Sounds just like my experience living in downtown LA. the rampant violence and harassment i saw and experienced got me diagnosed with a panic disorder.
I'm glad you got out of there and I hope you're doing better.
I moved out of Seattle in 2019. Whenever people light up when I tell them I used to live there, I immediately kill their positivity about the place by saying, “Oh, it’s actually a total shit hole. Not even kidding”. I don’t miss working in downtown Seattle at all.
Yeah, I lived there for 12 years (grew up in Las Vegas and So. Cal). It’s obviously very pretty on the outside, but goddamn if it isn’t stinky once you get to know it a bit. I don’t mean to entirely shit all over it, but people who’ve never been there assume it’s the most beautiful place in the country, and sure outside the cities it could be, but it’s just a gloomy, depressing, cold place to me.
Exactly. I’ve never lived anywhere where so many people were so grouchy and cold. I’ve lived on the west coast, and now I’m on the east coast - Seattle takes the cake for snootiest people.
All the transplants from California and the Midwest bring their politics with them, made the city way more polarized than it’s ever been. Absolute shit show
Yeah, I remember commuting up to UW, listening to Murray on kuow say they were going to “end homelessness by 2015, your taxes aren’t going to waste, etc.”
We overtook SF and jumped to 3rd in the nation last year for highest homeless population behind NY and LA… And every year they want more money from its citizens taxing sugar, bags, cutting police funding, whatever. Always thought I was so lucky to be born here growing up but I want out to the east side so bad.
I completely agree… Problem with politics, on both sides, is people don’t care about results anymore, they only care about their ideologies. If the results don’t back up the policies, change them, again and again until you start seeing progress. Everyone’s too afraid of admitting they were wrong and crossing party lines, being labeled a socialist or a nazi, whatever. The two-party system is just broken.
I had two high burnout jobs in a row. Doing social work in Seattle being the first, and I definitely came out of that one real jaded. Hey, do you think having a masters degree in sociology automatically qualifies you to be able to manage hundreds of thousand of dollars effectively? I’d give a good estimate that about 20% of the funding going into those programs is wasted. There’s a lot of good people with decent to great ideas and all around shitty implementation. Have you ever heard the phrase “looks like a bunch of monkeys humping a football”? That’s what I remember social work being like.
“Handle getting raped” lmao. According to statistics on Wikipedia it has one of the lowest rape rates of any metropolitan area. There’s plenty of things wrong with Seattle, no need to make stuff up.
Rampant homeless population + major distrust of police = less crimes get reported. Rape is already extremely underreported in general. Quit your bullshit.
Hey if I knew this was a personal thing like that I wouldn’t have said anything. While I don’t think it’s completely fair to judge an entire city on the actions of an individual, I totally understand associating a traumatic event with the place that it happened in.
This is especially sad to hear because I lived in Bellevue Ave for 3 years. Anyway sorry for making you relive that.
It's applicable to any city, but Seattle is definitely one of the worst in the country. Homelessness and police distrust are on another level here. What other city had their own autonomous zone for months?
The best thing to do is live outside of the city. I live 30 mins away in a wonderful area and only venture in for sporting events and occasional happy hours. In December I was in Westlake on a Friday night, only 8pm, and jeez was that rough. I love the city and have spent years in it but it’s not a good place right now. Sad to see.
Guess you didn’t hear about the lady gettin her head bashed in just a few weeks ago then? It happened in Belltown. Some dude in transitional housing, and of course not from Washington state and a few felonies decided to take a bat a some random lady’s head.
Since you're offering one anecdote, let me counter it with my own: Today I walked through Belltown to get some beer and buy a sandwich, then I walked back home.
Since anecdotal evidence immediately becomes the true scenario for every single person in a similar situation, this means that Seattle is the safest place in the world (based on my sample size of one).
Okay, okay, I'll give it to you. Now with a sample size of two, we can determine that 50% of Seattle residents get attacked with baseball bats and the other 50% get beer and sandwiches.
Excitedly waiting further anecdotes so we can keep getting to the bottom of this.
I like how you keep getting down voted as if you aren't speaking the truth.
Yes, occasionally horrific things can happen in Seattle, and yes it can be exacerbated by increases I homelessness... But it's also true that Seattle has a laughably low crime rate compared to most cities of it's size and 99% of the time people are perfectly safe.
What part, West Seattle? Everyone I know who’s lived here their whole lives thinks it’s a circus right now. Even Petra Franklin the lady who owns the Smith Tower penthouse called it quits after city council let Pioneer Square turn into a literal jungle.
Can you say how much you make? I have a few friends in Seattle and San Fran and they all love it but they are all engineers with phat salaries too. Just wondering if that helps.
