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A Week On The Worst Coast
It was late morning on a weekday in Seattle, ostensibly one of America's wealthiest major cities and home to an impressive number of globally significant businesses. It was February, but the weather was a comfortable fifty degrees, and it was not raining. I had arrived the previous night from the airport, but as I drew the curtains of the Fairmont (the city's status as a 'Tier 2' North American metropolis in our internal booking system meant the Four Seasons was, alas, out of budget) I noticed something strange. The city was dense, there were cars on the roads, we were surrounded by office buildings which seemed, despite covid, to at least have some tenants, but the streets were almost devoid of pedestrians. Seattle was empty.
I decided to visit the city's major tourist attraction,
the first Starbucks storePike Place Market. The concierge furnished me with the name of a (British themed, amusingly) breakfast place there. Apple Maps said it was a ten-minute walk through the center of downtown, past the art museum and various office towers. The city did not look apocalyptic from above, at least from the Fairmont. It seemed tranquil. But again, foot traffic was eerily light for a major downtown on a weekday morning. Within a minute of my departure a grubby white woman, quite young, ambled-shambled-ran past me, mumbling about something. She was completely naked except for a short tail of toilet paper hanging out of her. This was rare even for Manhattan hobos in broad daylight, at least beyond the usual places. Around another corner a tall black fellow wearing an old bicycle helmet, neon vest and torn sweatpants starting walking up to me. I prepared myself for a quick exit across the street into the symphony orchestra, but he was actually quite polite and asked, shakily, if I might have any money. He was polite and I was apparently still a little freaked out after the naked lady, so I gave him the $10 I had in my pocket. He bowed, walked away, then muttered loudly some slur about 'fucking white people', which seemed uncalled for after what I'd done for him (perhaps he knew I was Jewish?).I continued walking. Three men and a woman in heavy winter coats were engaged in what seemed like haggling over a drugs purchase, or maybe they were just shooting the shit while they shot the shit. Another group of hobos had set up what seemed like a slightly longer-term presence just outside the headquarters of Zillow, which according to Google has never returned to its Seattle offices (though they still seem to own the lease). At this point, after several minutes of walking through downtown Seattle on a weekday mid-morning, I had not encountered a single normal pedestrian. Not a student. Not an office worker in a quarter zip. Not a #girlboss with a coffee in her hand shouting into her AirPods. The city had been ceded.
I expertly dodged a homeless guy wearing what looked like a girl's tank top and board shorts literally foaming at the mouth while gyrating and staggering wildly by the Four Seasons, then arrived by the waterfront. Here there were people, but they were construction workers in great numbers working on some kind of public works project by the park. One stepped over a homeless man lying on the street as if he wasn't there, or rather as if he was some kind of immovable feature of civic life, like a fire hydrant. I arrived at the cafe. The girl serving me told a group of Amazon corporate employees visiting from India ahead of me that they had reduced hours recently, first closing for one day a week, then two, now three or four. There were no longer enough customers to justify opening seven days a week. I ate, then walked past the 'first Starbucks' around the corner. Online tourist guides say you need to get there first thing in the morning or you'll wait for hours, but when I arrived there was no queue (you got me, Brits) at all.
Outside, construction workers continued their labor renovating some part of the market. A hobo shambled next to his cart outside the giant neon Public Market sign and shouted at some tourists who ran into the Target next door. Two brawny construction workers stood by and shrugged. I decided to follow the tourists. The Target had a detachment of a half dozen cops inside of it (I counted). Real police, not security. Given that the Seattle PD has only 940 officers, this amounted to 0.6% of the entire city's police force guarding a single Target outlet. I felt honored. Every single shelf in the cosmetics section was a locked cabinet. I paid, left and decided to head to the Nordstrom flagship store for some shopping, resolving to Uber back to the hotel if I bought anything. Along the way, I passed a city whose commercial life seemed in terminal decline. Empty storefront after empty storefront. Even the big luxury apartment buildings with sea views had huge 'for rent' banners draped across them. In 2016, Seattle had 16 homicides. In 2023, it had 73.
