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Comment by just_lurkin | Hacker News Reader

The reporters designation of "figured out" seems to stem more from the fact that the solution fits his own view than any actual real evidence. There is mention of the difficulties such lax policies has brought to the city, but they are waved away as being "growing pains" toward a new utopia.

I can't say, living here, that I feel that the problem is solved. I view the needles outside my apartment as evidence to the contrary - though I suppose I'm an ignoramus for thinking that.

Simply strolling through Pioneer Square or most parts of International District paints a significantly different picture. One can dine at a Chinese place on Jackson and look out their window and see junkies peddling stolen goods at the bus stop. The non-enforcement of so-called "petty crime" used to fund drug addictions is egregious and continues to undermine the already little sense of community there is in this city of transients.

What I'm trying to say is that while I appreciate the difference in approach from the traditional one, I do believe that there needs to be an honest discussion about the limits of rehabilitation. More research on the subject, as it relates to Seattle, shows that there are many, many, people who take advantage of these lax policies to abuse the system, hurting others who actually need help.

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At least part of the cause of the visible squalor we see in Seattle is that the tough-on-crime crowd has consistently opposed safe injection, harm reduction, trash pickup, housing-first, and other evidence-based policies in favor of expensive, inhumane, and pointless measures like sweeps and incarceration. Any measure the city government takes that is not overtly cruel gets slammed as coddling the homeless or "attracting" homeless to the city, despite the fact that the data show this trope to be a fiction.

Tough on crimes folks oppose trash pick-up?

Really?

Yep, the argument I've heard is that it legitimizes encampments. Additionally I suspect people are outraged by the notion that homeless people could get trash pickup for free from the city when housed people have to pay for theirs - even though it would be a lot cheaper than sweeps.

I think it’s more of a liability problem. Once the city starts garbage cleaning the city becomes exposed to liability from the encampment because it can be argued that its sanctioned now.

I imagine a conversation like:

Q: What should we do about this homeless encampment? The options are:

1. Provide it with free trash pickup so that it's a slightly nicer place to live and to be around

2. Shut it down, remove the tents as well as the trash, make the inhabitants move elsewhere

And then I would expect the "tough on crimes" crowd would prefer option #2 to option #1.

That makes more sense.

I read it as “opposed to trash pick-up in general” and then thought “who the hell would be opposed to that?”

“some would prefer to see the police cart drug users off to jail to get them out of the way” (article)

It seems like creating housing projects for these people would be cheaper and more beneficial to society than increasing the prison population. I’d like to see something like dorms with shared restrooms, cafeterias, and such facilities. It’d create work and demand locally while keeping the streets clean.

As long as it is outside city limits, but operated as a city extension, in something like a rural environment, I think this is a great idea.

Why is removing this from the city central to your support?

Probably because the neighboring cities aren’t doing their fair share. Need to spread the pain to all the local cities and counties

To effectively clean up the city. You can’t have tent encampments in cities, which leads to refuse build up, which brings the rats, which spread typhoid. Yes, this is a fact, and yes this is right now a current problem facing Los Angeles. If resources can be distributed outside city limits which are paid for by city taxpayers, city residents can see a return on their taxes with cleaner, safer neighborhoods. For those who are not drug addicts or bums, but need help to get back on their feet, those are the individuals who should be offered beds and resources in the city.

I am anti housing projects. To me, creating a housing projects is like sweeping the problem under the rug. It concentrates poverty and crime into the area in/around the projects.

A) ghettoization in the form you describe is a zoning problem. Mixed-rate zoning is a thing, even in major cities in the US, and there's no reason social housing needs to be geographically isolated from market rate housing. As you point out, that's really unhealthy. I submit that the US has just implemented public housing extremely poorly, especially on the federal level, and Section 8 vouchers are going to be a much larger bill to pay to the American taxpayer than simply building public housing to begin with.

B) From a healthcare perspective, both housing and rehabilitation are necessary for the person to be able to function stably. I would argue that this type of housing as well as drug decriminalization is necessary to treat the underlying poverty (and resulting crime).

EDIT: wording.

Seattle spreads the housing projects around the city. In fact they just opened one in the South Lake Union area last year (just behind the Neptune apartments). They replaced a parking lot with something like 10-15 sheds for housing. They are in the 100-150 sq ft range, have electricity and a shared bathroom(s). I'm a touch fuzzy on the particulars because they also erect a very tall privacy fence around the whole thing, which feels like a good idea if for no other reason than a touch of privacy for its residents.

I’m glad to learn some places are doing this!

Not really they are still mostly concentrated in pockets because developers are allowed to buy out of building subsidized housing units

I don’t think anyone wants the projects of the 50-70s. See the navigation centers in sf. It works.

This is why nothing gets done.

- Dealing with petty crime that makes everyone miserable is insensitive to the homeless/addicts/etc who are stealing people's stuff and selling it.

- We should send people to provide garbage pickup to people occupying spaces that don't belong to them, but make sure that they aren't disturbed.

- We should be housing first, but not with housing projects.

What would you suggest be done?

Obviously, we need to make sure NO ONE has any kind of quality of life. Large US cities should keep being shit shows and keep getting worse for everyone until 100% of people, no matter their socioeconomic situation, can live like kings.

I can’t tell what you are communicating.

I'm anti-incarceration for moral reasons, but it's not clear to me that there is a definitive consensus that incarceration does not work. See: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan02/w8489.html

> "Annual expenditures of approximately $10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity attributable to illegal drug use, even ignoring any crime reductions associated with such incarceration."

(The above is from a study conducted by a prominent U Chicago economist and another economist who is now at Princeton.)

It’s really very complicated. One of the macro trends over the last few decades is a massive increase in crime from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, then a decrease since then. Incarceration started increasing in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to that increase in crime. When crime started coming down in the 1990s, incarceration started coming down about ten years behind that in the 2000s.

Nobody really knows why crime started dropping in the 1990s. Some people think that the reduction is attributable to the banning of leaded gasoline. Maybe. But I don’t think studied have ruled out the notion that the reduction is attributable to putting a large number of people in prison. See: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/089533004773563485

> Crime fell sharply and unexpectedly in the 1990s. Four factors appear to explain the drop in crime: increased incarceration, more police, the decline of crack and legalized abortion.

It’s not an area where you can point to a definitive consensus, and everyone interprets the data to fit their own political views.

I'm anti-incarceration for moral reasons

There is also a middle ground, where you can think that drugs should generally be legalized, but incarcerating people for non-drug crimes is a good idea. The problem isn't really people doing drugs. It's people breaking into cars, damaging property left in public, trespassing, assaulting other people, leaving big public piles of trash, things that fall into the "harming other people" category of crime.

At the end of the day though, the people breaking into cars are usually doing so because they have no other reasonable means to sustain themselves, or they are compelled to do so because of drug addiction. The long-term _solution_, is to remove these obstacles.

