Illegally placed concrete blocks have taken over public parking in Seattle
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
There are descent people that are pushed into homelessness, but one camper can turn to a dozen in less than a week and only one of them has to start threatening to hurt your family, breaking into vehicles or set a fire to turn a benign situation into one that can threaten your life or livelihood.
Speaking from personal experience, we turned a blind eye to a middle aged man living out of his car next to our garage for a few months. Then we woke up one night to find the van had erupted into a two story fireball that almost burned down our entire block.
I go out and talk to people now when they start forming an encampment in our neighborhood. Its incredibly difficult work and I have never had both more and less sympathy for their situations and the real threats encampments pose.
This is a complex issue but it is an issue that is the city's responsibility to address. Shame on them for putting people on both sides of this issue in impossible positions.
New York figured this out in 1979. Cities have a constitutional obligation to build shelters for everyone that needs them. They did.
Those blocks will come down really quickly if business owners started getting fined for putting them up and van-dwellers started finding their houses getting towed. However, the city likely can't do one without the other.
My suggestion: If debris was left in front of my property irrespective of whether it was within my property or not, I’d get a notice to rectify. If I didn’t within a reasonable time frame, the city would rectify it for me and send me the bill. Failure to pay the bill within six months would simply result in it being folded into the property taxes. Consequences for not paying taxes don’t need explanation at this point. Very effective strategy. Not my fault someone dumped something in front of the house, but how to track who did it? Easier to shift it onto the property owner.
In my case I would simply put up security cameras that are clear enough to pick up license plates. The city would be only too happy to pass on the bill to the vehicle owner of whoever dropped off the crap.
Context and proportionality are important too.
I'll bet there are a broader range of options available worth considering. What about trying the public sanitation angle? Does that open up some options?
> Speaking from personal experience, we turned a blind eye to a middle aged man living out of his car next to our garage for a few months. Then we woke up one night to find the van had erupted into a two story fireball that almost burned down our entire block.
This reads like an inflammatory article. Nothing but anecdotal reports of sample of one.
The RVs arrived a little over six years ago after they were forced to move from a lot underneath a nearby overpass. There were around a dozen vehicles and some tents.
There was a lot of violent crime, including several shootings toward the end of the encampment.
There was a lot of trash and sewage. When they were moved the city hauled away several tons of trash and "shopping bag toilets".
There was a lot of obvious mental health problems and the deep fear and desperation that goes along with it. I've worked in enough urban service jobs to recognize people who don't have access to the mental health support they need.
There were single people, couples, and two families with children. The people I spoke with are mostly from Seattle and a few grew up in this neighborhood. They are homeless but not from some far away place. This is their neighborhood. They stay here because they know people and because they can sometimes find work here.
We failed as a city to provide a safety net when these people fell. My street is more safe and has less trash and it's true that I like it but to get that we didn't solve a single problem. We just moved it along.
It's really frustrating to be expected to follow the laws when the homeless aren't. I get cited for parking an RV in my own driveway because it is unsightly. 2 blocks away there is a full blown homeless encampment.
If you embrace only a purely strategic point of view, sure, choose from the palatable tools available to achieve your ends.
But most people have some kind of moral and ethical code, imperfect as it may be. The golden rule is nearly universal across various moral belief systems.
Be careful: if you only consider the purely strategic point of view you may find yourself as the primary casualty. Living without a moral code is perhaps the most self-defeating decision you can make.
To summarize, when acting within the moral sphere (which Kane defines as the situation where people are acting in a way that respects other people's rights), we should act to maintain it.
But when it breaks down, we do the best we can to restore it, which might mean acting less ideally toward the people causing breakdown.
I find that the people who espouse these views are usually insulated from the effects of them. Have you ever had a homeless camp near your residence? How close? How would you feel about your wife/daughter/mother being home alone near a homeless camp?