The route was a big mistake. The way from the market to Nordstrom had me turn at 3rd and Pine, home, as I would later find out, to "Crackdonald's". Hopefully you find this generally amusing, but I'll be honest, this part was scary. Among other things I got shouted at, someone tried to grab my (cheap) bag, a woman who was completely out of it stumbled into me, collapsed, then got up. I should have turned around but stupidly continued walking past the (unbelievably still open for business lol) McDonald's when a city employee in some kind of uniform grabbed my wrist and guided me through, then said I didn't look like I was from here and should avoid this intersection at night. I entered Nordstrom, which I assume only remains in business for corporate headquarters reasons, because there were almost no customers inside. The hobos were visible from Chanel, where I was ultimately reminded of the absurd markup European luxury brands charge Americans; the sales assistant sent two security guys from the store to wait with me on the empty sidewalk for my Uber.
On the five minute drive back, I marvelled again at the seemingly extraordinary amount of construction work the city was pursuing downtown. Widening sidewalks, planting trees, resurfacing streets, everywhere the logo of the Downtown Seattle Association and its key partners (Amazon and so on) was visible. A lone open ice cream store sought new workers at $27 an hour, an annual wage 50% higher than the median income in Britain. It was clear that Seattle was a very rich city. Yet it was also clear that it was a lawless shithole, abandoned by all but the hardiest pedestrians for point-to-point car transfers. And even then, they seemingly increasingly avoided the urban core. This is what marks the biggest difference between Seattle and places like Johannesburg; there, in the poor and violent downtown, one can see that the material situation is dire. There is no money. In Seattle, there was money. This was a choice, one unprompted (seemingly) by any major political change as occurred in South Africa. It seemed, inexplicably, as if this was what these wealthy and otherwise productive citizens had chosen for their city, clear-eyed and uncompelled, even as they invested billions in civic improvement most of them would never be able to use. Why were they doing this building? Did they not realize that the reason downtown was doing less well than it has been was not a lack of tree cover in summer or sidewalks that were too narrow for throngs of pedestrians to traffic them simultaneously, but a rather more immediate and pressing issue?
At the same time, it was hard not to participate in a general sense of despair at this pretty and useful city of 800,000 held hostage by, perhaps, a couple thousand psychotic homeless addicts. These were not well armed young men of the kind who create so much trouble in Rio, or in Caracas, or in the worse parts of Mexico. They were big, dumb, lumbering addicts, or skinny little things, out of their minds. They probably weren't going to shoot back, at least not accurately. And it was not lost on me that, in a different kind of society, the small corps of policemen in the Target alone, equipped with enough materiel, could have in a few hours dealt with the issue permanently. It was hard not to want them to, though it wasn't and isn't my call to make.
In the afternoon we went with some of our clients to eat at the University Village, an outdoor mall and dining complex near the city center. As they did in Johannesburg in Sandton, the productive class had built here an enclave, a kind of urban Disneyland guarded by a large cohort of ever-present security staff. But there is a crucial difference between the two: South Africa's transformation, for better or worse, was imposed upon it by the world. Seattle's was enacted by its own people.
The concierge at the hotel said Portland was even worse.
My work almost never brings me home to America (and my family all live on the East Coast), so in my morbid curiosity I jumped at the chance to see for myself how bad things had gotten since 2020. Downtown Los Angeles was a shithole, but it apparently has been since they built the highways (except for that brief 2015-2017 golden age) and I assume they'll try to clean it temporarily for the Olympics. San Francisco, which I had been expecting to be in the condition Fox News promised me, was slightly better than I expected, I must admit. Not that it wasn't a dump, because it was, but it didn't really appear worse than it was before 2020. SF was (laughably) considered a "Tier 1" city (and had a weirdly cheap Four Seasons), so I stayed in the FS by Union Square, famous for shithole status and close proximity to the Tenderloin. Honestly, there were a lot of normal people walking around during the daytime and even in the evening they still outnumbered the hobos. The financial district seemed fine enough, and in general the hobo problem, while worse than Manhattan, was no worse than Boston was late last year, and I thought Boston was still liveable, probably. The signs of decline were around us in the closed businesses and empty offices, but it was Singapore compared to Seattle. The food in San Francisco has seen big declines, though, we ate at well-reviewed / recommended places and what had once been one of the great food cities in the world seems to have lost all its good cooks in the last few years.