In other words, middle-class employed people who are safe in their environment don't really commit crimes - why would they? The best way to solve crime In General is to make more people like that.

Now granted, there are some people that would _still_ commit crimes even though they don't need to - this is the place where punitive solutions are appropriate, to make it not worth their while.

If economics were the main driver, you'd see a strong correlation between crime rates and the economy. But by and large you do not: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUndersta....

> Based on these estimates, the observed 2 percentage point decline in the U.S unemployment rate between 1991 and 2001 can explain an estimated 2 percent decline in property crime (out of an observed drop of almost 30 percent), but no change in violent crime or homicide. The sharp increases in crime in the 1960s—a decade of strong economic growth—further corroborate the weak link between macroeconomics and crime.

Violent crime rates started trending up in the 1960s, more than doubling by 1971: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/U0YlrTTCYi550Z4py1MNVenNt-...

Meanwhile, the economy was quite strong until 1969, with unemployment below 4%: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33069.pdf (p. 5). Poverty rates went down about 40% from 1960-1970, and then were stable until about 1980. Over that same period, violent crime tripled. From 1982 to 1990, poverty went down by 15% and unemployment dropped in half, but violent crime increased 36% to historical peaks.

But we’re basically talking about non-violent crimes like theft and drug trafficking where in your own statements the correlation exists.

I wouldn’t expect homicide to meaningfully drop in an economic boom since the reasons for murder are so varied.

It exists but is very weak, meaning it’s not the primary driving force.

> a decade of strong economic growth

This seems impossible to solve without considering which people were actually experiencing this growth.

Hence the statistics I presented below that, showing that the poverty rate went down dramatically over that period.

You did - I should add that I didn't consider their breakdown sufficient enough:

> In 2013, for example, the average poverty threshold for an individual living alone was $11,888; for a two-person family, $15,142; and for a family of four, $23,834.7

I wasn't alive in 1969, but for 2013, that threshold is quite low - it may make sense for poverty, but it is not a net wide enough to catch a significant portion of (relatively) poor people whose addictions have grown to far outweigh their paychecks.

I'm not terribly surprised macro economic number don't show a strong correlation to crime. We're already talking about a group on the margins generally when we're looking at small property crimes and top line numbers like unemployment don't capture people who aren't even looking for work anymore (eg drug addicts).

Yeah Economics has a huge problem with the Fruit Basket Fallacy.

Going to need a definition on that, the first result on google for 'fruit basket fallacy' is literally this comment.

I made it up. Economist have a big problem with running statistical analysis on unsorted population data. Hence trying to run regressions on fruit baskets.

Drugs get sold for huge markups due to prohibition. A heroin user spending $200 or more a day is, in reality, only using $4 or $5 a day worth in production cost. Even with a huge tax, I'd be $15 or whatever.

Exactly! I'm not interested in castigating people for shooting up heroin, but I'm really not OK with them littering needles in our parks and sidewalks.

I love the image of a cop stopping someone who just shot up heroine with their arms crossed being like “well... are you going throw that away? hmmm” and gesturing with their eyes to the trash can.

A little silly but also nice.

Freakonomics makes a case the drop in crime is directly correlated with the passing of Roe VS Wade and the legalization of abortion. This led to the 18 year later drop in unwanted male children now adults. Very interesting read on a very explosive topic :)

His argument has been widely debunked, and subsequent followup found that Leavitt had a huge data error that way overstated his conclusion.

I personally find the lead/crime argument to be much more convincing

What’s the lead/crime argument?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

“Widely debunked” is too strong. They’ve released a new study where they double down on that conclusion: https://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/abortion-c...

It is a good chapter to read to see their methodology even if you don't agree with the results. For example, comparing stricter/easier gun laws and prison times in different cities and not finding a correlation to the drop in violence since it was across the board.

Oh I've read it and am familiar with their argument, I just disagree. I don't think analyzing gun laws on a city by city basis makes a lot of sense, they're small, in high demand apparently, and easily smuggled from a more permissive locale.

The abortion argument is just a pathway to IQ/some people are genetically more predisposed to being dumb & violent, etc. It's just a step on the way there. I hardly think I have to spell out what's the next step on the road after that. Open white supremacists like Steve Sailer vocally support the abortion argument, for instance

" a pathway to IQ/some people are genetically " How did you come ot that conclusion? Much simpler option is on the table: parents mostly abort kkids when they know they don;t want them or can;t take care of them. Kids that are wanted, are much more likely to be properly brought up and not become criminals.

> Kids that are wanted, are much more likely to be properly brought up and not become criminals.

Adopted children (in the US) are much more prone to various failures, like becoming criminals, than are the biological children of their adoptive parents.

It seems unlikely that this is due to the adopted children being unwanted.

An argument (in this sense) is a particular way of arriving at a conclusion. There could be different arguments for the same conclusion. This Freakonomics abortion thing seems to me an explanation. The 'conclusion' here is the reality of lower-than-expected crime rates - you don't argue for that; you try to explain it.

Your second paragraph is the most naked slippery-slope appeal to fear I've seen. Just repeating "just a pathway", "just a step" doesn't make it so. If the explanation is true, it's true. That some racist believes something or not doesn't affect its truth or falsity. I get a kind of claustrophobic communist-era vibe from your comment - that there is no truth, no reality, outside what the powers-that-be declare to be true. (I guess we call it 'political correctness' - there's no 'correct', only 'politically correct'.)

> Oh I've read it and am familiar with their argument

You do not seem to be familiar with the their conclusions and sentiments, no.

> The abortion argument is just a pathway to IQ/some people are genetically more predisposed to being dumb & violent, etc. It's just a step on the way there. I hardly think I have to spell out what's the next step on the road after that. Open white supremacists like Steve Sailer vocally support the abortion argument, for instance

Not even close.

> LEVITT: I actually think that our paper makes really clear why this has nothing to do with eugenics. ... what our data suggests is that women are pretty good at choosing when they can bring kids in the world, who they can provide good environments for, okay? The mechanism by which any effects on crime have to be happening here are the women making good choices. And that’s such a fundamental difference — between women making good choices and eugenics, which is about the state, say, or some other entity forcing choices upon people, almost couldn’t be more different.

> ...

> What did Donohue mean by “unwantedness”? He was referring to the expansive social-sciences literature which showed that children born to parents who didn’t truly want that child, or weren’t ready for that child, these children were more likely to have worse outcomes as they grew up — health and education outcomes. But also, these so-called “unwanted” kids would ultimately be more likely to engage in criminal behaviors.

> ...

> The mechanism was pretty simple: unwanted children were more likely than average to engage in crime as they got older; but an unwanted child who was never born would never have the opportunity to enter his criminal prime, 15 or 20 years later. Donohue and Levitt created a tidy syllogism: unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; therefore, abortion led to lower crime.

