The short version of it is that the homeless "advocates" want homelessness to be as visible as possible so they encourage very public encampments, gatherings, etc. It used to be that the encampments and loitering were fairly discreet but that all changed around 2015 (after the police shut down a very large encampment under I-5) and got far worse with COVID when shelters were ruled too cruel. You don't really see it in the residential neighborhoods because that would lead to a more meaningful pushback. The end goal seems to be to scare off enough rich people that rents go down but pre-Amazon Seattle was never like this and I doubt the progressive activists would enjoy it. You really see how quickly things can break down in a city with a populace that used to be famously law-abiding.
(The ban on solicitation is the one law police bother enforcing, so that's why no one asks for money. You have to go to Portland if you want that experience.)
Interesting - I'd honestly rather be asked for money (not aggressively, like I'm used to in every other city haha) because that at least feels like these guys are still part of society. It's really unnerving to see whole groups of people who are just in the same space but seem to have nothing to do with anyone or anything. That's weirder to observe than panhandling even though maybe it's easier to just keep walking.
Obviously getting people housed is aligned with urbanist goals, but it's pretty hard to see how any actions taken by the various not-for-profit orgs that run Seattle will actually get us there. "Do absolutely nothing until the city council comes up with a way to fund housing for 100% of the homeless population of Seattle" isn't a realistic solution.
Seattle has a high transit mode share and is only one of only six major US cities in 2019 with a driving commute mode share of less than 50%. It's the only such city without a significant fixed guideway network. They do it all with buses.
I didn't ride any buses but we did take the light rail from and to the airport ($3 vs. almost $80 for an Uber). I've heard complaints about crime and stuff on the light rail, to my eyes it was clean and safe, felt fine there. (I actually rode a couple of city buses in Cincinnati as well as their streetcar. At least for the downtown it works well, but it's a more spread-out city.)
One of my gripes is that, despite plans proposed years ago, they've never bothered to run light rail to the state capitol. Instead, they just keep adding more lanes to I-5.
You may well be correct. I did work at a hearing in 2014 or so where they had a written plan to continue light rail to Olympia. Maybe they weren't in earnest.
Seattle buses aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty good, and the network is pretty dang comprehensive. I live in a mostly SFH, suburban part of the city on the edge of the city limits, and I’m really close to 3 bus routes and a little longer walk to 4 or 5 more, including one high frequency line.
It has 3-5 fixed guideways but they’re not at all a network…yet. Still, the light rail is great and expanding. But the bus network certainly pulls its weight.
Though ridership is still catching up to 2019 levels, ridership was growing steadily before that.
What was the ridership of the light rail opened in 2009. How many miles of light rail did Seattle have in 2019? What was the ridership of that network in 2019? Enough to move modal share more than a point?
I have a different angle when I look at transit numbers. My angle is "what can municipal governments do to make transit service and other active transportation better," which implies looking at stats for cities rather than for metros and transit systems. But this approach is bad for answering different kinds of questions.
Ridership was quickly growing prior to COVID. I have no idea if it’s back or not, or how they’re evaluating it since they don’t really enforce fare collection.
Thank you for a brutally honest account of the Emerald City. My only hope is the now sane mayor and city council will undo the damages done by the previous ultra progressive city government for a decade plus. What killed me was voters kept voting for activists who were fairly new arrivals instead of folks with deep local ties who care more about providing services and making it attractive for businesses and visitors alike.
Thank you. My wife told she heard the council just last week reversed guidance that police were not allowed to pursue suspects. (Not sure what exactly that was about). I'm certainly not averse to looking at the police side of this stuff, poorly trained or brutal cops. But if these cities can hamstring the police they can also professionalize them, if that's the problem. I take care not to imply that I want to go full "law and order" just because I can see what's in front of me. Somehow that subtlety seems hard for some people.
“Not allowed to pursue suspects” was probably about car chases (which statistically are more of a danger to the public than just letting the suspect get away)
My understanding is it was a state wide reversal of the ban passed by the legislature this year, which is much welcomed news. Truth is there were plenty of mistakes made by the police and its union. But the former city council demonized the entire force and resulted in hemorrhaging of officers. That was horrible to most businesses and residents alike. The craziest story was a former socialist city council member who led the defund police charge also complained about slow police response time when she said someone threw dog feces to her lawn.