I'd love to be charitable and kind, but people have to protect themselves as well. Bringing a bunch of mentally ill drug users near your residence is a recipe for disaster. It should not be seen as some moral issue that we need to solve individually--the government and police should be able to resolve this on their own, especially considering the funding pumping into law enforcement and homeless funds. I think the big problem is we just keep creating more unaccountable programs and services instead of just giving people an SRO and a social worker. We're doing the dumbest possible thing because everyone wants to get a cut. Every other developed country has basically solved this--we could just copy a working model instead of dumping more and more money into hare-brained ideas every year that never work.
About my most recent experience in the East Bay (near San Francisco)... I lived (a) about 0.5 miles from a homeless person who lived in a truck; (b) about 1 mile from an industrial area with dozens of parked campers, (c) about 1.5 miles from a small tent encampment (maybe 10? tents), (d) and about 2 miles from a larger one (maybe 20?). In this experience, I did not personally feel threatened, nor did I hear accounts of them being violent or particularly troublesome.
But I get your point. I have been close to camps where I feel unsafe, and I would not recommend spending time nearby.
> I find that the people who espouse these views are usually insulated from the effects of them.
Would you give an example or two from your experience?
Blame drugs, blame political opponents, blame the government, blame developers, blame tech bros, blame whatever or whoever you want... but at the end of the day, still no solution is in sight. There is no widespread push for affordable housing or a pathway out of poverty, no real long-term care for people fighting addictions or mental illness. There is only the relentless push for profit for a few as society crumbles around them and more and more Americans get displaced.
It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. We're circling the drain with no end in sight.
[1] https://sfist.com/2021/03/04/insanely-it-is-costing-san-fran...
The solution is what it's always been: a universal housing mandate, and adequate social services (including harm reduction). The things stopping that aren't "performative activism"; it's Seattle's pathological disdain for housing and a polite-society liberal ethos that values property values over human lives.
It is not illegal to arrest someone for stealing/drug use/etc. and then have a psychiatrist examine them to determine whether they should go to jail or be institutionalized. Courts regularly examine criminals for mental fitness to stand trial already.
> no particular evidence that you can disappear whichever group of undesirables you see fit and guarantee that more won't appear
Funny, because that's exactly what lots of cities do and it works pretty well. Take a look at any wealthy SoCal city and you'll find no homeless.
> a universal housing mandate, and adequate social services (including harm reduction)
So, spending more than the median American makes per year on tents? Or allowing crazy drug addicts to trash temporary housing and hotels? Because that's what happens in SF. From the SF Chronicle, which is a super left leaning publication: "Residents have threatened to kill staff members, chased them with metal pipes and lit fires inside rooms, incident reports show. At the Henry Hotel on Sixth Street, a tenant was hospitalized after a neighbor, for a second time, streamed bug spray into their eyes, public records show. Last May, less than a mile away at the Winton Hotel, a resident slashed another tenant’s face with a knife, leaving a trail of blood out of the building" [1]
And from the director running one of these programs: "“We throw all these people into our hotels who have no demonstrated ability to live independently, who have severe problems and need to be elsewhere,” Shaw said"
Clearly the problem is not housing, it's the lack of support around getting mentally ill people the treatment (i.e. institutionalization) they need. And obviously, a crazy person is not going to consent to treatment for their craziness, so you need to force them into institutionalization.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros...
It is if the arrest is pretextual; that’s functionally no different from rounding up whichever group you think is bad and working backwards to disappear them.
In any case, nobody who lives in a van, tent, or even on the street meets the standard for forced institutionalization by those conditions alone. See the other thread.
> Funny, because that's exactly what lots of cities do and it works pretty well. Take a look at any wealthy SoCal city and you'll find no homeless.
I was under the impression that Los Angeles is both extremely wealthy and has lots of homeless. I’ve only visited once, however.
Either way: you surely understand that “move them somewhere else” is not a sustainable solution. You can’t sweep human lives under the rug in a country that has due process, as threadbare as ours might be.
The rest of the comment ignores what “housing mandate” really means: it means a combination of shelters, supported living (including mental institutions), and independent living based on the needs and capabilities of the individual.
I wasn't aware that arresting someone for stealing or illegal drug use was pretextual. Oh wait, it isn't. People committed a legitimate crime.