> DONOHUE: ... presumably the greatest thing that could happen in this domain is if you would eliminate unwanted pregnancies in the first place. But American policy has not been nearly as effective in achieving that goal.

> A country like the Netherlands, which has really tried to reduce unwanted pregnancies, has probably had the right approach in dealing with the issues that our research at least raised. So they have much, much lower rates of abortion even though abortion is completely legal in the Netherlands. But they want to stop the unwanted pregnancies on the front end, and I think almost everyone should be able to agree that that is the preferable way to focus policy if one can.

> ...

> LEVITT: On the other hand, I don’t think anyone who is sensible should use our hypothesis to change their mind about how they feel about legalized abortion. So it really isn’t very [abortion] policy-relevant. If you’re pro-life and you believe that the fetus is equivalent in moral value to a person, well then, the tradeoff is awful.

> ...

> LEVITT: So there are two policy domains for which this research is important. ... the second [policy domain] really does relate to the idea that if unwantedness is such a powerful influencer on people’s lives, then we should try to do things to make sure that children are wanted. You could at least begin to think about how you would create a world in which kids grow up more loved and more appreciated and with brighter futures. And you know, is that better early education? Is that, you know, permits for parents? Or training for parents? Or, you know, minimum incomes? Who knows what the answer really would be. But there’s a whole set of topics I think which are not even on the table.

I just skimmed the chapter again to refresh my memory. It has a clear 'THOSE people [lower income, lower IQ] having abortions reduced the crime rate' angle. I'm sure they may have said something different after the fact, to not appear pro-eugenics (they likely didn't know how popular their book would be when they were writing it!). I invite anyone who disagrees to simply read the source material themselves.

Anyways, seeing as not only do social scientists widely disagree with their hypothesis, but other researchers found flaws in their data sets that Leavitt & Donohue were forced to acknowledge & correct for- it seems irrelevant?

Only if you're biased towards accepting those kinds of arguments already. There are social explanations for the effect that, in my opinion, both better explain it and don't suffer from the slightest appearance of racism.

"Widely debunked" is factually inaccurate. It has not been debunked at all. It is not popular and leads to a lot of emotional responses, and there was one particular mechnical error in a single table in the original paper (Foote and Goetz); it has been addressed by the authors and did not materially affect the basic analysis or high-level conclusion.

An independent study on the lead/crime hypothesis (impact of childhood lead exposure on criminality) came to a similar conclusion.[0] (Reyes is interviewed in the podcast linked below.) Finally, they recently published a 15-years on follow-up study, which showed continued support for the hypothesis.[1]

You can read a transcript of their most recent podcast on the subject here[2], or just go direct to the source material.

[0]: https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/get_the_lead_o...

[1]: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFI_WP_201975.pd...

[2]: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/

IIRC, that was just one of the potential factors. Another was the phasing out of lead gasoline. The arc of crime is fascinating though. I was in high school during t.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

I'll definitely admin that I'm interpreting the data to fit their own political/moral views but the conclusion "10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity" seems that economically the difference in incarcerating addicts and providing them healthcare is negligible.

If the economic difference is negligible then what reason is there for incarceration over providing healthcare? Crime did drop in the 90s but there's also the reality that those with criminal records are predisposed towards recidivism, a complicated issue on its own, but it seems that incarceration leads itself to staying criminal while healthcare at least has less direct links to criminal recidivism.

The issue is that while they are trying to break the addiction they often relapse and because drugs are expensive and also not conducive to holding a job there is a non-negligible percent of people that would continue to break into cars and steal things to pay for their habits. If they aren't hurting anyone ok fine let them go the rehab route first, but if they demonstrate they are a danger to society then they need to be separated until they cure their addiction. I think we should also reduce the sentencing for drug crimes as often they are overly punative.

I’m extremely against confinement as a punishment but I don’t think this would be unreasonable so long as it was strictly limited to the time needed to detox and you could say with a clear conscience that it was for the addicts benefit. Like they have to leave with an escort but they can hit up Mcdonalds and Yankee candle for their room.

Yea I think the best way is to first heavily restrict their freedom until they normalize and then have an incentives-based system that rewards positive behavior and actions with more freedoms until they can return to a normal life. Unfortunately, drug addiction is always the product of something deeper that's causing self-medication. Personally, I think a lot of addiction is due to a lack of connection with others and a lack of purpose for being. I like the concept of community service in the form of actually interacting with other members of the community instead of picking up trash on the side of the freeway for example.

This feel ill informed. First off, to an addict, nothing is a better positive rewarder than drugs. Secondly, forcing someone to "kick" never works and in fact leads to people trying to use the same amount and overdosing.

I do think mental health services are whats needed.

I think the solution is transforming a segment of incarceration into medical help, or expanding medical conservatorship.

If you smell like crap and can't sustain a life because of drug addictions or mental illness, and your behavior causes problems for society, you need to be helped, and maybe against your will.

The vast majority of homeless are actually not visible and look like and act like normal people. They often get out of being homeless in a few years. It's the chronic homeless who need help, might always need help, that ruin the public space for everyone else.

Respectfully disagree. The invisible homeless need the most help because they could really benefit and return to society for not that much cost. The visible homeless are mostly addicts and mentally ill that are too far gone to be anything more than contained.

They often already get help, and are the segment that help actually helps them. But it's the visibile chronic criminal homeless w/ drug and mental illness problems that make a city worse for everyone, including the invisible homeless.

Agreed, in Seattle some of the activist groups actually actively make the chronic homeless more visible to increase funding to the other group. It’s a very effective strategy actually.

> "Annual expenditures of approximately $10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity attributable to illegal drug use

I'm not sure I understand that. Surely people in prison are even less productive? Or is this counting the massively underpaid prison labour that sometimes happens in the US?

Hey - good point! What does that even mean?

I think, from reading that abstract, that they’re claiming it causes drug prices to rise and lower the overall rate of drug use. If they don’t mean that, then I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.

You're right, but I think they meant they spent that much less on hospital/public health spending.

A huge amount of drug users are very productive and go to work every day, but when they get caught up in the legal system they may lose their job.

One study shows the decrease in crime was caused by an increase in abortions.

http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-sh...

Before everyone starts vilifying the person conducting the study. He said on the podcast that he does not think that his study should influence public policy and that the answer was not to try to convince people to have abortions but to spend more money on children and family services and criminal justice reform that keeps families from being separated because of minor crimes.

I had a conversation with someone the other day who made many of the same arguments as you. I agreed with some of it--namely that around safe injection, harm reduction, methadone (et al) clinics, etc.--but I had a hard time stomaching the idea that "housing first" was a good idea, in that if you take a drug addict and put them in a home, they're still a drug addict who can't contribute meaningfully to society.

Would you mind pointing to some of those studies/evidence so I can be a little more informed about the whole thing?