More than anything else, though, the trip underscored just how much of a farce the extreme urban decline of West Coast cities has been. Other countries have real problems. When their cities become hellholes, it's because their economies have collapsed, or because they've been taken over by extremely well-organized criminal gangs funded with cartel money in a nation too poor to pay for honest police, or because they're locked in years-long siege situations with militarized gendarmerie, or because they recently imported millions of people from cultures that hate them and don't care about their rules. But on the West Coast the shithole city problem wasn't the fault of any of those things, not even mass immigration (certainly not of the legal kind, although honestly very few of the hobos appeared to be Latino). Nor was it a grand act of clear-headed sadomasochism, amusing as that would be, because I can't really say most of the people I met there were happy about what had happened.
No, in America, the great cities of the West Coast had been destroyed because, like a prison warden deciding one day to become an inmate for no reason at all, their inhabitants had voted to legalize crime and - in so doing - to be held voluntarily, collectively hostage by the dregs of humanity their cities both produced and attracted from elsewhere in the country, bussed to California for the mild climate and pathologically altruistic host population. That the problem could be solved almost immediately by a competent government (even without resorting to the most extreme methods) was perhaps, in fact, the point. Perhaps you are supposed to take the BART with the filth every day, supposed to step over the needles, supposed to fear for your safety every time you walk around after dark, supposed to know just how easily this could be fixed at almost no cost and effort and yet watch powerlessly as it never happens and things just keep getting worse for no real reason at all.
Unrelated side point: holy hell were there an insanely high number of transwomen on the West Coast. I encountered more in that week than I have in my entire life. Two unrelated baristas at two different coffee places in the same morning were both transwomen, then so was the receptionist at the office we visited a half hour later. Wild. I now understand where all the very online trans people actually live.
My experience with transwomen in the west coast was similar, I also see it when in RDU, NC (compared to other Southeastern Cities). There's an order of magnitude difference.
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I don't have much to add besides to say that 2rafa's description of Seattle is startlingly accurate, and poignant. I've lived here for more than 20 years, and it's astonishing how far it's fallen. It was NOT like this 8 years ago. This is the obvious and deliberate results of pants-on-head-crazy liberal policies.
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Having lived in 'Blue' and 'Red' cities, I had the opposite experience and assessment. The Red city despite a Republican leadership was/is full of homelessness and tents. Being hit up for money is a daily experience . I got vibes of it being unsafe at night, and I had to be mindful of my surroundings. The Blue cities are orderly to a fault. None of the looting and lawlessness that one frequently encounters on social media as being supposedly representative of those areas. I noticed a few tents by a freeway and a single homeless man passed out in front of a 7-11, but otherwise nothing indicative of widespread decay.
If one was a street criminal , the Red city is a better target compared to the Blue one ,despite the Second Amendment, only because in the former people seem more atomistic and no one is keeping an eye out on each other, unlike in the Blue cities, in which people seem more mindful of each other.
It's evident that the social problems blue areas face are as prevalent in red areas too, even worse, at least from my own experience. Like everything else in life, ymmv.
Just because a modern big-city downtown does not look like a picturesque scene from 1900 Paris with dapper Parisians sipping on coffee and making small chatter, on the tiny chairs on the cobblestone, does not mean it's a hellhole or decayed.
What red cities are there in the United States? Oklahoma City? Mesa, Arizona? Dallas has a GOP mayor, but he’s a former Democrat and was elected as such. As far as I’m aware no major city is really controlled by Republicans holistically.
He might mean Miami. They have some weird non partisan city gov i don’t understand, but the mayor I believe is Republican.
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It’s basically Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. And neither of those are overrun with hobos and crime.
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My first thought was, “Surely Salt Lake City…” I looked it up, and SLC’s current mayor is a leftist female activist with a bachelor’s degree in gender studies. What a nightmare. (To be clear, it does appear that part of her appeal was her promise to deal effectively with homelessness, and when I visited SLC about a year and a half ago the homelessness problem was not very bad from what I can tell, so I guess there’s that.)
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It certainly wasn't that bad pre-2020, but probably a large part of why it got so bad is that Seattle's downtown has never been a place normal people went very often. Away from the touristy waterfront (which doesn't have many tourists in the winter, hence your lack of wait at the "original Starbucks" which I assure you was quite packed this past summer), it's pretty much just office buildings. Outside of 8-6 on weekdays, pre-2020, it was completely empty other than where the public transit transfers are. You could go blocks without seeing another human, even in the summer at mid-day. A lot of restaurants didn't bother opening for dinner or on weekends because they were only for office workers, and the nearby nightlife neighborhoods (Belltown and Capitol Hill) are not that far a walk (or short transit ride).
