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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

The "Seattle is Dying" video produced by KOMO, the local TV station.

"60 Minutes" also ran a segment on the Seattle homeless a couple years ago. They went in looking for people who were down on their luck. They found drug addicts and alcoholics.

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When I hung out with a homeless guy in North Beach, SF for a good hour while he was painting his perspective on shelters was that the addicted folks were in shelters, and non-addicts that went to shelters were treated as if they were addicts. He felt rather de-humanized by the whole system and so he stays on the street.

I haven’t seen these videos yet, but I’m curious if they went to shelters or streets.

The drug addicts and alcoholics are much easier to find than the people down on their luck, who mostly are still functional and instead make up the more invisible portion of the homeless population. They are also the most easily helped by existing resources (easy cases that don’t involve rehab and can live independently).

Here's a write-up from Seattle's government about the root causes of homelessness in the city: https://www.seattle.gov/homelessness/the-roots-of-the-crisis

This is a take on the issue by the Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/why-are-p...

I remember that ST article. Their statistics have problems - for example, a big reason people lose their jobs is because of drug addiction or alcoholism. The same for evictions. The same for their own families throwing them out.

Drug addiction and alcoholism is the proximate cause of a lot of calamities in peoples' lives.

Your number of "90%" isn't even close to accurate:

https://our.news/external/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Far...

Not really, he was just referring to Chronic Visible Homeless, your article doesn't break out SUD for that sub group but even at just the Chronic Homeless level (many who aren't on the street) it puts the rate at 2/3 having substance issues.

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