zlacker

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+(OP)
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+c1
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.

>>VWWHFS+c1
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+8c
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