That is true. I remember walking from the Seattle Science Center to the waterfront around 2012 or so, and there were some stretches that were deserted. And pretty creepy, with the towering office buildings and no people in sight.
No homeless people either though.
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Surely "wow, this Four Seasons is priced like a motel, what a steal!" should have raised some red flags? Silly games, silly prizes.
Next time do the 1 Hotel, which is better situated and where my company suggests visitors stay. (Which isn't to excuse our municipal decay.)
The Four Seasons in SF was cheap compared to Seattle and LA, which as I recall were like $850 a night, but it was still maybe $550 a night, which certainly isn’t motel-tier unless your motel is in East Hampton. I just looked up the 1 Hotel, which seems nice, and it’s slightly cheaper than the Four Seasons.
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I’ve heard Seattle was bad, but golly willikers I didn’t expect it was like that. In Dallas traffic is somewhat worse than before Covid and crime slightly higher, but otherwise the rising price of labor and worse customer service is the only hint something weird happened in 2020, except possibly some lingering bitterness. And this is a city which has homeless people! They’re simply not given free reign to go anywhere they want and do anything they want. It’s literally that simple and I can scarcely believe that the obvious solution isn’t being pursued in Seattle and other west coast cities.
The question is, if the police do something that has the potential for looking bad, and then things go wrong and it does look bad, will the city government have their backs? And, if the city government does support the police when something goes wrong in a way that looks bad, will they remain in office?
It comes down to what the voters are more willing to tolerate. I bet the voters in Dallas have different answers than the voters in Seattle.
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I visited Seattle in July 2011; there were a few bums, but it was still a livable city then.
This is 3rd and Pine in 2011:
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6108626,-122.3384563,3a,75y,309.5h,74.65t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1soRad70MZbSsrq9eYFj0QbQ!2e0!5s20110701T000000!7i13312!8i6656?entry=ttu
The main public library building had just opened; it was sparkling clean and still had the new smell. I don't want to think about what it must be like now.
And I visited Portland in September 2008, walked back to my hotel at 2 a.m., wasn't hassled. Back then Portland's homeless all seemed to be the "crusty" type: white guys with dreadlocks, who usually have dogs.
That jump from 2019 to 2021 is so jarring.
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I have to wonder: is there a city anywhere in the world where the (violently) criminal homeless are suppressed effectively and ruthlessly?
Any of the reasonably wealthy countries/cities that are also highly authoritarian, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Singapore, etc. I would assume China too but I have no first or second-hand experience of this.
A college friend from Luxembourg and I were in Montreal once and a homeless man asked us for money. He was shocked and said that would be unthinkable in Luxembourg.
I’ve also spent a lot of time in Istanbul and while there are a lot of Gypsy beggars and post-Syrian civil war a LOT of refugees, I do not recall ever really seeing a “homeless” person. I think there are a couple of reasons for this:
It's probably that I've become desensitised but Montreal is not even really bad with this, we might have the proper balance of how to treat them. The police, barring extreme circumstances, do not let the homeless cluster until they become a problem. The real trouble tends to start when they interact with one another, if they're spread out they might panhandle and annoy the public a bit, but they don't often get violent.
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Also, housing's pretty much got to be cheaper there. I don't know if Istanbul is the kind of city where the medieval neighborhoods have been gentrified and the poor people live in outlying postwar tower-block developments, or the kind where the lowest classes live in the oldest housing, but either way the rents have to be cheaper than most US cities.
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Part of the problem with trying to answer this is methodology varies greatly depending on country or city, such as the definition of homeless, which varies. It's possible for people to not have a permanent residence but also not be sleeping on the street.
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In most of Europe, even in laissez-faire cities like Berlin, they seem to bunch up in a few bad neighborhoods and around train stations, as in Paris. I actually live very close to one of the ‘worst’ places for homeless people in London (Oxford Street / the West End in general). But, by and large, they’re not terrifying. Even the heroin addicts are emaciated, skinny things who will ask you for money and look away when you say no. Where there’s a risk of violent crime, like getting mugged at knifepoint, it’s rarely these guys who are doing it. The behavior you see on the West Coast and to a lesser extent in other US cities is different, I’ve never encountered hobos like that in Europe.