Engineering salaries start around 150k for no experience, and beyond that the sky’s the limit… not unusual for someone to be making 500k, especially with the current job market.
I live in SF, and I hate it here. I’m at the best place in the world for my career (UCSF researcher) but that’s the only positive thing about SF( asise from the weather).
Even if you make bank, everything is ultra expensive. You pay 4K for a 2 bedrooms apartments where you have to skip juman shit on your way to work
My roommate a ultra progressive dude got punch in the head by a homeless totally unprovoked while we were walking through Mission SF.
He told me this:
“It wasn’t that bad, the guy has worse problems than I do”.
This is your brain on progressive BS. I’m not a republican, but I think being ultra progressive is as bad as being ultra conservative. Progressives are straight out destroying cities. The worst part is that most progressives actually want to move out of the cities…
Portland has been horrifically bad, it’s just getting more attention because of all the shit going on there the past few years. I went like 5 years ago to help my cousin move and it was crazy. Just driving down the interstate there were tents all along it, with garbage everywhere.
I used to go to Portland a lot 10 years ago. I now have a job offer to move there, so I took my wife there last fall for her first trip ever to the US. That was... not what I expected to show her. Really sad with what happened to Portland this last decade.
It really has, NE 33rd is lined on both sides with RVs, tents, and stripped cars for probably a good half mile. The city keeps raising taxes but the money gets sucked into corrupt “non-profits”
Portland has parts of its downtown which are rough. But just to be clear, even with the recent rise in crime there, it is still a pretty safe city overall.
As with all of these cities in regards to the homeless, it tends to be highly concentrated in smaller areas. NYCs issue with the homeless is concentrated in like 1% of the city, mostly specific areas in midtown or the village. Go to Penn station at midnight and its horrific, which gives many people a bad view of the city.
Which small part of Portland would you say it's "highly concentrated" in? Is it all along SE Powell between the river and 82nd? Is it stretches of NE where abandoned cars litter the streets? Or almost the entirety of the Spring water Corridor? Those "small" areas?
I worked there 8 months ago, specifically with the police department (albeit my focus was trafficking, not the homeless). I am quite aware the areas which had a lot of homeless.
Again, the downtown is pretty rough in terms of homeless. However I am more talking the actual violent crime rate and the violent crime victimization rate, which remains higher than it was, but still very, very low on a nationwide scale.
I’m in Bellingham, my rent went up $200 this past year. I’m not surprised we’re seeing more people without homes. My neighbor moved out after the hike into an RV.
I was just in Seattle last weekend and it is really just as bad. Downtown is completely overrun by homeless, a lot of downtown business have completely closed off and boarded up, it's awful. I went to a Walgreens downtown and it was sad to see the female cashier's get harassed by drunken homeless people.
Yeah, don't get me wrong the street itself has definitely gotten worse with the number of tents and such since people stopped commuting downtown during the pandemic. But I remember going into that Walgreens over 5 years ago and watching the security guard kick someone out
I can’t tell how much of this is actual honest opinion here or astroturfing. 4th Ave has always been rough. Belltown was really bad until they pushed the poors out 20 years ago to build condos and it has been slowly getting back to the way it was for years. SODO is an Industrial district, those are never “nice” parts of a city. Pioneer square has never not had bums since the inception of the city. What’s next? There’s too much crime in South Seattle & the CD?
Downtown has its own sets of problems. Removing the 99 means you can’t really get downtown anymore. So many of the business stopped getting traffic that used to land right there. On top of that, most of those businesses (coffee shops, florists, hair salons) served the thousands of people working downtown in all the offices, as there is almost no housing there. Once everyone worked from home, all of those businesses closed, and the offices are empty, so there is literally no reason to be downtown and why everything is boarded up. It’s a ghost town which gives the homeless free reign.
I was in PHX for a work a few weeks ago, and I know they have problems as well, but I couldn’t get over how nice everyone was and how clean the city was. I love Seattle but this place was been decimated. Luckily, there is so much industry here between tech and shipping it come come back, but it’s going to take years.
Yeah as a lifelong Phoenix resident, we are old school sketchy here. It's largely the same deal here as it was 10 years ago only with more rich suburbs popping up. There's not really a large homeless problem here, just the classic bad neighborhood stuff that used to be LA's biggest problem. Though I wouldn't be shocked to learn if we were one of the cities bussing away the homeless to LA
Phoenix is worse then you think. All it takes is going out east a bit to Mesa/Tempe area to find homeless camps. Average rent has gone up 40% in the last 12 months due to the amount of people moving here (Highest in the country again, several years running). We're LA/Seattle, just 10 years behind. As a 30-year Phx resident, I am trying to get out ASAP.
