing drug laws.

Moral and financial cases can be made for any of the above, and we can debate that, but to me it's really drinking the Kool-Aid to claim these don't encourage homelessness. They certainly make it easier to make bad decisions that can start or keep you on the track of homelessness.

You are missing the point, it isn't that simple. Doing the opposite might keep cities cleaner or reduce crime but the cost is significantly higher to maintain. A prison population is a social service that is incredibly expensive, the more enforcement there is, the more expensive it is per body. This doesn't solve the problem it just costs the taxpayer more for another non-solution.

My argument didn't even address costs. Did you mean to respond to another comment?

This does seem to be a topic that is (for whatever reason) very difficult to have a straightforward conversation about.

> When you artificially remove bad consequences from some of those choices, it is not surprising that those choices are made more often.

There was a talk by a finance minister from singapore who was asked about his country's social safety net, and he replied to the effect of: we don't have a net, we have a trampoline.

Yep. Singapore is always the country I point to when opponents point at (insert area) which legalized drug use and saw numbers go down. They don't beat Singapore's numbers, and Singapore's approach is a lot different.

Executing people for possessing pounds of pot won't solve Seattle's issues.

Enforcing vagrancy laws might.

Human beings are motivated both intrinsically and extrinsically.

Adding support for an activity provides extrinsic motivation for doing something.

Basically, cities get what they pay for. If you pay for homelessness you get it.

That said, I'm not saying we shouldn't help people, but that we should make sure that whatever support we provides guides people towards self sufficiency and not dependence.

“The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber, ... To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.” – FDR 1935

If you permit the assumption that homeless are more likely to engage in criminal activity [0], the city of Seattle has significantly reduced enforcement of crime, including violent crime.

Therefore, ppl who would otherwise being in jail for crimes are living on the streets.

There was a documentary about this done by a local Seattle TV station. I don't know how reliable it is, but at the end it actually gave fairly humanitarian and progressive solution to the problem, despite spending most of the show arguing lax and progressive policing attitudes created the problem to begin with [1]

[0] by, a criminal being more likely to become homeless, or by desperation driving the homeless to crime

[1] Their proposed solution, inspired by a program in RI (? maybe ME), is to treat drug addiction as a disease to be treated by having effective programs.

'Seattle is Dying' was produced by KOMO, which is owned by Sinclair, the largest broadcast company in the USA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group

There are different approaches here.

One approach includes both reward / consequence. In this model, things like theft, various forms of violence particularly in shelter or public housing violence, even taking over extremely large areas of public space (ie, 3-4 tents plus dogs plus...) results in consequences, while avoiding issues along the above lines results in rewards (ie, eligibility for service or additional service). In addition, these approaches tend to also consider impact on the non-homeless (ie, prison time linked arguably with a reduced risk of property crime)

Other models are focused primarily on making life as bearable as possible for the homeless - basically the straight service model. Under this model, resources are provided and consequences are reduced in the event to solve homelessness.

Some folks going through the tougher love systems (ie, jail vs rehab etc) say good things, other folks ask how can homelessness be criminalized and focus primarily on reducing risk of govt involvement (this can also save money in some cases - prison is expensive, rehab is expensive etc).

I can elaborate. Enforcement of basic car camping and drug possession/use laws has basically gone to zero and as a result there is a sense that Seattle has opened itself up as a "Risk Free Zone" for homelessness. Stories like https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/just-sickeni... have created a sentiment that people are moving to Seattle because of this.

While I can't speak to the truth of the belief that people are actively moving to Seattle, I can say that there's little incentive for someone to follow basic property or drug laws in this city.

EDIT: To your point on how this differs from "Homeless people are lazy" I guess the idea is that we've created a situation where there are even more factors pushing homeless individuals to the streets and suburbs of Seattle, that Seattle has made homelessness more attractive in a sense.

> Enforcement of basic car camping and drug possession/use laws has basically gone to zero and as a result there is a sense that Seattle has opened itself up as a "Risk Free Zone" for homelessness.

Again, I find this logic to be extremely confusing. How related is "car camping" to Seattle's homeless? Is there some implication that the majority of them have cars they sleep in? Or am I missing something there?

As for the incentive to follow basic property or drug laws, again, how does that encourage homelessness? I could understand if you argued it encourages crime, but why homelessness?

The only remaining argument is basically "this encourages already homeless people to move to Seattle", which I can see being a problem, but of a different kind. It shares certain aspects with the immigration-related problems: in both cases, it's an effect of a deeper underlying problem that acts as a root cause and should be solved.

Car-camping is the nice way of saying "permanent homeless camps". The idea is that, if we didn't allow homeless camps to grow and spread, then it would be much more difficult to live without a permanent home in Seattle, and thus, you might move to somewhere else.

Car camping is intended to be as shown at [1]; no more than a few days, tidy, and not overflowing with garbage and sewage. These campers are here to do pre-game tailgate parties for the nearby stadium.