EDIT: Found one further down, but would love to see any others you have: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.94.4...

On the flip side, I have a hard time imagining how a homeless drug addict will be able to kick drugs while on the street and then somehow find a house and then become a 'meaningful' member of society without support. They basically have two problems: no house and a drug addiction. Fixing the 'no house' problem without tying it to drug addiction is a step towards normalcy.

Offering a choice of jail time or compulsory residence in drug treatment facility seems like a good compromise

I don't like the framing of this premise that you need to "contribute to society" in order to not be exposed to the elements and have a safe place to retreat. Do people working on ads contribute to society? What about middle managers of middle managers? What about the people on golf courses that basically spend money to make other people do shit for them?

Furthermore, we cannot dehumanize our fellow humans even if they use drugs. The result of such framing is vicious savagery as is seen in America, the Philippines, and other places around the world.

I think it's pretty obvious he didn't mean "contribute to society" in the metaphorical sense, but in the idiom which typically means "hold a job".

See my response above, I really didn't mean either of those things, it was just a lazy end to the sentence.

You know, I actually paused after those words because I was afraid of a response like this, but I didn't rephrase because I just figured "they'll get what I mean".

In the context of my response, I really just meant it as shorthand for "not doing any of the negative stuff that Seattleites deal with on an everyday basis". Lots of homeless people are already doing that--namely, not putting the general public at risk with violence or needles sitting around--but many of the ones visible to us are making the city worse off.

So again, my OP should really be reframed as: "if you take a dangerous drug addict and put them in a house, they're still a dangerous drug addict".

And I do implicitly mean there that if you take a non-dangerous, knocked-off-their-feet homeless person and put them in a house, you now have a housed person, and that's a very positive thing :)

Yes, nobody says that just putting people into housing will magically fix them. That's why there's 30 other things on the list. Someone in housing is more likely to begin on their road to recovery than someone who has to live on the streets and have their stuff stolen all the time.

How could you possibly battle drug addiction or mental illness while sleeping on concrete exposed to elements and crime? It's constant stress that makes these issues worse, not better, every single day you live on the street.

Having both the serious possibility of prosecution while offering the alternative of entering a drug treatment facility and emerging with a cleared history is a good compromise. People who committed petty crimes due to addiction and were compelled by the state of Rhode Island to go through such a program say that it saved their life.

Intervention works and it can be done humanely.

The King County Needle Exchange is why there's needles absolutely everywhere. Safe injection won, and now you can't walk anywhere barefoot.

Needle exchange isn't safe injection btw

Where were you walking barefoot before that you no longer can?

What data are you talking about? Because there sure is a strong correlation between drug use and homelessness. While I think it's insane to punish people for ingesting substances that might harm them, I still don't think we should just look the other way and silently condone its use when it's actively destroying people's lives.

> "attracting" homeless to the city, despite the fact that the data show this trope to be a fiction.

This is incorrect and I think it's constructive to address it. People talk about numbers, but it's mostly just whatever justifies their bias. Where you draw a line AND when matters when talking about this, so I believe somewhere just under 40% are from outside Seattle. I measure that if you're not from King County (for at least 1 year) before you lost your home, you've moved to it (re: http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/). Either way, homeless people do not move away to cheaper locales, but are drawn toward the city center. This is primarily due to existing support networks, convenient mobility, drug availability, tolerance, and available disposable wealth. Seattle is not special in this regard, as this behavior is see in many metropolitan centers around the world. Does it matter? No. Where people come from isn't the issue as you can't really control for the conditions...what is WA gonna do, prevent global warming from sending climate refugees up the coast? Good luck Inslee.

I have observed how various cities have approached handling the homeless. I spent 5 years in Santa Cruz, CA and a decade in Santa Ana, CA where these same "issues" had been handled differently from Seattle. I'm not an expert, but I have an opinion, and I recognize that's all it is.

You know who doesn't have a homeless problem? Irvine, CA. If you have a car with a bunch of caked mud on it and some dents or a blown out window, you get status-profiled (they don't admit to it, and it's not racial, but it's demonstrable) and pulled over. The Irvine Company (a family who owns most of Irvine) leverages or ships undesirables from the city and it stays that way (mostly in Costa Mesa, Laguna, etc) same as Santa Cruz did in the 90s where they would drop repeat offenders on a train to Santa Clara. Luckily(?) when a few people ended up freezing to death in their cars and the streets (over a few winters) in Santa Cruz, it came out as an official public safety policy. Draconian measures work to a degree, it seems, but mostly moving people CONSISTENTLY works.

Mixing unrestricted support systems into metropolitan areas has been applied for over half a century. It sifts those who can be helped, out until you have those who cannot or will not be helped. As unpopular as it seems, I think that a city/county being allowed to export people to unincorporated areas if they break a city/county law and have no residence and aren't able to complete a work program, would solve homelessness in a more humane manner. If you don't want to participate in society, homestead the land or run your way back and start over. Either way, it doesn't fill more jail cells. Yes people may die, just as people die now, but without putting residents at risk.

Who is this "crowd". Seattle politics has been absolutely dominated by people who support all these things.

Last week I saw 2 people shooting up on the brand new deck of pike place market, essentially the biggest tourist attraction in Seattle.

Are you honestly claiming that if only they had a safe injection site and some housing that allowed drug use that that wouldn't happen?

Drug addicts don't care about any of that stuff, they want to get it in their veins asap, and now that its effectively legal they can do this 24/7.

> At least part of the cause of the visible squalor we see in Seattle is that the tough-on-crime crowd has consistently opposed safe injection, harm reduction, trash pickup, housing-first, and other evidence-based policies in favor of expensive, inhumane, and pointless measures like sweeps and incarceration. Any measure the city government takes that is not overtly cruel gets slammed as coddling the homeless or "attracting" homeless to the city, despite the fact that the data show this trope to be a fiction.

What data are you referring to? Governments in the Seattle area manage to spend over a billion dollars each year on the homeless problem. With about 10,000 people, that’s about $100,000 per person per year (both numbers are 2017). And they only house about 50%, which means $200,000 per person housed in temporary or permanent housing.

Somehow New York City houses 80% of a larger homeless population (60,000) for around $50,000 per person. They are three times more effective with their money.

People should be yelling. The data does suggest that policies on the west coast are expensive and ineffective. They aren’t good for anyone. I think the author of this post [1] makes greats points about the problems of unlimited compassion. Looking at the numbers really changes how I feel about the tent city down the street from me.

[1] https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness

There are people who are mentally ill, addicted to drugs, and/or abused. The streets are no place to heal these wounds, they are a place for them to fester. Modern asylums and rehab centers should be built, along with shelter space with counseling and medical services.

Leaving people to rot on the street for even an instant longer is abhorrently inhumane, and the local government officials in charge of our west coast cities should just resign, since they so clearly lack any empathy or rational thinking.

