The uniquely differentiating thing in Seattle is the geography (as you say). If you don't care about having nearby skiing and mountaineering (and more but you get the idea), you can do better elsewhere.

> low taxes - directly contributes to the issue of homelessness and half of your complaints.

I've lived here for 40 years. It's always had low taxes, but the problems you're talking about are very recent.

Yes, the rise in rent has been quite dramatic recently - and our social services have been utterly ill-prepared to handle the fallout, because of low taxes.

So you're saying that we should raise taxes to spend on the homeless problem? That hasn't worked for San Francisco, which spends a crazy amount per person and the only thing they have to show for it is more homelessness. Perhaps your heuristic is wrong. Perhaps, when you pay for something, you tend to get more of it, not less.

I can't think of a single place that spends money on homelessness that doesn't get more of it.

Furthermore, if a city is expensive and getting more expensive like SF and Seattle, it means that city is becoming harder for people without decent earning power to stick around. It's like a video game being changed from easy mode to hard mode. Seattle and SF are hard mode, which means most people at the bottom will fail to ever succeed there. By spending the money in Seattle and San Francisco, you're throwing good money after bad money because you're helping many people stay in a place in which they likely won't ever succeed. The money would be better spent in locales around the country where it's easy mode for someone to get back on their feet.

Trying to solve homelessness in Seattle and San Francisco is one of the most egregious wastes of money I've ever seen. It's practically a homelessness industrial complex in San Francisco already and starting to become one in Seattle. Everyone advocating most ardently for it are people whose salary is paid from these tax dollars. It's the Shirky Principle in action.

https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/

The only viable long-term solution to homelessness is building socialized housing with integrated mental health services. The patchwork of shelters and social programs will never work. Building socialized housing requires a lot of money, and this is what the Tax Amazon movement is trying to accomplish: https://www.taxamazon.net/sign

I ardently advocate for this and my salary isn't paid by it, because I want to live in a strong society where shelter is provided for everyone who needs it. Your vision of society is, what, to ship people off somewhere else? Out of sight out of mind, right?

> The only viable long-term solution to homelessness is building socialized housing with integrated mental health services.

Back up that assertion with evidence. Also include evidence showing that places like Seattle and San Francisco are the best places to implement such solutions.

> and this is what the Tax Amazon movement is trying to accomplish: https://www.taxamazon.net/sign

Why should Amazon pay for this? If you think this is so important and the right solution, how much money have you donated towards this? If you're expecting Amazon to pay for this then you've got no skin in the game and risk nothing by being wrong.

> I ardently advocate for this and my salary isn't paid by it

And as an ardent advocate, how much have you spent on this?

> Your vision of society is, what, to ship people off somewhere else? Out of sight out of mind, right?

I have no vision. I'm a utilitarian and care purely about successful outcomes, optics be damned. I'm just not so naive as to think that the best place to try and get people back on their feet are places where they stand the least chance of doing so because even competent, educated people that have no vices like drug addiction have to work hard to succeed in a place like Seattle and San Francisco.

Your approach just puts people in the middle of the ocean, but gives them a life jackets. They are almost certainly still going to drown under those conditions. My proposal is to find a kiddy pool or at least someplace shallow with calm waters and give them a life jacket.

You have to have more heart than brains to think some of the most expensive, competitive markets like Seattle and San Francisco are good places to try and get people back on their feet again. And if you genuinely think that such an approach is a good one, you should be the first to spend your hard-earned money to prove it.

I donated $12.5k to Plymouth Housing (housing-first org in Seattle) last year, which was matched by Microsoft to $25k. It barely matters, voluntary individual charity won't solve structural problems. Given that half your post is now an utterly wrong & irrelevant personal attack, I have license to tell you your mode of interaction here (and in other comments, from a brief perusal of your profile) comes off as incredibly smug and not nearly so clever as you clearly believe. We've all read Taleb, you don't have intellectual superpowers from knowing what skin in the game is.

The Tax Amazon movement would also levy a tax on Microsoft, because it's a tax on all big businesses which operate within Seattle, which I'm perfectly happy about, but I'm sure you're very used to being wrong about everything so this matters not.

I have no idea how you can care about "successful outcomes" without vision since success is not a value-free metric. That should suffice to make you think a bit, I'm going to cut short the gish-gallop here because interacting with you is generally unpleasant. Goodbye.

So you work for Microsoft, which explains why you're interested in taxing Amazon. Good to know that your conflict of interest is now laid bare. Your salary may not be paid by the homelessness industrial complex, but it is paid by a direct competitor to the entity you want to see taxed to pay for this. Let's tax Microsoft instead.

You're really stuck on this desire to expose my fraudulent underlying motivations for not wanting homeless people to die in the streets. You'll be happy to learn far smarter people than you have taken a crack at this problem! Go read the first few sections of Industrial Society and its Future and you'll have all the ammo you need to attack leftist motivations. Its analysis is quite a bit more robust than your (frankly, extremely basic) idea that everyone must have a financial stake in policy to desire its realization. Happy to help.

> You're really stuck on this desire to expose my fraudulent underlying motivations for not wanting homeless people to die in the streets

What's fraudulent is your shameless promotion of taxing a direct competitor of your employer.

Many of your comments on this HN story have included a plug for the tax amazon pac, making all those comments basically political spam and spam has no place on HN.