However, largely because Seattle doesn't enforce limits on car camping, that same street will soon look like [2]. This is a small permanent homeless camp that will remain at this location for months. The trash pile across the street will grow and attract vermin. Eventually, after weeks of health issues, sometimes fires and other illegality, the city will do a 'sweep'.

These sweeps are problematic on their own, since it is obviously dehumanizing to chase people out of their homes. They're also depressingly impermanent. The [1] location had been recently swept before the Google car came through. It already looks like [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5848614,-122.3351365,3a,75y,...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5720255,-122.3366802,3a,75y,...

> thus, you might move to somewhere else.

This brings us back to CodeMage's first question:

> At a first glance, it looks like a passive aggressive implication that homeless people, if they just tried harder, wouldn't be homeless.

This is effectively what you're arguing. That homeless people just need to try harder. Or you're arguing that you don't care if they're homeless as long as they're not near you.

> How related is "car camping" to Seattle's homeless?

In Seattle, there are a lot of people living in tents, cars, and temporarily-parked RVs. They all get lumped under "homeless" because they don't have permanent addresses or access to municipal services.

> The only remaining argument is basically "this encourages already homeless people to move to Seattle", which I can see being a problem, but of a different kind.

It's really hard to get good data on this, but, yes, there is a widely shared belief that Seattle gets more than it's "fair share" of the country's homeless epidemic because we have a lot of compassionate people, services, and, increasingly, lax law enforcement. Talk to any local and they'll tell you anecdotes about other counties or even states buying people one-way bus tickets to Seattle so that it's not their problem any more. It's hard to tell how much of that is urban legend.

> It's really hard to get good data on this,

Okay sure, but the data we have indicates that it's not true, and yet people like yourself insist that it is. In a world where my options are to a) make my best guess based on imperfect data, or b) make something up that fits my worldview, it seems like the correct thing to do would be a, but you're going with b.

> states buying people one-way bus tickets to Seattle so that it's not their problem any more

Ironically, this is effectively the approach people in this thread are arguing for, except without the bus ticket.

> yet people like yourself insist that it is.

I absolutely did not. Did you read my comment carefully?

> Ironically, this is effectively the approach people in this thread are arguing for, except without the bus ticket.

Another irony: you're lumping all homeless people — criminals and victims — into the same bucket, which is the criticism many homeless advocates have of "NIMBYs". What I think many people in this thread are saying is that repeated offending criminals should be locked up. Some of those people happen to be homeless, but I don't see comments in this thread arguing that non-criminal homeless people should be discarded.

Even if those anecdotes aren't true, isn't the perception of Seattle being a homeless-enabling city likely to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy if it's believed widely enough? Homeless people in Canada definitely try to make it to Vancouver if they can because of the perception of an enabling local government and mild weather.

Shouldn't the city do something to dispel that perception, y'know, such as enforcement of vagrancy laws?

It seems obvious to me: if laws against behaviors that are common among homeless were actually enforced then some subset of the homeless population would try harder to not be homeless, or move to another location.

Ah, the good old 'bus them out of town, let them be someone else's problem' non-solution.

Sorry, where did I say that? I'm talking about not creating incentives for homeless to concentrate in one city.

I'm pretty sure it's better for society overall for the homeless population to be widely distributed than concentrated in one place.

> Sorry, where did I say that?

Here:

> would try harder to [...] move to another location.

That's different than putting homeless on busses to another city.

Okay, so it's "run them out of town" instead, but the effect is the same: you're just passing the problem off to someone else, to dehumanizing effect for the person.

If enforcing property rights and laws that protect public health and safety is "dehumanizing" then I don't know what to tell you.

> To your point on how this differs from "Homeless people are lazy" I guess the idea is that we've created a situation where there are even more factors pushing homeless individuals to the streets and suburbs of Seattle, that Seattle has made homelessness more attractive in a sense.

I'm sorry, but this makes no sense to me. The best data we have indicates that most homeless people are from the area, so I don't think there's any evidence to support the idea that people are moving here from elsewhere.

The idea that homelessness is "attractive" is even more absurd. Do you seriously believe that if we just criminalized people a bit more, they'd simply stop choosing to be homeless?

It's a bit cynical to call homelessness "risk free" in any sense of the term.

You seem to be arguing for criminalising poverty. That's going to work just as well as criminalising stupidity, short-sightedness, death, or losing your car keys.

You're not missing anything. A lot of people just want the problem gone and somehow think that being tougher on the already downtrodden is a viable solution. You can fine and jail the homeless and it's not going to make them any less homeless.

The only solution is exactly the kind of thing this article is talking about. Providing consoling / rehab services and helping people turn their lives around one by one. There is no blanket solution.

It's not OK to oppose drug legalization merely because one wishes to find ways to criminalize homelessness.

Also a Seattle resident; I don't think you speak for all Seattlites.

