Holy crap, no kidding. Between NextDoor and /r/SeattleWA, compared to my own experience, I'm beginning to think that I live in one of The Orville's split universes. According to those forums, there are lawless hordes of vagrant gangs roaming the streets, dumping bags of used syringes onto little old ladies in walkers while stealing their bikes and running over children with RVs.

Meanwhile, I (a person with no car so I walk and bus everywhere since my neighborhood isn't cool enough to get light rail...ever) barely see any of what they describe. Yes, there are a handful of tents around freeway onramps. Yes, the trash looks a little unsightly. Yes, I wish it wasn't there. But I've not once been attacked and I rarely see a syringe or even a hint of what looks like poop (statistically, it's probably dog poop given the scourge of terrible owners of dogs in this city).

So I'm not discounting that something happens sometimes, but damn, not on the level that the screaming hysterics seem to think it does.

I like how we live in a first world country, but yet casually dismiss the fact that there are homeless people living outside in tents, and that feces and syringes are only an occasional thing so it's really not so bad. Coming from a clean, safe neighborhood in New England, where even trash on the side of the road would be offensive, I feel like we are definitely living in two different parallel universes.

I think that's a very disingenuous reading of what I wrote. I was comparing my personal experience to the hysterics I read on forums like NextDoor and local Reddit. I did not say that the problem was not a problem, but that some responses to and perceptions of it are overblown. (Oftentimes, these positions are used to justify espousing a preference for simply throwing homeless people in jail for "vagrancy" or involuntarily removing people from the state. So, yes, in a way, I do find the response to be worse than the actual problem.)

Not really disingenuous at all - I read your comment the exact same way.

I don't mean this in a confrontational way, I'm just being curious: have you been on Nextdoor?

From my experience so far, the typical attitude of an average Nextdoor "neighbor" towards the homeless is not: "This is a problem, we have to do something for these poor people." Rather, it's: "This is a problem, I don't want it near me."

I don't know about Ballard, but people on Nextdoor in the Eastside neighborhoods have a penchant for NIMBYism and, as a side effect, truly do tend to exaggerate things.

I'm not saying we should just ignore homelessness, but exaggerated complaints on Nextdoor are definitely not the way to address the underlying problems.

It's way worse on the west coast than most places and I think it's probably somewhat of a "boiling a frog" scenario. Rather than a single big influx upsetting everyone, the homeless situation has been slowly getting worse every single year to the point where we now have tent towns that stretch literally for a mile [1]. The problem is there are no clear solutions that anyone can agree on.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Z3Rd0rD_I

Rhode Island (where I used to live before Seattle) is a blue state with functioning prosecutors that actually prosecute charges for misdemeanors and crimes, but they offer sentenced individuals the alternative of entering the drug court system for mandatory interned rehab, or the mental health system. People going through the system say it saved their life.

Intervention works. West coast states do have similar drug courts, but since crimes are not prosecuted and misdemeanor charges are routinely vacated there is no incentive for people to actually be helped.

For helpful information on Rhode Island's program I recommend the last 20 min of this documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw

I don't think criminal law/enforcement explains enough of it. The west coast has a somewhat unique combination of fair weather, public services, people willing to give money to the homeless, and cultural acceptance of vagrancy that you don't see many other places. The result is that we kind of vacuum up a bunch of homeless people from other states, which then don't have to deal with the problem themselves.

Do you mean "lack of public services"? Try New York, for instance - you don't see people camping in tents because they spent billions of dollars building shelters, to meet the constitutional requirement for shelter. Massachusetts has the same right in their constitution.

It's not about "is the homeless situation here terrible". It's that there are organized groups in Seattle that claim the city is too dangerous to live in because of homeless drug gangs, and that's nonsense.

In New England, you freeze to death if you are not under cover in the winter, so you don't really have sizable permanent populations like in places with a less godforsaken climate.

I see on average 2-3 syringes on the sidewalk and in the dirt beside the sidewalk during my weekly walks through the neighborhood around the new elementary school. I've had human diarrhea inside my compost bin, and solid feces in a giant pile in the middle of our shared townhome driveway. Used condoms beside my outdoor furniture in the week following the wind storm that took down our fence. Multiple Christmas presents of mine and my neighbors were stolen by package thieves. My wife reports multiple cases of being suddenly followed by loitering males and was screamed at once by a crazy racist lady.

This is in Licton Springs, for what it's worth. From what I've seen other neighborhoods are much cleaner.