> nobody who lives in a van, tent, or even on the street meets the standard for forced institutionalization by those conditions alone
Then you give them a choice: go to treatment or go to jail. It is a strictly better outcome than only giving them the choice to go to jail.
> “move them somewhere else” is not a sustainable solution
It's a fully sustainable solution for many cities in SoCal, like I've said. Go to Newport Beach some time and you'll see. If you want your city to spend billions supporting people who don't want to be supported, you can do that with your own money and vote.
> due process
You're not entitled to violate local laws without consequences. Notice I never said to specifically go after people for being homeless, but to go after people for violating actual laws. Illegal drug use, illegal trash dumping, stealing, etc. Just because those actions are associated with homeless people does not make them any less illegal.
> supported living (including mental institutions)
The entire point is that the political will does not exist to force people who should be in mental institutions but don't want to be, into those institutions. If you steam bug spray into someone's eyes or chase them with a metal pipe, you are a danger to others around you.
False. If you are a danger to yourself or others, then you can be involuntarily committed after a hearing with a judge, and it's completely constitutional.
https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/civil-commitment-...
When you start with an immediate falsehood, why read further? The italics don't help your argument either.
“Danger,” in turn, has been narrowly interpreted by the courts to steer clear of obvious due process concerns: the state generally needs to show than danger is imminent and unavoidable, rather than merely plausible or even likely.
In other words: people living in RVs or tents do not prima facie meet either condition for forced institutionalization. People living on the street don’t even meet the conditions necessarily, since there’s no test for “quality of life.” And that’s the way it should be, unless you think that your civil liberties evaporate as soon as you cease to own property.
The Constitution itself is pretty worthless when it's subject to the whims of a bunch of corrupt asshats. It doesn't really matter what is or isn't constitutional anymore. If any appeal makes it to the court, it's just gonna be a red blue split anyway, and largely ignored or maliciously complied with by agencies leaning the other way. You might as well make it a system based on Facebook likes. That would at least be more democratic and just than what we have today, lol.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta...
A lot of money goes to politicians, their supporters, and bourgeois — while only a small percentage goes to fixing homelessness.
This is essentially looting the public by corrupt actors under the false guise of moral action.
> team up […] to find ways to feed the never-ending demand for performative action (backed by [billions] of dollars) with a supply of expensive temporary solutions [that enrich themselves]
If you’re spending most of the money on politicians, their friends, and bourgeois — for the purpose of virtue signaling rather than fixing the problem — you’re a second problem.
Government looting the public.
> relative, Laurence Belinsky, who is married to one of Cuomo's cousins, was the group's CEO. Belinsky had to step down in 2011 after his $500,000 salary became public at a time when a Cuomo-appointed task force was looking at excessive compensation at charities.
https://twitter.com/thebl0w/status/1418642879111745541
>This is a shelter on Ward’s island. NYC pays $3500 - $4000 per person a month to sleep in a room with 30 ppl.
Seattle in particular has turned to abusive gaslighting:
Per capita, Seattle citizens pay nearly the most in the country — only for politicians to prey on that, by pocketing the money and heaping abuse (“yOu’Re nOt cOmPaSsIoNaTe!”) on the public to exploit their good nature.
I’m at the point I hope a Republican administration drops the RICO hammer on the racketeering — these people need jail for a decade for their treachery.
The city has 815,201 residents as of 2021. I think they can spend more than 13¢ per resident per year on this. Maybe there are other details that compound the problem, but the math insists that funding is obviously a massive part of the problem. They should be spending $20M a year at the very least, just to start, and increase from there. $20M/yr is $25 per resident per year. Even a homeless person could probably afford $25/yr, while the median household income in San Francisco is $120K/yr. If they want the problem fixed, paying for it to be fixed is really the only option.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-has-an-unpre...
The vast majority of homeless people are drug users AND mentally ill. If you are living on the street when we have 3.6% unemployment--it's most likely drugs and mental illness (yes, there are rare exceptions).