Graham Factor actually just had a post about the difficulties of injecting oversite in ways where you just make multiple competing bosses who write policy through action:
A little bit older, but a former Seattle cop sat down with a former Baltimore cop (now professor) and discussed some of the more absurd reform efforts:
Yes, Seattle has serious homeless and drug problems. And we don't have enough air conditioning because it only started getting hot here in the last few years. Plus housing is too expensive.
But I still wouldn't live anywhere else. I can see a volcano out my window. There's water everywhere, fresh and salt. We have forests and mountains practically in our back yard.
And one thing I especially appreciate about the greater Seattle area is we're diverse and multicultural and it's OK to be gay and trans.
I agree. Seattle has issues, but also has real soul and a collective irony I’ve never experienced anywhere else. The city has really gone through some rough patches over the last decade, but I have hope and faith that it will come through.
I’m sorry to hear that was the larger part of your experience. I have family in Sea and am there often (was actually around Pike’s Market in Mother’s Day). I’ve not noticed much visible homelessness in the tourist areas and much less in Sea generally (but I live in the Bay Area, so that bar is subterranean).
Wrt to good/interesting things in Seattle, there are interesting things in the neighborhoods. Particularly the gradual densification and the amount of commercial that’s allowed in/around residential areas. Some of my favorite restaurants are in converted SFHs on large corner lots.
Should you go back, I’d focus on coffee and seafood wrt to food. Also, the local Yimby Action chapter is great and loves having random urbanista drop in should you be around during their monthly happy hour.
I was at CNU. Sorry to not have connected with you. The weather must play a role, but yes homelessness is bad in numerous cities. Please share your writing with the local politicians. They have the resources to do better.
The city is much easier with a local guide. A neighbor friend from East Lansing/Michigan State University days lives there are helps me around when visiting.
Every time I visit Seattle, I’m prepared for the widespread street homelessness you describe, and every time I see a place much more normal than you experienced. I don’t know if I just have good luck, but I’ve walked around the city and taken public transit there and never seen anything worse than in other U.S. cities. I’ve also never had a bad meal in Seattle, although after your post about not eating anything until dinner, I suspect we may have very different habits and tastes when it comes to food.
I visited Seattle a decade ago - with young children - and the quantity of homelessness "on display" was shocking even then.
I do wonder sometimes why people in Seattle and LA treat rampant drug use and homeless encampments as if they're inevitable and should simply be tolerated. Boston and NYC don't have the same issues - it can't be only the weather that's different.
As a Vancouverite, this was a really interesting article. I haven't been to Seattle in a decent few years, but I'd be surprised if it looked much worse, if at all, than Vancouver which I suspect you'd have a similar assessment of given that the railway-era brick areas you like are the ones with the greatest concentration of visible homelessness and drug use.
But really why I thought it was interesting is the west coast/east coast difference that lies in this post. As someone used to this landscape, I can't imagine how it could look different (though based on trips to Toronto & Montreal, I know it does. For example, on tents and hard drug use: how/why is it that you don't see this in the east? Surely the rates of stuff use, and drugs being consumed, can't be that different?
Weirdly the last time I was in Seattle, in 2022, I did not notice a large homeless population at all. Completely the opposite of what I was expecting. I saw some of the signs, like seeing tents while taking the train to/from the airport. But other than handful of people, about half of which were clearly under the influence of something strong, I just didn't see many. My assumption was the police keep them away from the downtown/touristy areas, an "out of sign out of mind" type of mentality.
I sepnt a few days in Portland before I went to Seattle. There I was shocked by the numbers. And I live in a big city. Seeing unhoused people and tent cities is nothing new to me. But just the sheer amount of homeless people and tent cities I saw was something else. I don't know, it feels like we are failing as a society.
I lived in Seattle for 30 plus years. Worked in a retrofitted marine equipment warehouse on the waterfront, between Pike Place and the Pioneer Square. Took the bus to work, walked everywhere. It was a rich, healthy, comfortable place to live, work, raise my kids. It’s heartbreaking to read this, to know that what I lived and loved is gone. I’m sorry your visit was ten years too late, but glad someone finally said the truth out loud. Seattle Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, are you listening?