It's interesting people always point to Portugal to support the idea that decriminalization is the way to address substance abuse. But compare Sweden, which has similar levels of drug dependency to Portugal, but takes a "zero tolerance" approach to drug use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Sweden. While Sweden does include treatment as part of its drug policy, that is a complement to, not replacement for, strict law enforcement.

(Swedes are very anti-drug. While a narrow majority of even Republicans in the US support legalization of cannabis, 83% of Swedes support keeping it illegal: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sweden-cannabis/in-anti-d...)

> According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), in 2005, the rate of drug-related deaths per capita in Sweden was more than twice that of the Netherlands and there were more persons addicted to severe narcotics ("heavy drugs") than in other countries

It doesn't seem to be working that well, does it?

Is drug related death really the right stat to use? Seems like it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Considering the low rate of drug usage in Sweden amongst the general population it seems to tell a sorry story about Swedish drug policy...

So they throw people in jail and end up having the same outcomes as Portugal that doesn't?

Gee, you are making it very difficult to choose which policy I prefer!

I seriously doubt the Swedes 'throw people in jail'. Their social policy in general is very much the other way. Their prison sentances will be 10-30% as long as US ones for comparable offences.

In terms of drugs Norway and Sweden have traditionally not had much drugs - mainly because they are a long way from anywhere.

Portugal is such a strange example to point at. Yes, the heroin use fell after the decriminalization, but it also fell in other countries at the same time. Use of other drugs in Portugal after decriminalization actually rose.

Whenever someone points out Portugal and you talk to them you find that they think just decriminalization turned Portugal into a beautiful utopia.

In practice decriminalization was 20% of the action. The important 80% was investing heavily in social workers, public health, and temporary housing so that people on drugs could receive treatment.

What other countries fail to appreciate is that people in these conditions are almost always self-medicating or escaping something. So great, you don't put them in jail, but they continue living in a vicious addictive hell with no hope for a better future or of ever regaining their lives. That's not exactly compassionate is it?

The metric to track can't be: "didn't die" or "didn't incarcerate", it should be "regained their life" and "broke their addiction".

Wars can also be ended by surrender, which Vancouver BC did. I understand Seattle’s approach has been similar: Grant de facto immunity to homeless people committing petty crime, stop all police enforcement of drug laws, and shame everyone who dares to complain.

> and shame everyone who dares to complain.

And then watch at they turn on you by quietly voting for your opponents in greater and greater numbers as the problem worsens.

... or fleeing to suburbs...

That's a big problem for those of us still here that would prefer enforcement; our fellow-minded voters have (probably rightly) chosen defect and left the city, rather than stay to vote for change. Suburb living also has twice the greenhouse gas impact as well.

Those of us still here that prefer empathy would rather you follow your 'fellow-minded' folks and just leave.

Seattle's had this tension between the left and the liberals for a century. Traditionally you lived on the outskirts. You're welcome to go back if the city offends your sensibilities.

Does there need to be a line drawn here? I don’t think there is a contradiction between empathy and enforcement. For example, I would really like an end to the bike and package theft and I think it is reasonable to enforce laws against it. Do you disagree?

In a perfect world, no.

In the world we live in, yes I disagree. Our criminal justice system further entrenches these problems. Before you claim that these petty crimes don't apply, the majority of folks in jail and prison are there on probation/parole violations, and these petty crimes are all jailable/revokable offenses for folks on paper.

In America, we put the already marginalized in jail and prison which only further entrenches their marginalization. Empathy means breaking that cycle.

Fear-based rhetoric around crime is not empathy. In fact, it's the exact opposite. And it's rampant in this thread.

>the majority of folks in jail and prison are there on probation/parole violations

This is a funny way of saying they're back in prison for more serious original crimes after failing to rehabilitate during the second chance they were already given in the form of probation/parole.

Repeatedly letting criminals free to walk the streets and commit more crimes is not empathy, it is folly. Empathy is protecting the neighborhoods which aren't rich enough to be insulated from these bad actors.

> Repeatedly letting criminals free to walk the streets

That's a funny way of implying that everyone that the justice system imprisons are criminals in a world where we imprison 22% of the global incarcerated population despite accounting for 4% of the global total population[1].

Fear-based rhetoric around crime and the people who commit crimes* is not empathy.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...

My empathy is reserved for victims. I don't see how siding with antisocial actors and taking a permissive stance on crime is supposed to improve society. I literally can't understand the mindset of such a belief other by applying hipster contrarianism to morality.

My empathy is reserved for victims of the prison industrial complex (that includes your concept of victims, btw). I do see how your sort of hardline dehumanization of undesirables...sorry, 'tough on crime'...approach in the latter half of the 20th century has resulted in many of the problems being discussed in this thread.

I'm a felon that committed a crime and violated my probation a year after my original sentencing (I've since discharged my sentence). My crime was almost killing my passengers and myself in a drunken single-vehicle collision when I was 19. My violation was being a drunk passenger on my 21st birthday, after the designated driver was pulled over for simple lane violations (right/left turns into far lanes). They were let go with a warning, and I was taken to jail. If I didn't come from the privileged background I do, I could very well still be in prison today.

I'm a contrarian hipster, don't get me wrong, but I come by this empathy honestly. I empathize with your fear too, but I'm telling you to get over it because it only makes the problems you fear worse.

Is it empathy that leaves the mentally unwell and drug addicted to rot in the street, harass and endanger passersby, and commit petty crimes with impunity?

"Empathy" is unfortunately becoming code word for "caring to a specific group of people but not others". It's almost never used for "the ability to understand and care about the feelings of people in general".

The people who aren't living in the street but are victims of these petty crimes or have their own quality of life drastically reduced because of all this still matter. And I don't think the solution is to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. Especially since even the reasonably well off (dare I say, what's left of the "middle class") frequently has it worse in the US than random people do in other first world countries.

Time and time again, empathy leads to bad counterproductive policies with good intentions.

Compassion is a much better path.

I didn't think empathy had much to do with the tough on crime policies that are bearing this fruit today, or the dehumanizing rhetoric rampant in this thread that justifies doubling down on those failed policies.

Time and time again, fear leads to bad counterproductive policies with debateably good intentions.

I'm ignoring the meaningless/unspoken distinction between compassion and empathy in your comment.

re: compassion vs empathy

google is your friend here since you don't know the difference:

https://www.google.com/search?q=compassion+vs+empathy

Isn't a liberal left sided? I'm confused by your statement.

Though it's changed recently (and even more recently is swinging back to historical usage), historically the word liberals referred to folks that are generally corporate/free-trade friendly (Reagan famously claimed something to the effect of, 'I'm a liberal, an 18th century liberal'). They also pay lip service to personal freedoms, but that tends to be through the lens of white men being the only people deserving of those, and they're generally against freedom of migration. Or rather that they care about free-trade more than free-migration because it advantages them more, despite the societal benefits of one relying on the other.

