Seattle and the Puget Sound is a beautiful place but horrible place to live. They have an absolutely useless government that has no idea how to solve any of their problems. So they end up with stuff like this.
I wouldn't call Seattle's government "useless", but their effectiveness is certainly diminished by reactionary voters whose moral/punitive emotions get weighed more than evidence-based science on homelessness.
When I moved here in 2010 the cola was 30% more than St Louis. It's now over 3x.