How Seattle Lefties "Solved" The Homeless Problem

Jason Rantz explains:

The homeless community in Lake City [Seattle] is plaguing the business community by using the planters as beds and toilets. But rather than sweep the homeless, the city is removing the planters — the latest manifestation of a policy that punishes tax-payers, while giving a pass to people who refuse help.

KIRO 7 reports a group of homeless people are terrorizing shoppers at nearby businesses, like the Grocery Outlet in Lake City.


“I’ve had numbers of customers come up to me and say, ‘Love to shop at your store but I won’t come back because I don’t feel safe, I can’t bring my children,’” Mike Sandberg, the owner, told KIRO. “The residents here were pooping on the sidewalk, behind Papa Murphy’s and the stairwells back there and creating a health hazard.”

“They can be agitated and aggressive,” shopper Majid Namini explained. Another, Paul Heistand, told KIRO “If you don’t give them what they want sometimes they get kind of angry and sometimes they will just scream at you.”

Despite being offered services from the city, most of homeless choose to live on the streets there. So, naturally, the city is just giving up on enforcement and is removing the planters, a move that’s both lazy and sure to enrage the city’s hardcore activists.

Meanwhile, new San Francisco Mayor London Breed may be taking a big step in the right direction to deal with the homeless problem in the City by the Bay.

She heroically writes: 

Walking the streets of San Francisco can be a frightening, demoralizing, even an unhealthy experience for residents and tourists alike. A report last month declared our streets dirtier than some of the world’s worst slums, and we all witness the smells and sights to prove it...  

I will: 

Take dangerous street behavior seriously. We cannot continue acting like the status quo is okay or unavoidable. It is not okay.

• Through increased outreach, resources, and oversight, end long-term tent encampments within one year of taking office.
• Pass my conservatorship legislation locally which allows a court to appoint a guardian to care for someone who is gravely disabled and suffering from mental health issues, and work with Senator Scott Wiener to help pass his legislation in Sacramento so we can get those who cannot take care of themselves off the streets and into treatment.

The conservatorship legislation is the key. Many on the San Francisco streets are mentally ill. They refuse care and treatment. This must be changed. Turning the streets private is the ideal solution but that is not going to occur anytime soon. So the realpolitik solution is to act like the streets are private and get the nutjobs off these streets that nobody wants on the streets anyway, except extreme lefties who are simply against all civilized behavior.

-RW