Seattle

Seattle Under Siege

https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness

Excerpt: In its 2017 point-in-time count of the homeless, King County social-services agency All Home found 11,643 people sleeping in tents, cars, and emergency shelters. Property crime has risen to a rate two and a half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s. Cleanup crews pick up tens of thousands of dirty needles from city streets and parks every year. At the same time, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman, and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened, with more addiction, more crime, and more tent encampments in residential neighborhoods. (...) the real battle isn’t being waged in the tents, under the bridges, or in the corridors of City Hall but in the realm of ideas, where, for now, four ideological power centers frame Seattle’s homelessness debate. I’ll identify them as the socialists, the compassion brigades, the homeless-industrial complex, and the addiction evangelists. (Wow. The author, Christopher F. Rufo, is a maker of documentary films for PBS, but he takes a very hard–and critical–look at why the culture of homelessness reduction in Seattle has gone so rotten and had so little success. You’d almost get the idea he could be a conservative, or at least a realist. Link may not be live.  Ron P.)