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Houston deals with them quite effectively, though not very ruthlessly. Housing is affordable so the homelessness rate is low to begin with. And every few months the police dismantle the homeless encampments and their residents are forced into free government housing.
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Most cities presumably. When I was in Paris recently, I walked 100 miles and saw ZERO obvious drug addicts and only a few beggars. In Boston, I saw only a few homeless.
Seeing dozens or hundreds of drug addicts stumbling around seems to be confined to the West Coast and a few other cities like Philadelphia.
Oh well. I thought the situation is generally worse. Thanks anyway.
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San Francisco, when a visit from a friendly (i.e. Communist) foreign leader is imminent.
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I think the author missed or was glossing over that Haredim are skewing his numbers. Many Jews under 30 are religious because Haredim have a high birth rate, and many Jews earn under $30000 because that figure includes Haredim.
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Congratulations, you've successfully de-lurked me by writing about my city. I largely agree with what you say about it, but there's some stuff I'd like to add.
For context, when 2020 hit, the city's mayor was Jenny Durkan, who as a white lesbian former-prosecutor lacked the identity credentials to shut down the George Floyd protests. Our new mayor is Bruce Harrell, a half-black half-Japanese man, who does have those credentials. And believe it or not, the city's been getting better since then. Everything you saw was worse a year ago, and worse a year before that, etc. Downtown is positively bustling now, compared to the wasteland that it used to be, although it's nothing like what it was before 2020. The radical DSA councilwoman retired, and was replaced with the "more conservative" of the two choices, a progressive black small-business-owner (pot shop) who wants more policing, probably because she doesn't like her neighborhood getting shot up.
Still, I think national businesses have correctly gotten the message that Seattle now lacks the consistent political will to create a good business environment. By which I mean, keeping the streets clean and sane, and criminalizing looting and shoplifting. It's a shame, because for quite a while the city had competent, business-friendly governance, which allowed all the "cool parts" to flourish. Perhaps chalk it up to ideologies which fail to propagate themselves.
If anyone wants to see a microcosm of what this looks like, check out this article from a neighborhood blog. Pay attention to what's said, and how they say it, and the range of views expressed in the comments. https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2023/12/how-joy-hollingsworth-flipped-city-council-district-3-seattles-most-progressive-district/
And yes, I regularly visit Portland, and it is worse. Although like Seattle, it is starting to recover.
This was due to a redistricting that pretty much guaranteed she would lose, right?
I don't think so? I haven't examined the numbers, but the core of the district is the same, and the borders are more compact. I'd naively give Sawant better than average odds that she could have won again, if she'd run again. It sounded like there was a last-minute push to do something like that, but it got shut down. From the article below:
https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2022/11/district-3s-new-borders-set-in-seattle-redistricting-commissions-final-map/
However, maybe if you dig you could find something? Halfway down this article is a map overlaying Sawant's performance in the last primary with the district borders in this primary, and it does look like she would have lost some strong areas. (The white area in the NE is the arboretum, and no one (legally) lives there.
https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2023/08/mapping-the-hollingsworth-hudson-primary-victories-in-a-less-polarized-district-3/
But for context, this guy came in third in our jungle primary, and he's about the most conservative possible in the area:
https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2023/08/district-3s-surprise-third-place-finisher-endorses-hollingsworth/
I haven't really dug into the issue, but my recollection is that her recall election was close enough that any loss of supporters due to redistricting would have made reelection unlikely.
But maybe it was more than pendulum swinging back towards the center than the redistricting.
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I think there's something about trans women being baristas in particular; the first transwoman I interacted with more than a single time in my life was a Starbucks barista on the US east coast, and the first one I encountered in Europe was one at an indie coffee shop.
I’m not sure how true this still is but I think at one point Starbucks stood out as a relatively easy place to get a job but offered excellent surgery-covering healthcare.
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Isn't it more likely that you're first interaction with a small subgroup of people will be at a customer service facing job at a an oft visited business type like a coffee shop?
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I think you visit cities incorrectly. Before I was married my trick was to go on a dating app and arrange a couple dates with locals. You’ll meet in some real neighborhood, go to a nice bar, see where people actually live, and get laid if you play your cards right. The last time I was in Seattle, a bit post pandemic, I had a really fabulous time. Lovely city, lovely people.
