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Comment by throwaway827364 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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