Rest assured, other parts of the world have this all figured out. My favorite term is Favela which Wikipedia assures me is "also known as community". Eventually the ruling class throws up their hands. You can't put people in poor houses, jails, mental hospitals, subsidized housing--all too expensive/illegal/impractical. So you let them live in an ill-maintained "community" like the rest of the world does. It's coming.
Hate to break it to you, but there are still plenty of ghettos and tenements, and replacing some of these with tent cities is not an improvement.
This is repeated often, but doesn't seem based in reality. Most of the people living on the streets are addicted to meth or heroin or mentally ill or some combination of the those. If you're on meth or heroin, you'll never be able to afford an apartment regardless of what they cost.
Wow, when Toronto put up concrete blocks (wtf is “ecology” in the name), they spent $100k for about 100 blocks to be bought and placed in front of various unregulated marijuana dispensaries. Then another $250k in bureaucratic/engineering/legal expenses.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/01/20/blocking-off-ill...
Someone there spent $1000/block and since those appear to be about 4 feet long they would likely cost about $100 each so the labor cost to install each block plus profit to the installer eats up $900. Probably a kickback in there somewhere.
Of course with lawyers involved there was probably a round of blowjobs to buy for the team and the final cost of that would depend on which corner they visited for that service.
Definitely. Since another level of government was paying (though a common set of tax payers...), there seemed to be a lot of running the clock. The war on drugs must not have budgetary limits!
While creative, the entire strategy was ineffective: within hours the blocks would be removed, operations would resume and then the city would do it again. Textbook insanity.
There are also composition requirements. Bin blocks are just made from remnant materials.
If we wanted that, we should've invested in low-income housing, and public transit infrastructure so that people could live elsewhere, and commute. Also, healthcare for folks who struggle with mental health.
Lacking investment in those things, I imagine we can't start the clock on when this might get fixed.
I want to focus on the "If we wanted that," part. The "we" part is notable and problematic. I'll mention two senses here:
* desire (measured by preference aggregation): what do "we" want, based on aggregating (somehow) individual preferences
* action (collective action): what can we agree to do?
My point is this: Just because _action_ hasn't happened does not mean that _desire_ is not there. There is big gap between the two. One recipe is:
1. define the group with the desire
2. find and organize them
3. identify the common preferences
4. accumulate political capital
5. wield the power
I'm not a naive optimist; this is hard. But don't assume the _desire_ is not there! It takes effort to align a previously scattered group of people into something with cohesion and identity.
I'd be surprised if anyone didn't want that. But I think the specific things when suggested, are things people oppose. "I want public transit, but I don't want them to put it on my street".
Also, full agreement that I'm not able to comment that people don't actually want this, only that the elected officials (and other powerful people) don't appear to want this (in Seattle). That is definitely who I'm referring to.
How far do you think Seattle can get on its own? What kind of assistance is needed from the county? ... Washington state? ... the federal government?
P.S. I realize this is an easy question to ask but difficult to answer in any reasonable amount of space. I'd be happy to read recommended articles on case studies or data-oriented comparisons.
There's a lot of the missing middle in Seattle for housing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o&ab_channel=NotJu... Which has been demonstrated to pay for itself (and support other businesses). Zoning for this would go a long way towards helping to alleviate the increasing cost of housing. (Also actively/readily) makes more money than it costs to maintain.
I think there's also something to be said for getting rid of cars in Downtown Seattle (still need to provide good accessible options). I originally clicked on this article in hopes that was what people were doing. Tangent: Shuffling homeless people around with cement "eco" blocks (legitimately interested in the etymology of that name) turned out to be the sad waste of resources we were going for here...
Mental Health feels a lot more difficult than this. Probably needs more of a national fix cause healthcare is too expensive and inaccessible in the US.
If placing them is illegal, but requires specialised equipment to do it, couldn't the city go after the operators of that equipment?
Of course if a business/person wants to provide free parking on their property, that’s fine. But they shouldn’t be required to by zoning.
edit: disabled parking should be free, that’s different
I don’t think public transit riders should be forced to pay the full price of their habit. Nor do I think cities shouldn’t charge taxes and spend the revenue on both roads and yes even curb side parking.
