zlacker

I lived in Seattle Capitol Hill (Harvard Ave by SCCC) area for 10 years and left the state in 2010. I went back a few years ago for a visit and it looked like the homeless population had doubled in the time since. All of King and Pierce counties are completely overrun by homelessness and drug addiction. I remember it was a big deal when they would go sweep out "The Jungle" tent city under I-5 at Beacon Hill. Now they're building tent cities right in the middle of residential neighborhoods.

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.

>>VWWHFS+(OP)
Recent events cast doubt on your judgment of the government there. Unlike e.g. New York they have dealt somewhat effectively with the pandemic. Seattle was hit first yet seems to have brought the situation under control with fewer deaths than other American cities. At the very least, they didn't force covid-positive patients into old folks' homes.

>>jessau+O
There's a pretty big difference between Seattle and NYC in terms of size and population density. Like many orders of magnitude difference. But you're right that NYC didn't handle the outbreak very well.

>>VWWHFS+B2
MSA population: 19M/4M -> less than one order of magnitude

City population: 8.3M/750k -> one order of magnitude

City density: 28k/8400 -> less than one order of magnitude

This is not what one imagines when one encounters the sentence fragment "Like many orders of magnitude difference."

[EDIT:] Normally technical correctness is appreciated? If anyone here really thinks that New York has done a better job dealing with the pandemic than Washington State, I would love to see the reasoning. ISTM this argument from population proves too much; why can't it be invoked anytime New York's performance lags other states?

>>jessau+u3
you see there's a pretty big difference though

>>VWWHFS+S3
They are not the same city, but no two cities are. Lots of denser and more populous cities in other nations have done better. Most of the most serious mistakes in New York were made at the state level; Washington State exhibited better governance. New York at least had some warning that the pandemic was coming. Washington had the USA patient zero.

>>jessau+u3
I figured by "one order of magnitude" you were trying to stress how different they were, but then I noticed you were the author of the post that was being refuted.

Beyond an order of magnitude in population, you have the cultural differences: Low usage of public transportation (compared to NYC), strict observation of social norms, comparatively high number of folks who can work from home, etc.

>>VWWHFS+(OP)
You are correct that Seattle has a tremendous amount of homelessness. The rest of your comment doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Sweeps - which you seem to be advocating - do nothing to solve the problem; meanwhile you ironically criticize tent cities in residential neighborhoods without seeming to understand that a tent city is a residential neighborhood and it is precisely the periodic shutdowns and relocations of tent cities and similar instabilities that exacerbate the homeless problem by blowing folks from place to place.

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.

>>xenocy+V5
I'm not advocating for anything. I'm just offering an observation as someone that lived there for a decade and loves the area, but now has somewhat of an outsider perspective. Seattle has very deep, fundamental problems that it has no idea how to solve. Homeless tent cities scattered throughout the county are not normal in nearly any other American city. Especially not the ones as wealthy as Seattle. And maybe that is a source of the problem. But it also seems the political leanings of the voters are at odds with the lifestyle they enjoy in the area.

>>VWWHFS+77
Seattle also added a massive amount of people and housing went up 2.3x. those economic factors likely outweighed anything the government did by far.

When I moved here in 2010 the cola was 30% more than St Louis. It's now over 3x.

>>jessau+O
There was a recent study that discussed the Washington response being so effective because it was based on an assumption that seems to have been wrong: that there was widespread, undetected transmission of the disease starting from the first case in the state on January 15.

The study results show that there was probably another case (or multiple) introduced around February 13, meaning that there had only been about two weeks of community transmission instead of the six that officials thought. But because they thought it had been spreading undetected for six weeks, they reacted very strongly and put in strict measures quickly.

So it was probably technically an "overreaction", but that's what made it so effective and kept the situation from getting as bad there as NYC and other places.

Here's an Ars Technica article about it: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/washingtons-covid-19...

And here's the actual study, which also includes a similar situation in early Europe cases: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.109322v1

>>VWWHFS+(OP)
What is your example of a "useful" government in the US?

>>VWWHFS+77
Just wanted to say I agree with you. I first came to Seattle in 2011, and left the area in 2015 (lived in Tacoma for 2 years in that time as well), returned in 2018. I'm originally from the Midwest and I just don't understand why people here seem to look at the San Francisco checklist of "how to make your city unlivable" and decided to go step by step.

>>remark+3i
West coast boom cities have very similar problems and evolutions (see Portland and compare to Seattle, heck, see Vancouver BC...). No one is copying SF, they are just subject to similar forces

>>VWWHFS+(OP)
> Completely overrun by homelessness and drug addiction

I lived in capitol hill for a decade, 3 blocks from CHAZ, and recently moved a mile away. The city is not even remotely overrun with homelessness.

Sure, there are people without homes. Do they seriously impact the lifestyle of others? Hardly at all.

This characterization of the Puget Sound feels way out of touch to me. It's a wonderful place to live.