Ditto, there is a certain subset that feels unsafe in the city (like the cop that did an AMA on Reddit about how he doesn't feel safe on 3rd avenue without his gun) despite its relative safety. Some of these people, like the aformentioned cop, are a danger to those around them due to this mindset.

As a kid I caught busses every day on 3rd Ave without a problem, and yes, the same open drug dealing still happens at 3rd & Pine (by the crackDonalds), but that has been going on since before I moved here in 2003. When I transfer there now, not much has changed in terms of the people you'll see.

The level of danger hasn't changed, but the homelessness crisis has worsened and become much more visible as we fenced off the underside of bridges, replaced parking in the inner suburbs with bike lanes (in large part to push the van dwellers out) and rent has increased. We have an opioid crisis that is going untreated, high rents and few middle income jobs.

Our society is stratifying badly between the 90% that is getting poorer every year (and feels no hope) and the 10% that are able to afford rent in prime cities.

I'm sorry, but if you feel safe around places like 3rd and Pine you are being ignorant and I think you are minimizing in bad faith the danger that exists in these places. See this: https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/5-people-shot-2-ser...

Indiscriminately firing a gun into a crowd of people seems like something that a reasonable person should be wary of.

As a long-time Seattle resident, I feel perfectly safe on 3rd and Pine. Not everyone is as uncomfortable with folks living on the street as you - time to get out and listen to others' opinions rather than assuming bad faith.

Your sole citation is a single shooting from three years ago.

Where did I imply I was uncomfortable with homeless people? I am uncomfortable with high profile violent crime. I provided more examples of this below.

Oh come on, local news sensationalizes crimes like that to drive fear which drives views. If you look at it rationally, crime is at a historic low compared to the 80s and 90s.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/is-seattle-dy...

What are the actual odds of actually being involved in an incident like that, compared to being killed in a car accident while commuting to work every day?

So the argument is being made that this particular place should not make people feel unsafe. I think a proper car accident analogy would be to compare one intersection to 3rd and pine, instead of the entire commute. If one intersection had as many car crashes as 3rd and pine had violent crimes, would you feel unsafe driving through that intersection, and maybe drive another way home?

More examples: https://komonews.com/news/local/hatchet-attack-on-3rd-and-pi... https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/kiro-7-investigation-pike-p... https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2018/05/15/detectives-investi... https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/police-inrea...

Those are all anecdotes.

The City of Seattle publishes actual geolocated statistics. Feel free to rummage around those and make a real case.

Check this: https://www.kiro7.com/news/where-are-seattles-most-dangerous...

The block on 3rd between Pike and Pine is the second most dangerous on KIRO's compiled list when looking at violent crime in Seattle according to those statistics. It looks like this data is from 2010-2013.

I also can't find geolocated statistics - the best data I can see is at the beat level here: https://data.seattle.gov/Public-Safety/Crime-Data/4fs7-3vj5 You sound like you know more about this than I, can you point me in the right direction?

Oh hey, your data is from back when I was going through 3rd & Pike/Pine daily. I never felt threatened or particularly in danger in that area, nor did my teachers (who also transited those blocks for their bus/rail connections) or classmates feel unsafe in those two blocks during that period.

FYI there is a live crime map, along with an interface to search older reports if you wander around seattle.gov

It's possible there is something the data is missing, like like the time of the crimes committed. I'm not invested enough to make a point by creating multiple queries against the available data sets. You and the other posters in this comment chain have provided anecdotal evidence that the area felt safe for you, but the data I'm seeing and anecdotes I've heard from friends tell me that it isn't safe.

The live map only shows the last 24 hours, and links to the data I provided above for anything older than 24 hours. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place for data which has more specificity in the location tied to it.

I live a block away from 3rd and am amazed anytime people think it's that bad - I legit walk my dogs there every night from 11 - 3AM. It just feels like a neutered version of any other city, the police presence there is always intense due to the tourists at Pike Place.

Pioneer Square, however... whole different story.

If anything, Seattle cleans up during the night. Its safer to walk and wander around at night as compared to the daytime.

Someone literally just got shot there today

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/seattle-poli...

What do you propose? Cracking down on homeless people. Heavy fines and jail time? Is that somehow going to make them less homeless?

The only viable answer is programs like what this article is talking about. Providing consoling/rehab services and helping people turn their lives around one at a time. There is no blanket solution. These are individuals that are suffering and trapped in a cycle.

If you think violently oppressing the already downtrodden is a good solution please leave and go to another city. This is probably not the place for you.

Northwest and West coast governments have acknowledged that the current legal deterrents and consequences do more harm than good: fines being impossible to collect alongside being inadequate deterrent, jail and prison exacerbating the situation and not resulting in holding people for very long anyway. Costing taxpayers even more when they do hold people for long.

They have not reached consensus on what to replace the deterrents with, so now there is a void and no oxygen to even criticize the outcome.

I live here too, and I disagree with you - this is a symptom of an entirely different problem. We should not be screwing people's lives over for simple possession, the rest is the same homeless problem that every city has nowadays.

You guys could also build some shelters.

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