I have some roots in Washington state and used to love to visit Seattle, especially in the summertime (living there through the dark and dreary winters makes you want to kill yourself), but haven't been for 10 years. But I hear bad things. I knew a lot of guys from Spokane (5 hours away) who spent their 20s launching careers in Seattle but moved back to start families.
I heard someone say that there are, at this moment, two kinds of dysfunctional American cities:
There are those in which there are "no-go" sections full of violent crime, murder, etc., but these neighborhoods are successfully cordoned off and there are also "nice" areas where the odds of this happening are remote. This is the model of much of the Rustbelt, Philly, etc.
And then there are those cities with relatively little *violent* crime, but the entire place is overrun with homelessness and there is not a single corner of the city where you would be surprised to see someone shooting up drugs. This is basically the West Coast model. And unfortunately Seattle seems to have fallen into it.
If an entire city were like the bad parts of Rustbelt cities, or if the vast homeless population in a West Coast city went around killing and robbing taxpayers with regularity, then that city would quickly cease to exist. But people are capable of unhappily slogging through and surviving both of these forms of city, and enough choose to do so to keep those cities alive.
That kind of rings true. Most of the cities I like are statistically more dangerous than the West Coast cities, but it isn’t safety or crime per se, it’s just the depressing feeling that we tolerate this. And that we almost focus on our ability to be unbothered by it rather than what these people actually need.
It seems incredibly odd that your friend and his girlfriend decided to go to Skid row first thing in LA, and upon seeing that it was… Skid row, decided to skip seeing anything else at all about LA. And I don’t even like LA.
Nah it was more like "Hey that can't be real right? Let's go find out!" And then "Holy crap, it is real, what kind of city is this?"
Being from the east coast (both of us) nothing prepares you for it. I think we imagine it's made up by anti-urban people until we see it. To a regular and maybe somewhat sheltered suburbanite it's scandalizing to see people in this state and a city that shrugs at it.
Good thing you didn't visit when they had the "CHOP" zone. We looked on with amazement at the fecklessness of their city council and mayor while part of this major city became a weird, lawless, vandalized wreck.
When I most recently visited Seattle, I made a point to walk around Capitol Hill, visiting favorite places like the Elliott Bay Book Company. It was good to see the area still thriving with independent businesses but troubling to think about what those places had to endure during three weeks of civic malpractice in June 2020.
Everybody I know who was living in Capitol Hill in 2020 is still living there, because they love it. It's my favorite neighborhood to visit, although it's a shame to see some businesses still boarded up.
I haven't visited for over five years despite living only a couple of hours away. When I did visit, it was always exhilarating and fun, and I never felt threatened or uncomfortable.
People think saying “Oh, the city is fine except for the tent encampments and open drug use” is like saying “It has a few dents and scratches, but it still does the job!” But it’s more like asking, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
-----------------
I'm glad there are those willing to carry on this discussion.
The short version of it is that the homeless "advocates" want homelessness to be as visible as possible so they encourage very public encampments, gatherings, etc. It used to be that the encampments and loitering were fairly discreet but that all changed around 2015 (after the police shut down a very large encampment under I-5) and got far worse with COVID when shelters were ruled too cruel. You don't really see it in the residential neighborhoods because that would lead to a more meaningful pushback. The end goal seems to be to scare off enough rich people that rents go down but pre-Amazon Seattle was never like this and I doubt the progressive activists would enjoy it. You really see how quickly things can break down in a city with a populace that used to be famously law-abiding.
(The ban on solicitation is the one law police bother enforcing, so that's why no one asks for money. You have to go to Portland if you want that experience.)
Interesting - I'd honestly rather be asked for money (not aggressively, like I'm used to in every other city haha) because that at least feels like these guys are still part of society. It's really unnerving to see whole groups of people who are just in the same space but seem to have nothing to do with anyone or anything. That's weirder to observe than panhandling even though maybe it's easier to just keep walking.
Lay off the conspiracy juice. "The end goal" of advocacy for the homeless is to get people housed, my dude. Natural allies for urbanists.