In Seattle, the leftists are the AnSyn folks at the unsanctioned May Day celebration, or the WTO protesters two decades back. Further back, they're the folks organizing the general strike[1]. The liberals are the folks that put their No Re-zoning sign next to their BLM sign in the window of their Ballard home. Or more charitably, the folks that see Gates and Bezos as shining examples of what our city is capable of.

In case you need it in song form, this is a song written by a leftist[2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_General_Strike

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nFvhhCulaw

I think the latest city council election is going to show that Seattle sadly wants more of the same problems and people like us are unwelcome

I don't know, Sawant got way less than was expected in the primaries (36.7% [1]), and I think a lot of folks are in the Sawant or anti-Sawant camp whereby all on the non-Sawant primary votes will consolidate to Orion.

Or people blew off the primaries sure that she'd take the general. ️

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/City_elections_in_Seattle,_Washingto...

She actually did pretty well considering many thought she would get primaried out. All the other incumbents look pretty secure as well

At least Mike O'Brien is out. His replacement may end up being more of the same, but at least it's some kind of change.

Not to worry: WA senator Manka Dhingra has been promising to bring injection sites to the suburbs as well.

Gonna be honest thinking of doing just that. All the neighboring cities use Seattle as a dumping ground for addicts so they are nice and clean.

Vancouver's homeless have largely fled to the suburbs too! (Maple Ridge, mostly.) I guess the cost of living is so high here that even those who aren't paying rent still can't afford it.

I heard from a lot of folks in Spokane who moved out because of the city's increasingly boggling policies. They were often quite vocal about the fact that they moved and their reasons for moving; they seemed to care for their old home, but simply could not live there any longer.

Why don't you offer an alternative solution then? Throwing the homeless people in jail is ineffective and immoral.

If your solution is drug treatment programs, great, but then don't argue against raising taxes to pay for them.

Seattle loves to pass new taxes that are "supposed" to go towards certain things (and do for a year or two), but then end up in a general fund. Just like the tobacco tax, the alcohol tax and the marijuana tax. These were all supposed to go towards roads and schools, at one point and, yet didn't.

Is there even a legal structure allowing a government to pass a tax with a particular outflow, in a way that prevents said government from later deciding to redirect the tax's revenue to a different outflow? Like how a trust works for private citizens, but at an organizational level?

You can earmark tax dollars for particular spending, but Seattle has a habit of only doing said earmarks for 2 to 3 years before going into the general fund. I'm not sure if you can make those earmarks indefinite, to be honest.

We need low cost low security jails for people who commit property crimes. Basically just wall off a few square miles and throw them in there left to their own devices.

Many prisons in central and South America are run like this: the prisoners are thrown into a contained environment without guards otherwise, the prisoners themselves (usually visit a gangs) organize the prison economy and otherwise keep the peace (bar for some occasional riots).

That’s not good because it gives the leaders a quality of life that they shouldn’t be able to enjoy.

Wow. That's your criticism? That they leaders aren't suffering enough? You and I have very different ideas about what incarceration is for.

This is basically the origin of Australia.

Arizona's attempt at this worked poorly: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/aug/21/arizona-phoen...

Maybe you can try using your giant 'logical' brain to postulate why that isn't a good idea?

You're suggesting making a fucking ghetto for homeless people? Are you serious?

This thread has confirmed my suspicion that HN cares way more about money and their material interests than any sense of morality or ethics.

That's pretty much Santa Cruz California and it hasn't happened yet.

People are downvoting this, but the person has a point. That's exactly how Trump got elected (followed by millions of people wondering how the hell it could happen).

Shame everyone who disagrees with you, cancel them, ban them on your online forums, and then it's like they don't exist. You win! Except they can still vote, and you're no longer in a situation where you can influence them.

Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver are remarkably similar in their problems and approaches to solutions. It really feels like a PNW/BC cultural thing.

And it's all following in the footsteps of SF. Lets make our cities open-air asylums!

The city’s approach is a shameful failure

That's happening all over. Statistics-based policing helps here. When you don't arrest people, your crime rate doesn't go up.

except governance is not a war, and unlike in a war you are concerned with well-being of your citizen and are not allowed to kill them... So really, just an empty soundbyte

I see people shooting up in public places, people walking around naked, doing wheelies on a wheelchair on high traffic roads, drug needles laying on the side walk, etc.

I think enforcing these laws would make Seattle safer and an overall better place to live.

I thought you were describing San Francisco.

I've heard that it's not legal to force people into rehab. But I can't see why this can't be done under something like the Baker Act.

If you're physically addicted to drugs, you are to some extent not capable of making rational choices, and this means you are a threat to yourself and to those around you. Could this not be a legal pretext to detain someone (humanely) and bring them to rehab treatment? Seems like a better alternative than jail, and certainly a better alternative to letting drug addicts rot on the streets.

I'm also not a lawyer and have no idea what I'm talking about, so feel free to lay into me and let me know why this idea is wrong or even crazy.

Usually how it works is if you break the law (eg, steal something) and get caught, you are arrested, then you get to see a judge. At that point it is up to the judge to push rehab as a punishment or prison. This depends on the laws of the area, the offense, and if this is a repeat offense.

I think you are in the right morally, and legislative position is not relevant - it should be based on morals. Various countries have/had absurd laws, such as making it illegal to insult the supreme leader, suicide is illegal, and having legal slavery, heresy, the list goes on and on. Today we regard those laws as stupid and cruel, and hopefully one day we will regard persecution of addicts with the same incredulity as we regard witch-hunts

Supervised consumption sites would go a long way toward fixing the needle problem.

We have safe injection sites up here in Vancouver, you still find used needles lying around everywhere, depending where you go, only you also find the small saline packs and disposable spoons from the injection sites lying around with the used needles.

The police don't really seem to care. I've watched a couple of officers find a small pile of used needles at one of the skytrain stations, they laughed to each other said how they should be cleaning that up, then just left. I know about an hour later, a bunch of school kids take the bus I was waiting for. Calling and reporting it did nothing.

Nothing concrete, but often calls to complain make it into a tally or database that can be cited by a politician looking to change things.

It works both ways. If the city refuses to charge offenders and police refuse to arrest, crime goes down.

Seattle PD knows this so they take days to file basic reports. If you wanted to report the somebody broke into your car you could be waiting multiple days for someone to take the report.

Police just follow the lead of politicians.

Seattle Police ignore just about everything except active shooters. Even emergency calls about homeless brandishing knives in broad daylight are ignored. (If someone does get stabbed, the police will show.)

Seattle politicians have shown that they have no interest in keeping violent people off the streets, so the police don't waste their time with it.

> Seattle Police ignore just about everything except active shooters.