Same in SF, same in LA, same in San Diego.
In non-shithole cities, you can just stay at a decent hotel, walk outside, and you will already be somewhere that people want to be. Hotel locations are not typically chosen without attention to the local surroundings, so properties that are anything above the lowest tier of sketchy hotels will, by default, be in a location that's pleasant to visit. It is incredibly unfortunate that a place as naturally beautiful as San Diego has elected to ruin big chunks of the city with drug-addled lunatics camping on the sidewalks, but this isn't just some natural property of cities.
In the case of San Francisco, hotels were originally set up in what were then nice areas, which then collapsed. Unfortunately, most SF hotels are now in the most unpleasant part of the city (or, more accurately, two or three blocks from the most unpleasant part of the city). You could throw a dart at a map of San Francisco and hit a better area than the Four Seasons.
Yes, and the same is true of Seattle. But that’s kind of the point, that the locals accept that most visitors (especially business travelers) will see the worst of the city instead of just… cleaning up the worst of the city.
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I think this is consistent with my claim that the Four Seasons was built in a good location and that San Francisco has elected to turn it into a shithole. Unfortunate. In one sense, @Tomato is correct that @2rafa is "visit[ing] cities incorrectly" and that more research is required, but I think "cities" is doing too much work there, when what we really mean is that the most pathologically progressive American cities have been ruined to the extent that you have to exercise a degree of attention that should never be necessary in first world hubs.
You don't have to do this in Geneva, Madrid, or Amsterdam. You just go to the Hyatt or Marriott website (or go independent if you want, it doesn't really matter for most purposes), select a hotel at the brand level you're comfortable with, and you will default to staying somewhere pretty neat. Sure, you could benefit from additional planning, but you don't need it to avoid being accosted by junkies.
I agree with everything you said, and no one should have to worry about making sure there isn't a homeless encampment a block away from a Four Seasons.
That said... 2cim isn't some yokel from Kansas City visiting San Francisco for the first time with her corn-fed husband and kids unexpectedly finding herself surrounded by syringes and shit. She is absolutely aware of the issues with San Francisco, and she's quite capable of finding and staying in parts of the city that are liveable.
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This is true. Traveling in Europe, I often just stay near the city center of a random city without doing much (or any) planning at all. No problems ever.
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By this point this old classic started playing in my head. 45 years difference in time and different reasons but still seems very apt to me.
I visited SF some 25 years ago as a tourist for a week or so. I only found out afterwards that I'd apparently stayed just one block away from "the most notorious block". While there I hadn't noticed anything strange or off. Even that "notorious" block was much cleaner than the photos and videos I've seen of downtown SF within the last few years. I did run into one (presumably) homeless guy but he was clean, extremely polite and seemed genuinely delighted when I actually gave my spare small coins to him.
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It feels almost like taking the bait to connect the horrid state of our "unhoused and unleashed" countrymen to the absurd number of transwomen, but... maybe? Kaczynski noted that the root causes of leftism are "feelings of inferiority" and "oversocialization". I cannot imagine how deeply these two concepts must run in a culture where there is a man demanding to be treated as a woman behind every counter. In hindsight, of course you're not going to get society-wide critical reevaluations of human nature in such an environment. Too many familiar toes to step on.
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This was wonderfully written. This is what people must feel like when they meet Bill Clinton and feel "heard". I live in Seattle. You saw exactly what I see, and feel exactly the same way about it. Our city sucks in a lot of very real ways.
That said, you did manage to hit up all the notoriously bad places such as 3rd and Pine and the downtown Target. Most of the city is nowhere near as shitty. You also got pretty unlucky. I've never had anyone try to grab me, and I've yet to see any fully naked junkies.
And, yeah, Portland is worse: https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/1auwcev/i_visited_seattle_last_night_from_portland_wow/
For sure, I definitely heard this when I told the story that afternoon haha. But I think the crazy thing, and what separates Seattle in some ways from Boston or NYC or Miami or even parts of LA (since they started trying to clean up venice beach, for example), is that this is the core of the business and tourism area of the city. The McDonald’s is like a block from the flagship Nordstrom. The Target is pretty much at Pike Place Market, which is around the corner from the art museum and the concert hall and next to the aquarium. In between and around the above are essentially all the major hotels as far as I could tell. Encountering these people is essentially unavoidable in the downtown zone unless you take a car door-to-door.
