I knew about the KOMO - Seattle is Dying show but did not comment. Used to live there and the evidence is plain. Seattle has gone through boom and bust cycles before and will continue to do so. Nothing is static.
Here is an excellent analysis and some good news at City Journal:
A Brewing Rebellion in the Emerald City
For the past five years, like many of its West Coast counterparts, Seattle has endured a steady expansion of homelessness, addiction, mental illness, crime, and street disorder. But the activist class—a political and cultural elite comprising leaders in government, nonprofits, philanthropy, and media—has enforced a strict taboo on declaring the obvious: something is terribly wrong in the Emerald City.
Last month, veteran Seattle reporter Eric Johnson of KOMO violated that taboo with a shocking, hour-long documentary called Seattle is Dying, which revealed how the city has allowed a small subset of the homeless population—drug-addicted and mentally-ill criminals—to wreak havoc. Johnson’s portrait is backed up by evidence from King County homelessness data, by city attorney candidate Scott Lindsay’s “prolific offender” report on 100 homeless individuals responsible for more than 3,500 criminal cases, and by my own reporting on the homelessness crisis.
Some interesting excerpts:
According to the Seattle Times, 53 percent of Seattle voters now support a “zero-tolerance policy” on homeless encampments; 62 percent believe that the problem is getting worse because the city “wastes money by being inefficient” and “is not accountable for how the money is spent,” and that “too many resources are spent on the wrong approaches to the problem.”
And this - Johnson is the KOMO reporter who did the video:
According to leaked documents, the City of Seattle and its allies have retained a crisis-communications firm to discredit Johnson and insist, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, that “Seattle is making progress to end homelessness, and proven solutions are working.”
Our appearance of careful management is simply a careful management of appearances. And, when you do not have facts to back up your case, you can always do what liberals do so well - fling poo:
The city’s nonprofit and academic partners—mainstays of the homeless-industrial complex—have also launched coordinated attacks against the critics. Timothy Harris, director of Real Change News, has argued that grassroots neighborhood groups like Speak Out Seattle and labor unions like the Iron Workers Local 86 who opposed the city’s head tax are “alt-right” white supremacists, bigots, and fascists. Catherine Hinrichsen, director of the Project on Family Homelessness at Seattle University, accused Johnson of “hate-mongering” and spreading “fear.”
Much more - nice to see the citizens wake up. I had a lot of wonderful times there but at this stage in my life, I would never want to live in a big city again. Too much that can go wrong, too frail an infrastructure.
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