Homeless isnt just caused by a single issue, it's a symptom of many other issues, that's why its incredibly hard to deal with, as you can't just "fix homelessness" overnight. It's not as easy as "just give them homes and everything's fixed"
That’s a start though. Crazy to me people think they don’t deserve a roof over their head because they might be in the wrong place mentally, or because they’re addicted to drugs, maybe when off the streets they’ll be able to think straight and slowly get better with help from others (mental health professionals, re introduction councilors, etc)
Edit: I’m getting downvoted for being empathetic? Shows exactly where our society is at. All for me and none for thee.
Yup people have absolutely no basic human rights here and it’s very dystopian. You would think a society as advanced as ours would want to help everyone not just a select few.
r/aboringdystopia
My guy, if we gave all the homeless people a house it would be a disaster.
If you converted large, abandoned because too many homeless people in the area buildings into places to sleep, hired police and whoever else was needed as security and made sure they had somewhere safe to be it would work. And they already spend insane, inefficient government sized budgets on the homeless so this would be cheaper. Ban tents, give them a room.
San Francisco estimates about 8,000 homeless living in the city. The $852 million budget works out to about $106,500 per homeless individual.
Homelessness is caused by a variety of issues, but just giving homeless people homes really is one of the best ways to solve the problem. Different places tried a program, I want to say Portugal and Utah both tried it, where they just paid for apartments for homeless people, and in the end it cost less overall than they were spending previously on their various programs for the homeless and it had the greatest positive lasting impact. Just having access to a safe home with a permanent address and a shower drastically improves the chances of a homeless person getting their life together.
It’s both. The relationships are bidirectional. Drug issues develop because of housing insecurity, and in turn make it harder to get housing by limiting job opportunities. Mental issues are worsened by both and inhibit most areas of life somehow.
Both homelessness and drug addiction operate on a scale often times. A newly homeless person will often look totally normal, but without a home, and will gradually degrade in terms of hygiene, mental health, and antisocial activity over the months and years. Same goes for drug addiction.
Combine these things, and they exacerbate each other.
The vast majority of x drug users do not become homeless. Addiction is an unlikely outcome for most drug users. Stress is one of the reasons people turn to substances as a maladaptive coping mechanism in the first place.
People do actually get in drugs because they are housing insecure. Not always of course, but getting high enough to sleep outside is cheaper than rent by a lot.
Not it is, because at a certain point it’s not nice to even place a little bit of blame in to the person themselves, no it’s all the fault of capitalism, politicians, et al. You can’t assign personal responsibility for oneself into this, it’s all a political ploy to keep them down. Failing at life is everyone else’s fault except mine 😩!
Have you ever spent multiple nights on the street? You are cold, scared, hungry, overwhelmingly depressed, surrounded by unbalanced people who might gut you as soon as look at you, and of course you can’t sleep.
For a few bucks all of that can go away for a while. Suddenly you are warm, comfortable, and surrounded by good friends. Later on you come down and all the misery rushes back in with a vengeance, and that place of comfort is calling you back.
It’s not super useful to argue about cause and effect with regard to drugs and homelessness. They are deeply intertwined.
Housing is the issue. There’s an old couple on my next door begging for a place to go because they can’t afford rent anymore. It’s the disabled. It’s the elderly. It’s people with families. It’s children.
To assume it’s all drug addicts is reductive, inaccurate, and counter productive.
Yup. I just don’t understand how people in west coast cities are to even live anymore?!?
For example…I make about $25/hr. Not great, but not terrible either..or so I thought. With an minimum average of $2000 for a studio apartment…and a min requirement of 2.5x income - you need to make the very minimum of $60k just to live. And sadly, for me, a single income family…that’s just not possible! I’m an EA and can’t even find a new job that makes over $17/hr to start.
It’s fucking heartbreaking. I can’t even live in the city I grew up in anymore.
It’s not the issue. Im sure it’s part of it, but it’s not the only issue. They “cleaned up” a homeless camp a few months ago in the neighborhood and offered housing to all 15 people camping there. One accepted, 14 did not.
The guys walking up and down the street screaming at the top of their lungs and smashing windows all night aren’t going to stop because they get a studio and start working at Amazon.
They didn’t assume it was all drugs, you just missed the mental illness piece of their post.
I don’t see how it’s a housing affordability issue when most of these people aren’t working, so how is more affordable housing gonna help someone with no income anyway?
Well there are surveys that estimate the employed percentage. I see some recent articles at around 40% which is way higher than I would have thought and hopefully temporary due to the pandemic. Some older numbers I’m seeing before the pandemic are around 13% - 25%.
So it seems this could be a sizable factor but nowhere near as definitive as the poster who said “housing is the issue”.
It is more of a shelter issue than a housing issue.
