I am especially interested to hear from HN readers who live (or until very recently lived) in Seattle, as to whether or not the impression this gives of the city matches with your experience?
We did not encounter any direct criminality against us while we lived there, although my wife had a close call. She stayed late to finish up work and left her internal office door unlocked to grab food. Within that 15 minute window, someone hopped a fencing structure, gained entry to the building, and managed to steal anything he thought was important. It was one of the few offices unlocked. Thankfully she did not surprise him in the act.
Camera recordings provided a clear description of the perpetrator and police found him within 20 minutes at a local homeless encampment. A 19-year-old kid high on meth with a long criminal history including rape. Police recovered everything and returned it after holding it as evidence. It's an incredibly sad situation all around.
3rd and Pike/Pine has been a bad location for this entire time. I am given to understand that it's been bad since, idk, the 80s? When Covid hit, the visible homelessness situation exploded. I can't speak to all the factors as to why, but it was unbelievable. Normally 3rd and Pike/Pine were mitigated by the normals wandering through. That all vanished. It was rough.
In the last few months, it seems that there's been a shooting in Seattle daily. Many do not seem to be directly connected with traditional gang-gang violence over drugs/turf wars, or the long-standing tradition of arguing with armed drunks after the bar closes.
I can't speak in nuance to homelessness relationships to violence, but I can clearly note that there seems to be a relation.
> Last month The Wall Street Journal editorial board declared that “lawlessness now hampers Seattle’s economic recovery.”
I would not rent or buy any office space in Downtown Seattle until the City addresses the violence; addressing that at a deep enough level, the homelessness situation - nonprofit services, camps, etc. that are all downtown will need to be relocated. That is almost certainly politically untenable here.
What the WSJ might be missing is that there's very little reason for knowledge workers to show up to an office daily to stare at their computer. So cities like Seattle, which have spent 20 years investing into knowledge work companies, are going to take that hit to the face, hard. I'm personally talking with my wife about finding a city with more sun and cheaper houses...
There is a clear problem with homelessness here, and that's very evident downtown. When you get to the more residential area it feels like a normal city. It feels more uncomfortable than it does unsafe.
1) bad stuff definitely exists
3rd/Pine, parts of SoDo, the couple blocks between Occidental Square and Kobe Terrace, Aurora between like 85th and 145th, and bits of Beacon/Columbian/Rainier, are all what I'd call legitimately unsettling/dangerous experiences for WASPs and I totally understand why places downtown are having issues.
2) bad stuff isn't new
I got mugged multiple times on free-ride-zone buses as a kid/teen, lost lots of bikes, etc etc. The police have always been worse than useless and nobody I knew, even upper-middle-class neighborhood-dwellers, bothered reporting petty property crime. The impact of homelessness on downtown quality of life has pretty much always been a thing; consider https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/warning-seattles-f... (from 2012) - the free-zone buses were literal mobile drug dens after a certain hour or on certain routes, was pretty nuts.
Before the viaduct was torn down, it was effectively a miles-long open-air shelter. I actually wonder how much of the current tensions are attributable to having physically gotten rid of one of the more inherently accommodating structures in the area, driving that population more out into the open a few blocks uphill.
3) bad stuff is getting worse
No argument that things haven't accelerated throughout the pandemic, though. Having actually spent a lot of time wandering around outside in the international district in early 2020, I can say that the current trajectory absolutely didn't start around/after the summer unrest. Imo, that's a totally unjustified attempt at ideologically linking unrelated concepts. As mentioned, cops have been useless since forever. The pandemic and pandemic-related restrictions have engendered an enormous amount of economic instability that bureaucratic-focused measures like rent assistance and eviction moratoria often fail to meaningfully mitigate; those most in need of help are the ones who aren't getting it. I think the destabilizing economic impact of the pandemic on the populations most vulnerable to homelessness is systematically discounted by the smug suburbanites who really really really want to find a cause, any cause, that isn't rooted in housing/inequality issues. Much easier to blame defunding the police.
4) rate of increase appears proportional to amount of socioeconomic deprivation
My take is that the amount of badness tracks pretty closely with aggregate economic fucked-ness. I did a lot of volunteering at the Compass Center circa the 2008 economic crisis and saw the progression firsthand: expensive housing begets housing instability, which is often the first step on a long downwards slide towards being a naked screaming shit-flinger. One gets driven into an encampment and now one's proximate to drug sales and has a lot of free time - doesn't take the most detailed analysis of all time to see how things continue to slide. People talk about multiple "classes" of homeless - the real honest Americans temporarily down on their luck, vs. the insane drug addicts accosting randoms on the street. While those distinctions do exist, it's often ignored that the boundaries between them are pretty fragile and it is very easy to progress downhill; the actual crazies come from somewhere, and that somewhere is unfortunately frequently the cauldron of fucked-ness that is living without stable housing.
All this said, I live my daily life without worrying about it much or even encountering examples of visible homelessness. The region is increasingly segregated on the basis of economic class, so for your Amazon dev working from home in Magnolia or whatever the issue is largely academic.
I will absolutely back that up 100%.
The 2020 summer unrest imo is first-order irrelevant to the homelessness/crime question, although policing practices/headcount might influence certain things somewhat.
I have lived in the city since 1995 and this has always been true.
Six months ago, I watched 7 cops in 3 suvs unable to find and detain a drunk guy that went from unconscious to walking away with his baseball cap pulled down. It literally looked like a Loony Tunes episode.
As far as I am concerned, they are all LARPing.
https://www.seattle.gov/city-budget/2019-20-proposed-budget/...