Obviously getting people housed is aligned with urbanist goals, but it's pretty hard to see how any actions taken by the various not-for-profit orgs that run Seattle will actually get us there. "Do absolutely nothing until the city council comes up with a way to fund housing for 100% of the homeless population of Seattle" isn't a realistic solution.
That's a good point. Advocates' refusal to endorse safe lots and tiny houses because they're not "permanent solutions" is stupid.
Nah, it’s to keep a bunch of people who work at nonprofits employed
Why Seattle should be talked about. . .
Seattle has a high transit mode share and is only one of only six major US cities in 2019 with a driving commute mode share of less than 50%. It's the only such city without a significant fixed guideway network. They do it all with buses.
I didn't ride any buses but we did take the light rail from and to the airport ($3 vs. almost $80 for an Uber). I've heard complaints about crime and stuff on the light rail, to my eyes it was clean and safe, felt fine there. (I actually rode a couple of city buses in Cincinnati as well as their streetcar. At least for the downtown it works well, but it's a more spread-out city.)
One of my gripes is that, despite plans proposed years ago, they've never bothered to run light rail to the state capitol. Instead, they just keep adding more lanes to I-5.
Olympia is too far from Seattle to be suitable for a light rail connection. Sounder commuter rail would be a better fit for that route.
You may well be correct. I did work at a hearing in 2014 or so where they had a written plan to continue light rail to Olympia. Maybe they weren't in earnest.
Sounder makes more sense considering they’re already building the connection to DuPont.
Dupont won't be bad at all! They'll eventually get the cities linked. Now for a tunnel under the Cascades to Central WA. 😺
Seattle buses aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty good, and the network is pretty dang comprehensive. I live in a mostly SFH, suburban part of the city on the edge of the city limits, and I’m really close to 3 bus routes and a little longer walk to 4 or 5 more, including one high frequency line.
And light rail continues to expand!
Seattle has just opened its second light rail line. They haven’t been doing it all with buses since 2009.
It has 3-5 fixed guideways but they’re not at all a network…yet. Still, the light rail is great and expanding. But the bus network certainly pulls its weight.
Though ridership is still catching up to 2019 levels, ridership was growing steadily before that.
For the 2 LRT lines that have opened,
a) What bus lines did they replace?
b) What was the ridership on those bus lines before LRT?
I don’t know. You’d have to ask someone with a deeper knowledge of Seattle transit history. I’m curious, though, about why that matters.
What was the ridership of the light rail opened in 2009. How many miles of light rail did Seattle have in 2019? What was the ridership of that network in 2019? Enough to move modal share more than a point?
Light rail ridership: https://www.soundtransit.org/ride-with-us/system-performance-tracker/ridership
Bus ridership: https://kingcounty.gov/en/legacy/depts/transportation/metro/about/accountability-center/rider-dashboard
They’re found in two different places since they’re handled by two separate agencies, but you can do the math.
Whatever the numbers show, there’s a difference between “They do it all with buses” and “They’ve done it mostly with buses.”
Thanks for sharing these. Point received.
I have a different angle when I look at transit numbers. My angle is "what can municipal governments do to make transit service and other active transportation better," which implies looking at stats for cities rather than for metros and transit systems. But this approach is bad for answering different kinds of questions.
Ridership was quickly growing prior to COVID. I have no idea if it’s back or not, or how they’re evaluating it since they don’t really enforce fare collection.
Thank you for a brutally honest account of the Emerald City. My only hope is the now sane mayor and city council will undo the damages done by the previous ultra progressive city government for a decade plus. What killed me was voters kept voting for activists who were fairly new arrivals instead of folks with deep local ties who care more about providing services and making it attractive for businesses and visitors alike.
Thank you. My wife told she heard the council just last week reversed guidance that police were not allowed to pursue suspects. (Not sure what exactly that was about). I'm certainly not averse to looking at the police side of this stuff, poorly trained or brutal cops. But if these cities can hamstring the police they can also professionalize them, if that's the problem. I take care not to imply that I want to go full "law and order" just because I can see what's in front of me. Somehow that subtlety seems hard for some people.
