Fact is the recently elected City council made public drug use illegal: https://crosscut.com/politics/2023/09/seattle-city-council-p...

Murdoch and co. will have you believe Seattle is a fentanyl-ridden wastleland. Property values say otherwise.

In the spectrum of “things that have had an effect on Seattle’s homeless stats”, do you think this recently elected council’s recent decision has had time to have an effect?

If not, doesn’t it seem likely that previous looking the other way has contributed to the current status?

while I agree that basically any news outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch is heavily untrustworthy, I'd like to point out that property values are not necessarily correlated with quality of life.

Within a given city, yes, the nicer bits are more expensive. Between different cities, however, it is totally possible to find one city is both cheaper and nicer than another (with the possible caveat of being smaller, and perhaps if you can't WFH, not as many jobs).

To use an example I know well, basically every city in France outside of Marseille is nicer to live in than Paris, but Paris has real estate prices that are 2-4x most other cites.

I imagine you could find similar things in other countries as well - Amsterdam vs Eindhoven in the Netherlands, for example.

Are you sure these are facts? I think it’s just bad engineering IMO. Send people to jail doesn’t solve any root issues.

I have no dog in this fight but saying "X" is a bigger driver than "Y" of some complex social phenomenon is not what I consider to be a "fact".