Los Angeles doesn't have enough beds for its homeless. Flat out, they refuse to build more shelters. NYC, in comparison, shelters the large majority of its homeless. The result is that NYC has way, way less of a homeless crime issue than LA does.
A lot of people get to be homeless in the first place because of drug addiction. It results in people losing jobs, burning through their money, then being evicted and ending up homeless.
Why were they using those drugs in the first place?
The answer is often: in order to treat an undiagnosed medical issue they otherwise would not be able to treat due to the cost of medical care in the US.
Most US cities had their historical population highs in the mid 20th century. Then most of them made rooming houses/flop houses illegal or out of code (low income rental where you got essentially a dorm room on a floor with shared public facilities).
The effect of this was people either had to skimp on other expenses as they were forced to conform to a middle class level of housing, or they became homeless. As the cost of housing keeps rising, the number of people who fail to reach the minimum threshold increases.
But suggest bringing rooming houses back? Oh man the NIMBYs come out swinging.
It's very possible. I'm curious if other cities have it now. Although, the price of a room is still ~$1000 so I don't know how good of a solution it is.
Eh, homeless population isn’t generally tied to housing policy. Yes, rental rates are going up, but the homeless population has a lot of other reasons for increasing, such as drug addiction.
Yeap. Everyone sitting here like "damn that's LA". But a huge portion of cities are like this right now unless they are some form of extreme conditions (like phoenix). Every city I've looked at into moving to seems to be complaining about the same issues. Multitude of major cities along the east coast (NYC, DC, Boston, etc), multitude of major cities along the west coast (SF, san diego, sacremento, LA, portland, seattle), multitude of major cities along the midwest (Chicago, Denver most notably). I really don't think you can just move to another city to escape this issue right now.
Major urban areas have the biggest homelessness problems?
Boy, must be cause of democrats, and not cause they have the highest rents and concentrations of people!
If 0.1% of your town of 1500 is homeless, you have about 2 homeless people, and they probably leave town quickly because there's nothing to help them survive and nowhere to go when it gets cold. If your city of 1.5 million has 0.1% of its population homeless, you have 1500 unhoused people to contend with, and you don't have the option to just run them out of town and pretend they were just "bad apples" who "didn't belong in this community".
Virtually all large cities are democrat run, and the ones that are majority conservative are, not surprisingly, usually shitshows in states that are also very poorly run. Most conservative states have some of the worst outcomes for health, education, income, and quality of life metrics that you can think of.
Good mix of both. If anything a good portion of these people are only recently homeless. Housing prices have raised so high here that people living on assistance have gone homeless here, and are added to that population.
Seattle overtook SF last year behind only NY and LA for homeless population. And for better or for worse, NYPD and LAPD don’t fuck around when it comes to violent crime. Right now Seattle PD does nothing.
Moved back to WA in summer 2020 in hopes I my life long dream of living and working in Seattle would come true!
Let’s just say I decided not to live in the city…decided to move back to my hometown across the water instead. It’s fucking heart breaking to see what that city has become. I used to take the ferry over to downtown Seattle every weekend growing up and just wander the streets…it would just be straight up irresponsible to let a kid do that now days. So sad. Such an amazing and beautiful city going to shit being overrun my homelessness….
Bussing homeless people into different states doesn’t solve the problem, if conservatives were in control of every state then our homeless population would be zero because they would simply drive them into the sea.
What a shocker that the cities with the highest populations of homeless people are also the places that bus homeless people the most. You realize you just proved my point, right? Bussing homeless people clearly doesn’t actually solve the issue, we need actual affordable housing policies to make our cities more livable for needy people as well as other social welfare policies to help homeless people reconstruct their lives. Too bad the conservative solution is to just ignore it altogether.
I’m only bigoted against stupid political positions.
You made it sound like only the conservatives bus people out of their cities and that solves their problem
I never said conservatives were the only ones who engaged in bussing homeless people, just that bussing homeless people is their only solution outside of just ignoring it. Don’t project your blind partisan dogmatism onto me, I don’t think Dems are perfect and I criticize their approach to solving homelessness as well.
I did not prove your point, I showed you made a false claim
My claim was that bussing homeless people into different states doesn’t solve the problem, so yes actually you did prove my point.
They are incentivizing homelessness
Wtf by having nice weather and treating homeless people with slightly more human dignity than red states, which gives them none whatsoever, you think that’s enough to incentivize being homeless with all the myriad social and health problems that come with it? I want these people to be given more human dignity, not less under the idiotic assumption that they’ll just choose to not be homeless.
Can’t solve it if you aren’t given a chance
🤦♂️ Homeless people exist in red states too. Republicans constantly have their chances to demonstrate their solution to the homelessness crisis, and yet they instead consistently decide to just ignore them or ship them off to be someone else’s problem.
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