> You'll be happy to learn far smarter people than you have taken a crack at this problem! Go read the first few sections of Industrial Society and its Future

Referencing the Unabomber? Really? Someone sending mail bombs and killing innocent people is your idea of "far smarter people than you have taken a crack at this problem"? In one breathe you say you don't want people dying in the street, and in the next you're quoting a serial murderer.

> your (frankly, extremely basic) idea that everyone must have a financial stake in policy to desire its realization.

People can desire the realization of whatever policy they want. However, if they have no skin in the game, that desire can be summarily dismissed by others, especially by those that do have skin in the game.

The Tax Amazon movement also would tax Microsoft, because it's a tax on all big businesses which operate in Seattle. You struck out yet?

This is a payroll tax for employees that work in Seattle. The overwhelming majority of Microsoft employees are in Redmond, Bellevue and Issaquah and the overwhelming majority of Amazon employees are in Seattle. I can't even find an address for a Microsoft office in Seattle. All I can find is a single Microsoft retail store. This initiative would cost Microsoft peanuts and Amazon tons. It's now clear that you're willfully misrepresenting this initiative.

Despite low tax rates, tax revenue for the city has risen dramatically alongside the local economic boom.

Yes, but real estate prices have risen even faster - and helping people experiencing homelessness fundamentally requires real estate to house them.

Even if you want to analyze it from a psychopathic economics perspective, it still makes sense to provide socialized housing and free mental health support to people who are homeless, because there is no other way they'll become "productive" again without that base.

Or you can view it as us paying for the negative externality of rising housing prices forcing people onto the streets from so many of us software engineers moving to the area.

Or you can view people experiencing homelessness as humans inherently worthy of dignity. No matter which way you view it though, your approach of letting them die in the streets is the wrong one.

> the negative externality of rising housing prices forcing people onto the streets

The vast bulk of the Seattle homeless are homeless due to drug and alcohol addiction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw

Even "60 Minutes" did a segment on it in the last year, and they kept finding drug and alcohol addiction underlying the problems of the Seattle homeless they profiled.

Yes, drug & alcohol addiction is widespread in the general non-homeless population and makes it difficult to ensure steady income. When the cost of rent rises dramatically, this means people with those issues are likely to find themselves homeless. Addictions are difficult to kick in the best of times (who among us doesn't know of some rich kid who's been in and out of rehab into their 30s?) and basically impossible when homeless. Not sure what your point is here.

Drug and alcohol addiction leads to homelessness because nobody wants to hire an addict and addicts prioritize spending on their addiction. Cheaper housing will not fix it, because the cost of housing is not the problem.

My point is that solutions will fail if they do not recognize and treat the actual cause. Otherwise you're treating lung cancer with antibiotics. It won't work. And it hasn't worked.

Yes, all effective socialized housing programs which serve the homeless have integrated mental health services. It's impossible for such treatment to be effective if people don't have a home. To restate: without housing & mental health support, many homeless people will never regain capacity. Again, I don't know what your point is. You might be interested to learn this media focus on the prevalence of addiction in homeless populations is commonly used along with an outdated model of addiction-as-moral-failure to portray people experiencing homelessness as unworthy of support, fit only to die.

I infer you do understand that addiction is a proximate cause of homelessness, not rising house prices. So I've made my point.

Only 35% of people experiencing homelessness struggle with addiction[0], so no I don't think you have. But sure, grant your premise - it's the combination! If house prices go up then people who were struggling to make rent at the lower level won't make it at the higher level, thus becoming homeless. There are many, many people with addictions who are financially functional to a point, but rising rents can finally kick them on to the streets where things get much worse. Boiling things down to a single cause like "oh it's addiction" isn't useful.

[0] https://sunrisehouse.com/addiction-demographics/homeless-pop...

In Seattle it's much higher.

Keep in mind that if you just ask people if they're on drugs, many will deny it. Many will cite other reasons for being homeless. You have to dig a little deeper to find that those "other reasons" are often a consequence of drug abuse.

35%, while very likely an undercount, is still a huge number.

> it still makes sense to provide socialized housing and free mental health support to people who are homeless, because there is no other way they'll become "productive" again without that base.

People that agree with this statement should organize and do just that. Leave everyone else out of it.

> Or you can view it as us paying for the negative externality of rising housing prices forcing people onto the streets from so many of us software engineers moving to the area.

No one "deserves" a house. Move somewhere cheaper if you can't afford to live in Seattle.

> Or you can view people experiencing homelessness as humans inherently worthy of dignity. No matter which way you view it though, your approach of letting them die in the streets is the wrong one.

Your stated alternative is worse.

1. Tax a productive person.

2. Make a big fuss about new government social program.

3. Drug users still die in street.

You'll be happy to know we are indeed organizing! https://www.taxamazon.net/sign

Perhaps one day you'll appreciate the psychopathy of telling people they should just move away from their lifelong home. Not everyone is a detached knowledge worker hopping around sampling cities like they're a plate of hors d'oeuvres. Moving is also quite expensive.

> You'll be happy to know we are indeed organizing! https://www.taxamazon.net/sign

You believe the low income housing market is underserved.

1. Raise money (your "Tax Amazon" friends are a good start).

2. Build housing.

3. Sell to underserved segment.

> Perhaps one day you'll appreciate the psychopathy of telling people they should just move away from their lifelong home. Not everyone is a detached knowledge worker hopping around sampling cities like they're a plate of hors d'oeuvres.

You flirt!