I've been away from Seattle for a while, so excuse me if it's changed. But I still remember quite well in 2010 when Seattle police gunned down a native american for crossing the street downtown, I think it was off of Howell. That guy used to ask me and my wife for change. His big crime was making a very young officer, I believe a recent arrival from the eastern part of the state, uncomfortable due to his skin color. Shot dead, in the back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_John_T._Williams

While tragic, the death of JT Williams has nothing to do with the Seattle City Prosecutor and the King County Prosecutor refusing to charge or jail violent homeless junkies.

"Police accuse King County prosecutors of declining cases, not charging felons" https://www.kiro7.com/news/tonight-at-5-30-pm-police-accuse-...

Seattle has changed. A few weeks ago someone beat a police officer with a sunroof he'd just ripped of a car (after jumping on the other roofs of cars in traffic).

He was released 24 hours later.

On a simpler note I saw someone exposing themselves/defecating on a street corner in downtown. Some officers spoke to him but then they left.

The police, of course, do seem to care, and they do care. It sucks that people like you try to get away with pulling one over on those who don't know the situation well enough and have to just trust you.

How? Junkies and other folks who throw needles on the street when there’s a trash can like 5 feet away will actually make appointments to stop at these consumption sites? Who pays for this? The city of Seattle makes a mess because of their extremist policies of not enforcing laws so let’s raise taxes to make up for it?

Please cite how Seattle's policy of not locking people up to rot in prison is extremist.

You had a viable argument right up until that point!

Edit: Thanks for the bot downvotes! Going from +2 to -1 in the span of a minute on two separate comments is a bit of a red flag :P

Not arressting people for theft is pretty extremist and I can't imagine how that is a good thing for the citizens of Seattle.

Adding a comment complaining about being downvoted tends to invite more downvotes from unrelated posters.

The timing is just so interesting though!

Two of my comments saw 3 downvotes in the span of a minute, the latter of which was much further down than this comment.

Amazing: A whole three downvotes! No way more than two people are reading this comment section at the same time.

I downvoted you, and I’m pretty sure I’m not a bot. I did so because failing to lock up people that commit serious crimes is prima facie extremist - no citation is necessary.

> Who pays for this?

sadly, me and other taxpayers like me in Seattle.

It's always amusing to me to hear people complain about taxes in Seattle. Washington State doesn't have an income tax, y'all. If you haven't figured out that a lot of the weird (and bad) city tax issues arise from that, welp.

To me all of these issues seem like the same ones San Francisco is facing, which leads me to conclude that neither lowering income taxes nor raising income taxes is likely to solve them.

I've lived in both those cities this decade; the results are in some cases similar, but the issues are in fact different. The thing that's similar: both cities are warm enough so that you can reasonably live on the streets year round. Boston's an intensely liberal city and nobody uses it as an example of how liberal cities always have homeless problems.

Similarly, Google "dallas homeless problem" sometime. Warm city, poor coordination of solutions for the homeless -- whoa, homeless populations are rising! But that once more does not fit the narrative, so nobody talks about it in threads like this.

(Houston is doing much better. Houston, unlike Seattle, has put a priority on coordinating efforts to help homeless. HUH.)

That said you're right -- it's not just about taxes. Seattle is low on revenue, but that's only part of why the city has failed to produce a coordinated response to homelessness. Bad organizational skills are not restricted to the right or the left, though.

Homelessness/drug use has indeed become a problem in Boston over the last few years - see [1]Methadone Mile and the problems in the [2]Common.

[1]https://apps.bostonglobe.com/graphics/2016/07/methadone-mile...

[2]https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/08/21/boston-common-jewel-...

Those are acute issues that can be directly linked to the closure of the shelter on Long Island.

a) Probably wise not to conflate homelessness with the opioid crisis. I would be a fool to argue that the latter correlates in any way with winter temperatures.

b) Different scale, man. Seattle's issues are way bigger than Methadone Mile. (I've lived in Boston too.)

More homeless die of hypothermia in Los Angeles than in NYC.

Unfortunately, the people that such initiatives are aimed at happen to be junkies. They will consume whenever and wherever they feel like it, just as many of them will steal from the most convenient target when they need more money for a fix. Further, the optics of state-sanctioned drug use sites are pretty bad, even in the most liberal of cities.

Observation to the contrary: availability of toilets does not fix "shitting on the streets" problem in SF.

Availability of toilets barely fixed the problem of urinating and defecating on the floor of the restroom in an office I used to work.

No it wouldn’t. They wouldn’t use them. Junkies reuse needles they find on the ground because they don’t care... they aren’t going to go to a specific place to wait in line to shoot up.

When I was out there last fall, we stayed in Belltown and walked all over. I'm wondering, where was all this squalor you speak of? I came out with a very different impression of the city than you describe. Obviously you would know better, so I'm just wondering, did I get lucky?

I live in Seattle and take the bus to work downtown every day. I think I've seen, maybe three needles in five years.

I've lived in Seattle for 1.5 years. I became numb to the hyperbole around the homeless problem here in 6 months. One side is talking facts, experimentation, and trying new things. The other side is talking feelings, fears, and taking every misstep as an opportunity to abandon any notion of solving the problem in an ethical way.

It is really interesting, especially on a site like HN, because the latter is directly contrary to the ethos of most startups.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

The geography of homelessness in Seattle still eludes me, but Belltown just isn't one of the high-concentration areas. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Pioneer Square and the International District are hotspots. This may be due to shelters and missions (places to get food and housing) being more concentrated there.

Homelessness and drug use also comes in very different forms even within Seattle; I live in Ballard, and most of our homeless and drug-addicted community lives in beaten-up RVs parked on the side of the road.

Perhaps you got lucky. Belltown isnt as bad as some other areas, but in my one year of daily walking commutes through Belltown I saw

1. A person OD'd (presumably dead) at a bus stop

2. Someone passed out, face down in the gutter

3. Multiple people shooting up (usually pants down, shooting into leg)

4. A guy that would regularly walk around shouting and gesturing angrily, making everyone near by visibly anxious

5. One guy literally rolling around in the middle of the street during rush hour, holding up busses and cars

6. A fight, fortunately broken up caused by a homeless guy spitting on another guy

7. People selling stolen goods in the open

8. Finally, some guy got shot in an alley in the middle of broad daylight on like, a Tuesday a couple weeks back.

Not offering suggestions, merely documenting my experiences. I am genuinely glad you had a good trip to Seattle, though

It's certainly not just Seattle either, the large-scale homeless/junky situation describes basically every west coast city.

There's obviously a much deeper problem.

Isn’t the problem simply overly liberal policy making? It seems moderation has disappeared on the West coast, and these cities basically don’t enforce laws against those pursuing a nomadic drug centric lifestyle on the backs of taxpayer supported land/amenities/services.