It’s quite reasonable for cities to fund numerous modes of transit.
The funny thing is that you wouldn’t even need to make parking super expensive to act as a huge disincentive. $1/h is enough to change behavior.
It's still crazy to me that I can park a block away from the world trade center for $0 (there's usually open spots around the federal reserve on the weekend), when the real estate there goes for $1500+ per sq ft
You’d probably expend more money having cops pointlessly drive around writing tickets for meter.
Before the meter change in Chicago, it would be next to impossible to find a parking spot in the loop - people were essentially using street parking as free week-at-a-time car storage. At $8/hr or whatever they run now, you can actually find open spots when you need them.
As I recently published at [1], my city of Berkeley does not raise anywhere near enough money from property taxes to pave the city streets. If you think the majority of roads in the United States are paved with property tax revenues, I'd like to see your math.
1: https://observablehq.com/@jwb/property-tax-whales-of-the-eas...
Local streets are a local responsibility. The state or Federal government will provide grants for ADA amenities or multi model transportation.
Suburban and rural towns are a little different - the state maintains state roads and US Highways, mostly with income, sales and excise tax. Counties maintain county roads, mostly with property and sales tax.
Given California’s strange relationship with property tax and the inherent inequality associated with it, it’s a different animal.
What's missing in your analysis is that a large fraction of American roads have simply never been maintained. They were laid down initially, often paid for by developer fees, and never touched again. So, your analysis still leaves the question unanswered.
It's telling that a city in California doesn't have enough property taxes to pay for their roads. It's almost like Prop 13 causes problems.
But you also can't have homeless people around, that would be unsafe. Also they still expect people to live there and do service jobs for them, even though there is no place affordable to live.
And guess where the sewage goes when you can't or won't drive your RV to the dump site?
like, we can't rly make them stop unless we take they RV, now we got 1 more homeless. or we could take them to prison, now we got 1 more prisoner. none of this fixes the problem bc it's rly hard to punish ppl who got nothing to lose.
These guys do have something to lose - their RV and all their stuff in it. You can't ask them to magically with money they don't have, but you can effect behavior and priorities.
Now if you lose your RV and start squatting in a park, get warned for trespass and then stay anyway, while doing drugs in the open and shoplifting, etc. I'd love to see an escalation that eventually lands you in jail (not prison) and a 1/2 way house and treatment.
Rules need to be enforced. They can and should be enforced extremely compassionately and incrementally. But they need to be enforced.
And if they are not, this is a perfect example of what happens. The city has now de-facto abdicated a lot of it's authority and here we go, back to vigilance committees and self-help of 150 years ago. As shown, the self-help mechanisms lead to sub-optimal solutions for everyone. Now no one can park on those streets at all and the homeless are still homeless. Society just isn't going to just sit back and let shit-heads ruin it for everyone because the current city governance is too ineffective to take care of business in an optimal way.
That does generally seem to be the case. I live in one of the neighborhoods the article is about. There are a couple of RV residents nearby that have been in the same spot for years, keep to themselves, and don't seem to leave much trash around. The city and neighbors seem content to leave them as-is.
This framing does a disservice to the homeless because it takes away any of their agency. What about the people who choose to live this way? Or does the government take that choice away from them too?
But it’s just that: a fantasy, born from ignorance.
These are mobile drug dens often inhabited by people with long criminal records who throw trash all over the area — not middle class people down on their luck.
It's complicated. You're right that many homeless people are just people down on their luck doing their best to get by. Many of them aren't causing anyone any problems. From what I understand, most of these homeless people get by doing things like couch surfing and aren't very visible.
In this particular corner of the city, most of the people living in these RVs are not in great shape. Most are drug addicts, or mentally ill, or both. There is a halo of crime that surrounds these encampments. In the past couple of years, I've seen:
* Multiple cars broken into.
* A drive-by shooting of one of the RVs right by my house.
* That same RV's owner almost certainly selling drugs from her RV for years.