“Not allowed to pursue suspects” was probably about car chases (which statistically are more of a danger to the public than just letting the suspect get away)
My understanding is it was a state wide reversal of the ban passed by the legislature this year, which is much welcomed news. Truth is there were plenty of mistakes made by the police and its union. But the former city council demonized the entire force and resulted in hemorrhaging of officers. That was horrible to most businesses and residents alike. The craziest story was a former socialist city council member who led the defund police charge also complained about slow police response time when she said someone threw dog feces to her lawn.
She was the worst
Graham Factor actually just had a post about the difficulties of injecting oversite in ways where you just make multiple competing bosses who write policy through action:
https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/too-many-chiefs?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2
A little bit older, but a former Seattle cop sat down with a former Baltimore cop (now professor) and discussed some of the more absurd reform efforts:
https://qualitypolicing.com/qpp-43-elliot-averett-on-supporting-police/
Yes, Seattle has serious homeless and drug problems. And we don't have enough air conditioning because it only started getting hot here in the last few years. Plus housing is too expensive.
But I still wouldn't live anywhere else. I can see a volcano out my window. There's water everywhere, fresh and salt. We have forests and mountains practically in our back yard.
And one thing I especially appreciate about the greater Seattle area is we're diverse and multicultural and it's OK to be gay and trans.
I agree. Seattle has issues, but also has real soul and a collective irony I’ve never experienced anywhere else. The city has really gone through some rough patches over the last decade, but I have hope and faith that it will come through.
One factor to keep in mind is that all West Coast cities fall within the 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeal, which has placed substantial limits on the ability to regulate homelessness. https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/20/us-supreme-court-hear-oregon-case-cities-clear-homeless-camps/
I’m sorry to hear that was the larger part of your experience. I have family in Sea and am there often (was actually around Pike’s Market in Mother’s Day). I’ve not noticed much visible homelessness in the tourist areas and much less in Sea generally (but I live in the Bay Area, so that bar is subterranean).
Wrt to good/interesting things in Seattle, there are interesting things in the neighborhoods. Particularly the gradual densification and the amount of commercial that’s allowed in/around residential areas. Some of my favorite restaurants are in converted SFHs on large corner lots.
Should you go back, I’d focus on coffee and seafood wrt to food. Also, the local Yimby Action chapter is great and loves having random urbanista drop in should you be around during their monthly happy hour.
I was at CNU. Sorry to not have connected with you. The weather must play a role, but yes homelessness is bad in numerous cities. Please share your writing with the local politicians. They have the resources to do better.
The city is much easier with a local guide. A neighbor friend from East Lansing/Michigan State University days lives there are helps me around when visiting.
Every time I visit Seattle, I’m prepared for the widespread street homelessness you describe, and every time I see a place much more normal than you experienced. I don’t know if I just have good luck, but I’ve walked around the city and taken public transit there and never seen anything worse than in other U.S. cities. I’ve also never had a bad meal in Seattle, although after your post about not eating anything until dinner, I suspect we may have very different habits and tastes when it comes to food.
My main complaint about Seattle food is that there’s no Waffle House, but that would be reason enough for me to move
I visited Seattle a decade ago - with young children - and the quantity of homelessness "on display" was shocking even then.
I do wonder sometimes why people in Seattle and LA treat rampant drug use and homeless encampments as if they're inevitable and should simply be tolerated. Boston and NYC don't have the same issues - it can't be only the weather that's different.
Portland, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Honolulu - all have homeless populations.
You couldn't pay me to live in NYC or Boston - too hot and humid in summer and too cold in winter.
As a Vancouverite, this was a really interesting article. I haven't been to Seattle in a decent few years, but I'd be surprised if it looked much worse, if at all, than Vancouver which I suspect you'd have a similar assessment of given that the railway-era brick areas you like are the ones with the greatest concentration of visible homelessness and drug use.
But really why I thought it was interesting is the west coast/east coast difference that lies in this post. As someone used to this landscape, I can't imagine how it could look different (though based on trips to Toronto & Montreal, I know it does. For example, on tents and hard drug use: how/why is it that you don't see this in the east? Surely the rates of stuff use, and drugs being consumed, can't be that different?