The severe wealth stratification that has occurred over the last few decades has left the majority of Americans facing a grim future of low earnings and unstable employment.

Its easy to see how that would make many people depressed and lead to a cycle of addiction to escape this crappy reality.

Bollocks, overall more people are rising out of poverty

Tell that to those forced out by skyrocketing housing costs a la San Francisco, and as I've come to understand, parts of Seattle.

(Most of Seattle)

The official poverty line is drawn by the government. It's great news for them if the poverty line rises slower than cost of living increases.

Are you referring to the global overall rise out of poverty? or specifically the 'west coast cities' as were mentioned higher up in the thread?

Either way, from what I've been witnessing, as the commenter above yours was saying - but in a more specific way, is that many people who once had a fair amount of discretionary spending ability have seen that money sucked up into higher rents and needs for broadband - having more needs for kids and slightly higher expenses for many things all around... it appears that saving to do big things is not an option.

all the while seeing people on instagram living best lives of travel and decadence, many people can't even afford to make healthy choices for food - that once could.

More and more people who were above poverty are finding the higher rents and other expenses taking them into debt with no good way out - more and more people are getting unbanked by fees, and leaning on pawn shops / family and friends to skirt by getting power and water turned back on.

Sometimes they climb back up out of this, but I think more and more people are just simply going without. Going without dental care and healthy food. Skipping meals. There appears to be a bunch of people using dating apps to get free food.

Just that reality is hitting people - and if they can an unexptected larger expense - they are over the edge.

I don't think we have good statistics to show all this. It may seem that poverty is being reduced, and I saw a meme saying the avg household has gained 5k per year lately.. but that's not enough to take care of the basics for most people I see around our growing city that is not on the west coast.

I hear that things like this are even worse elsewhere.

Amusingly, it's entirely possible that the deepest problem is cleanly illustrated by the other two replies to your comment (throwawaysea blaming liberalism and allana blaming wealth inequality) as we talk around one another's preconceived notions of how the world works until we drive off a cliff.

>I do believe that there needs to be an honest discussion about the limits of rehabilitation.

First I think we need to have an honest discussion about actually trying rehabilitation. The criminal justice system is more concerned with retribution than rehabilitation.

Do you think there would be fewer needles outside your apartment if we simply locked these people up? I think there would be more.

I agree that the limits of rehabilitation need to be seriously considered, and that good policy requires a mix of approaches. That said, all of your arguments could be applied to alcoholics during prohibition.

I think if we actually want a sense of community in this city, it starts by treating our neighbors as humans. These drug users are your neighbors. What are you doing to help them?

If my neighbor beat his wife, damaged my car and pissed on my house I would do exactly what ever good neighbor should- call the cops and make sure they have enough evidence to send his ass to jail. The problem is when the cops don’t come then what do you do?

Good neighbors don't act the way junkies act. Good neighbors respect boundaries. Good neighbors don’t: break in cars, break in garages, steal bicycles, threaten customers and staff at restaurants, nod out in the middle if the sidewalk, chase after women waving their dicks, move to your fair city to take advantage of your compassion, etc. (Actual events from this week)

If the police don't come, it's a breakdown of civilization. Buy a gun.

Seattle has no gun stores anymore, they ran them off with continuous passed anti-gun laws.

The point really is resort to violence. If people can't get access to guns, I'm confident they can be enterprising enough to find other ways to defend themselves and their property.

> The reporters designation of "figured out" seems to stem more from the fact that the solution fits his own view than any actual real evidence.

It's an opinion piece.

Junkies tend to be people with overwhelming problems who can't make their lives work. Throwing people in jail is usually not a means to make their lives suddenly start working.

I think you solve problems like widespread drug use by repairing the tattered social fabric that of this country which has taken such a toll on so many of the people who live here.

What about not ruining everyone else’s lives and the public health issues these people create? Not a fan of conservative ideology, but surely there is some level of personal responsibility and accountability they have towards the public? And when they betray that buy shitting on public areas or leaving needles near playgrounds, I think it’s not only reasonable but necessary to incarcerate them—for their own good and the public’s.

Lack of adequate housing supply is a contributing factor to homelessness. If you are just throwing people in jail and not addressing issues of that ilk, it rapidly becomes unsustainable.

Criminals in jail are a burden on society. Functional, productive, tax paying citizens are assets to society. Rehabilitation is not charity. It's enlightened self interest.

I'm not advocating for kind of bleeding heart "charity" here.

Interesting. Some of the benefits of decriminalizing can probably only be realized if it's done as a national level, so I'm pretty skeptical of just how successful local initiatives can be.

I wonder how Portugal achieved such supposed success in decriminalizing drug use.

Jesus dude. Just the "junkies" comment shows that you aren't even open to a different approach.

The purpose of this article is different - someone will say "the safety situation in Seattle is terrible because of ultra-liberal drug policies". Then you are supposed to reply with this article as a counter. And New York Times beats The Seattle Times, so you've won the argument.

It's all about providing a counter-narrative to prevent cognitive dissonance.

Eventually a junkie will commit a serious crime against one of the tech luminaries that live in and around Seattle. I’m guessing that the lax enforcement environment will be gone within about a day of that incident.

Seattle is playing with fire here. I wouldn’t set foot in a city where hard drug use is tolerated, and seemingly celebrated, by many of the people that live there. Junkies will do whatever is necessary to get their next fix. It seems like a bad idea to be anywhere near a city with policies that both attract and help create them.

I dunno, may be you are right -- that the "right" person hasn't been assaulted, raped or killed yet.

Certainly, the high profile stabbing in front of Nordstroms didn't do much. Nor, did much change when the homeless guy was stopped from throwing a women on her way to work off an I-5 overpass. Or the lady who was raped by the homeless guy at the U-district car dealership after dropping her car off for an oil change on her way to work in the morning.

I assume it would have to be someone connected to the local government. It took about five seconds to change the 2nd Ave bike lanes when a city employee was killed riding her bike down there.

I am still heartbroken that Mia Zapata was brutally murdered.

Your last graf implies that there was some nefarious favoritism that gave a turbo boost to Seattle's 2nd Ave bike lane project, due to the connectedness of the woman killed shortly before it took effect.

If you are referring to the well known tragic death of Sher Kung in August 2014, just before the September 2014 scheduled opening of the 2nd Ave bike lane, you are very wrong. The project had been underway long before that.

Good point. And, this victim was not a city worker, but a civil rights attorney at a large well-connected law firm.

It sure seemed to me that after her tragic death the call for bike safety was turned up to 11.

We haven't reached that point yet re homeless/junkie assaults. It will take the right person to get killed or raped for that to happen.

There was a video of a man in a Seattle target last year. Guy goes on a 15 min rampage in downtown and nobody shows up to stop him. That’s the state of decriminalization we have hit.

https://youtu.be/KA3KQCYI17U

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