* A woman, completely topless, staggering in the middle of the street screaming obscenities at no one.
* Many needles on the ground.
* People urinating on our garage.
* Someone taking a shit next to our garage.
* My neighbor's car was broken into and the urn containing his father's ashes was stolen. When he found the guy who broke into it at a nearby encampment and tried to get it back, he was attacked with a knife.
* Rumors of prostitution and hep-C outbreaks in one of the encampments.
* A large man beating the shit out of a woman in broad daylight.
* Multiple shootings in other RVs and nearby homeless shelters.
* One guy, clearly suffering from schizophrenia, who sits on the sidewalk and screams at no one for hours and hours.
* Someone climbed our fence and was shambling around our backyard until a neighbor showed up and scared them off.
* Package theft, obviously. Constantly.
* Many many screaming matches and other domestic disputes.
* Someone sitting on portable toilet seat in the middle of the street, taking a shit in the middle of the day.
* Piles of trash, human waste, buckets of piss, bags of shit, etc. Because when you don't have property, that also means you don't have trash pick-up or sewer services.
* Someone throwing rocks at someone's car and at people in their backyard.
* A woman walked up onto our porch and stole the lightbulb right out of our porch light. (I've heard they use incandescent bulbs to make some kind of drug paraphernalia?)
* One guy runs what he calls the "homeless recording studio". He has a venue-sized PA system in his RV that he cranks up to full concert volume and plays the radio. Then he plays his drum kit on top of that. With the doors open, at all hours of the day and night.
In fact, I literally just got back from walking out to see what a large police response was about after seeing several cop cars circling. I don't know the details, but an officer said someone in an RV was refusing to come out.
I have a lot of sympathy for people suffering misfortune and I think almost all of these people mostly need help and support. I don't want them to be punished. But I don't want to keep dealing with the kind of stuff they are doing either.
(You may be wondering why we don't call the cops about this. We do. If we're lucky, they come. When they do, it's hours later and too late to do anything about it.)
Homeless advocates say it is not fair that the city expects vehicle dwellers to obey parking laws..
It does not matter if it's to run errands or improvised RV housing, why should some obey the parking laws and others are allowed not to? The defeats the point of having parking spaces. Parking spaces were never intended to be dwellings. This seems really unfair. It's a difficult problem...everyone says that housing affordability/availability is the answer yet nothing get done.
To me, a permanent concrete block is an even worse violation of parking laws than a semi-permanent RV.
PNW = Pacific NorthWest?
Cities do not give away public parking. Either you have to pay for it (metered parking), it's provided "free" to customers only (i.e. paid for by the profit margin on goods and services), or it's only available to people who live in an area (i.e. those people paid property tax, either as owners or renters).
> everything but housing will do, presumably
Housing doesn't solve rampant drug addiction, theft, mental illness, and laziness. The article in the OP literally cites trash accumulating, rats running rampant, and vehicle fires spontaneously occurring. That is not the environment that a rational person occupies.
I guess you just lack imagination and or empathy. That's one way to look at it but it so far has a zero success track record at solving these problems.
The product you're selling - public transit and high density walkable neighborhoods - isn't very appealing to most people. Public transit is slow, dirty, and dangerous. Neighborhoods without enough parking just force people to Uber everywhere or take public transit, raising the cost of living and wasting people's time. Smaller, hyperlocal grocery stores have inferior selection, higher prices, and worse quality than places like Costco.
And these aren't problems you can fix with more funding. Public transit is slow because NIMBYs block trains from running at high speed in most neighborhoods. It's dirty and dangerous because there is no political will to screen riders or to arrest vagrants. Smaller grocery stores suffer from inferior economies of scale, so they never will compete with places like Costco in price.
The price of basic goods like bananas in a bodega type store is triple what it would be at Costco. $1.29-1.99/lb for bananas vs. $0.50-0.70/lb at Costco. And the Costco bananas will be bigger and in better condition than the ones at the bodega. Make the comparison with baked goods like muffins or croissants and it's no contest.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32300502.