>>acidbu+c51
I lived there in 2016, next to the Rite Aid outside (or maybe inside?) the CHAZ. The homeless situation was absolutely terrible for an American city. Sure it's not as bad as shanty towns I've seen in India or Malaysia, but it wasn't good. Housing was/is insane with shared rooms anywhere near the city being $700 and a 1 bedroom to yourself going for ~$2k. Not as bad as SF/The Bay, but still not good by any means.

Sure it's not "overrun," but there are a lot of them, and not enough jobs or affordable housing.

People complained about homeless people coming into the city for the benefits and I thought that was just a myth the Amazon employees would spew, but I talked to a social worker who told me that's true and that her office dealt with a lot of people who came to Seattle because of their programs and benefits.

>>jessau+O
Well in Seattle, the major outbreak was in Kirkland at that senior center. We know now even in NYC, the vast majority of fatalities happened in senior and assisted living centers. Over 70% of fatalities in Canada, Ohio and other places have been elderly care centers[0].

It's pretty clear this disease wasn't anywhere near as bad as everyone was predicting, and I expect the 100k US fatality number to drop once a year has past and we can put some real data analysis on it. A lot of people have died due to not being able to get medical care too, and those 2nd order effects of these lockdowns will also be significant.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=70%25+fatalities+senior+centers+co...

>>djsumd+F91
I lived 1 block from there, by Lindas until a year ago. What kind of interactions with homeless people did you have to say it is absolutely terrible?

I occasionally saw a homeless person, but that was about the worst of it. And I was out on the town a lot. Oh my car got broken into once as well. Once in 11 years.

>>acidbu+0b1
I just saw so many of them .. more than I have in any other city in the developed world (and I've lived a lot of places).

I never had any bad interactions with them I guess, but I broke my heart to see that many of them, especially in the downtown areas and further out towards the Interstate and underpasses.

I dunno, maybe I'm too sensitive, but it broke my heart. It's one of the many reasons I left Seattle.

>>djsumd+5e1
Homeless people exist everywhere. In my Wisconsin city they were out of sight because cold kills. In my Missouri city they were out of sight because we’d just arrest them if they didn’t stick to a few block radius.

Consider: if you don’t see homeless people, it might not be because there’s less homelessness. It might just be that they were driven out.

>>acidbu+0b1
I've lived in Capitol Hill for 9 years. I've been attacked twice by crazy people. One time it was a physical attack, the other time it was a man singling me and my family out and approaching within a few feet while screaming very aggressively (my family was visiting me at the time).

I'm a large man. It's worse for people who are not physically imposing. A woman I knew worked an early shift job (leave at 3:45am to open up). She was regularly followed and harassed while walking to work sometimes by gangs of men, she left the city in less than a year.

These problems are getting worse because there's literally hundreds of thousands of citizens (you can see them in this comment chain) who will rush to disagree with anyone who raises these problems. I'm well-equipped to buy a house here, but we decided several days ago to stop looking for one. We decided we're going to leave the Puget Sound area to get away from this.

>>djsumd+oa1
what other singular event has killed 100k people in the US in less than 6 months outside of a couple wars?

not as bad as everyone was predicting...... are you fucking kidding me? and this number is after the major cities impacted literally fucking shut themselves down to help prevent the spread.

>>jatone+mu3
100k is a rough estimate. It might be higher, but will most likely be lower. The data will need to be pruned and carefully looked at. There are incentives for people to misclassify deaths at COVID19[0]. It will likely not get much higher than 100k as exponential growth doesn't continue indefinitely[1]. It's practically gone in Italy right now.

600k die every year from hearth disease. 700k died globally from mosquito transmitted illness[2]. There are tons of secondary effects. People in America have died of Malaria. Many have committed suicide (Including my best friend's flatmate). Many were told not to come to hospitals. Many hearth attacks were wrongly attributed to COVID if a patient tested positive for it.

We've seen massive amounts of people at beaches in Florida, Texas and other places, as well as these protests and riots, and there are no massive spikes in fatalities 2~4 weeks after those events. The WHO said asymptomatic spread was rare, then waked it back (probably because of political pressure from Dr Fauchi), even though it was known asymptomatic spread was probably not a major transmission in February[3]!

This entire thing has been one massive media manipulation, and in less than two days, the entire thing flipped from one global narrative to another, like a switch!

[0]: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/#incen...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg

[2]: https://www.isglobal.org/en_GB/-/mosquito-el-animal-mas-leta...

[3]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non-symptomati...

>>djsumd+S25
100k is a rough estimate. It might be higher, but will most likely be lower.

How is this going to happen? We haven't controlled the disease even by shutting lots of stuff down, and the political will does not exist to keep that stuff shut down. After everything reopens the disease will certainly kill more people. There won't be an effective vaccine until a great deal more research is done; that's a decade away at least. Effective treatments such as antibodies will not be scalable for many months. We'll be lucky if we hold USA covid deaths this year to 200k.