Vancouver is heaven on earth! I love your city.
Weirdly the last time I was in Seattle, in 2022, I did not notice a large homeless population at all. Completely the opposite of what I was expecting. I saw some of the signs, like seeing tents while taking the train to/from the airport. But other than handful of people, about half of which were clearly under the influence of something strong, I just didn't see many. My assumption was the police keep them away from the downtown/touristy areas, an "out of sign out of mind" type of mentality.
I sepnt a few days in Portland before I went to Seattle. There I was shocked by the numbers. And I live in a big city. Seeing unhoused people and tent cities is nothing new to me. But just the sheer amount of homeless people and tent cities I saw was something else. I don't know, it feels like we are failing as a society.
I lived in Seattle for 30 plus years. Worked in a retrofitted marine equipment warehouse on the waterfront, between Pike Place and the Pioneer Square. Took the bus to work, walked everywhere. It was a rich, healthy, comfortable place to live, work, raise my kids. It’s heartbreaking to read this, to know that what I lived and loved is gone. I’m sorry your visit was ten years too late, but glad someone finally said the truth out loud. Seattle Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, are you listening?
I have some roots in Washington state and used to love to visit Seattle, especially in the summertime (living there through the dark and dreary winters makes you want to kill yourself), but haven't been for 10 years. But I hear bad things. I knew a lot of guys from Spokane (5 hours away) who spent their 20s launching careers in Seattle but moved back to start families.
I heard someone say that there are, at this moment, two kinds of dysfunctional American cities:
There are those in which there are "no-go" sections full of violent crime, murder, etc., but these neighborhoods are successfully cordoned off and there are also "nice" areas where the odds of this happening are remote. This is the model of much of the Rustbelt, Philly, etc.
And then there are those cities with relatively little *violent* crime, but the entire place is overrun with homelessness and there is not a single corner of the city where you would be surprised to see someone shooting up drugs. This is basically the West Coast model. And unfortunately Seattle seems to have fallen into it.
If an entire city were like the bad parts of Rustbelt cities, or if the vast homeless population in a West Coast city went around killing and robbing taxpayers with regularity, then that city would quickly cease to exist. But people are capable of unhappily slogging through and surviving both of these forms of city, and enough choose to do so to keep those cities alive.
That kind of rings true. Most of the cities I like are statistically more dangerous than the West Coast cities, but it isn’t safety or crime per se, it’s just the depressing feeling that we tolerate this. And that we almost focus on our ability to be unbothered by it rather than what these people actually need.
It seems incredibly odd that your friend and his girlfriend decided to go to Skid row first thing in LA, and upon seeing that it was… Skid row, decided to skip seeing anything else at all about LA. And I don’t even like LA.
Nah it was more like "Hey that can't be real right? Let's go find out!" And then "Holy crap, it is real, what kind of city is this?"
Being from the east coast (both of us) nothing prepares you for it. I think we imagine it's made up by anti-urban people until we see it. To a regular and maybe somewhat sheltered suburbanite it's scandalizing to see people in this state and a city that shrugs at it.
Dude, the South Bronx doesn’t prepare you for that?!?
Good thing you didn't visit when they had the "CHOP" zone. We looked on with amazement at the fecklessness of their city council and mayor while part of this major city became a weird, lawless, vandalized wreck.
When I most recently visited Seattle, I made a point to walk around Capitol Hill, visiting favorite places like the Elliott Bay Book Company. It was good to see the area still thriving with independent businesses but troubling to think about what those places had to endure during three weeks of civic malpractice in June 2020.
There's so much to relish in Seattle. I've walked my feet sore a few times, taking in the shops and sites. That library is something else!
Everybody I know who was living in Capitol Hill in 2020 is still living there, because they love it. It's my favorite neighborhood to visit, although it's a shame to see some businesses still boarded up.
I haven't visited for over five years despite living only a couple of hours away. When I did visit, it was always exhilarating and fun, and I never felt threatened or uncomfortable.
People think saying “Oh, the city is fine except for the tent encampments and open drug use” is like saying “It has a few dents and scratches, but it still does the job!” But it’s more like asking, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
-----------------
I'm glad there are those willing to carry on this discussion.