Homeless in Seattle
This problem is long time in coming and is by design, not by by accident. The people of Seattle are absolutely opposed to the working poor living in their neighborhood. America is class based and will not tolerate a mixed income neighborhood. The whole point of owning a home in a wealthy neighborhood is never living next to poor people.
And yet, Seattle still wants to grow. Seattleites pride themselves on attracting new businesses. Seattleites pat themselves on the back every time a high tech business moves in. Seattle celebrates every time Amazon builds a new office. Seattle’s identity revolves around Starbucks, a local coffee shop that franchised across the world. Every business who moves in or expands brings good paying jobs. And Seattle businesses pride themselves in creating six new jobs for every person that they hire
Yet those are the working poor that the people of Seattle don’t want. I have three answers to working people living in Seattle : housing, housing , housing. If Seattle wants to grow and to attract new businesses, Seattle will grow in population. Seattle needs to build enough housing for all of its new workers, including its service employees
In the near term, we need to clean up Seattle. That means providing homeless people the proper facilities to get rid of their trash and their waste. Then, their tent cities might not be such an eyesore and health hazard. (No, I do not consider people as trash to be "cleaned up")
On a city level, I would legalize micro apartments and more dense housing. I would also require that every new downtown business in Seattle should have to create housing that their new employees can afford that is within a mile of their new building. For the poor, city taxpayers should support coupons that can be used for rent or for mortgage payments toward the purchase of a first home.
On a county level I would like an initiative to sell bonds (at least a billion dollars) to build and sell transit oriented economy condos at market prices near existing light rail stations. They are sold rather than rented to allow the working poor to build equity. They are also sold to free capital for the next round of housing. There will be no "low income housing" to avoid the doughnut hole effect where we serve the very rich and the very poor.
On the state level, I would require that the cities upzone neighborhoods near transit on the grounds that the current zoning is an economic form of red lining.
On the national level (it's also the most improbable). I would like to rebuild our tax and entitlement system to eliminate the term "household income" from our vocabulary. People should never have to turn away new household members because an extra income would make them ineligible for aid. Giving aid strictly to individuals (a national dividend system based on the Permanent Alaskan dividend Fund) would eliminate that threat and encourage people to live together and fully populate our existing housing.
When I say you should expand your family. I’m not saying you should adopt the first addict -you find on the street. You have family and friends and coworkers. For every one of your extended family that move in with you, that’s one more more apartment for people who don’t have homes