Thank you! I actually had a whole other section about the evening, seeing all these bars and restaurants that literally close at 8pm (I guess maybe it’s too dangerous after), restaurant windows with like one or two patrons in them and twenty food delivery guys waiting for orders because people don’t want to go outside (not to imply that that’s just because of the homeless). But it was just more of the same situation, which you of course know much more about. I now have a morbid curiosity about Portland.
Solve for the equilibrium. When McDonald's has to pay staff $20/hour, the solution is to only be open for the lunch/dinner rush.
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I'll second the request for finishing up the section about the evening, if you get a chance. As a frog being slowly boiled, it's nice to get an outside perspective.
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You've hit upon another aspect of our city. Almost all the restaurants here close super early (usually 9pm, but if you come in after 8:30 they'll give you a hard time or turn you away). I've literally never visited another city where restaurants close so early.
We're just an early town in general, perhaps due to being on the West Coast.
I think the restaurants close early because they don't have staff. Seattle might have the highest labor costs of any major city in the United States. Median household income is $115,000/year. Housing is expensive as hell, and there's no good public transit to bring cheap workers in from the outskirts. Finally, we don't have the same flood of illegals which keep NYC and Cali prices down. Combine all that and you get McJobs paying $27/hr to start as you noticed.
You should visit Germany, then. I remember going outside in Leipzig at 8pm and the town looked like they were expecting a RAF bombing raid.
I worked for a bit in Germany almost 20 years ago. Coming from Finland, it was a shock when most stores closed at 18 and if I wanted to buy groceries, I had to go to the special ones that were open late - meaning all the way until 19.
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I've heard that Dresden the city just shuts down on a Sunday to the point where you can't get a coffee at noon.
The worst thing in Germany for this is Christmas. If Christmas Day falls on a Monday (or is it Tuesday, one of those days is the worst) then stores are shut for like 4 days and you have to go to a gas station if you forgot anything.
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Just reading the post, it seems like a chicken and egg problem. Everyone travels by car (forget the walkable, bikeable city) because it's too risky to go around on foot, so there's no public transport provision. Since there's no good public transport, everyone has to travel by car (because it's too risky to go around on foot). Since everyone travels by car... and so on.
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I would be keen to read that if you still have the draft.
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The ridiculously early closing hours are peculiar to the West Coast. It's been this way as long as I can remember, I don't think it's due to crime. As a night owl I really do hate it though.
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Hm. I want to share this with one of my oldest friends, a tech worker, a newly minted Seattlite, and yes, a trans woman. I want to ask “is this right? Is this what you see outside?” Given that one of her first comments on moving to the city was “I don’t think I’ve ever been catcalled at 3 PM before,” I feel like the answer might be yes.
But it’s a moot point. I also don’t think I want my IRL friends browsing this place. May God have mercy on our souls.
You could always try something like the attached image. It's from https://www.tweetgen.com/create/tweet.html
EDIT: or the picture I was trying to attach, anyways. Just make it look like a tweet, block off the name and crop the metadata and it's nigh-untraceable (until someone tries googling a random sentence).
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That's not a typical experience. University street by the symphony and art museum is packed with office workers. During commute hours there might be almost as many office workers as cracked out addicts.
The official term I heard is McStabby's
That's exactly true. This is what they've chosen, because their ideology has made them unable to accept the idea of cleaning up the streets.
This is not the win you might think it is.
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This is not purely self imposed: there's a reason it's the West Coast cities, and that's because they have to comply with the whims of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2018 the 9th Circuit ruled that enforcing anti-camping ordinances (better known as "rounding up all the bums") was cruel and unusual punishment, unless the city provided some kind of shelter that the homeless could go to. Since then lower courts have expanded the ruling considerably in a wide variety of ways that chalk up to making the homeless unpoliceable. In 2022 the 9th Circuit doubled down, ruling that the homeless can participate in class action lawsuits against cities that impose criminal or civil penalties on homeless.
Have the pro-homeless NGOs made hay out of this situation? Yes. Is there more Seattle and the rest of the west coast could do? Sure. But even in conservative Anchorage, Alaska (where it gets down to -20 F on the coldest winter nights) has a serious homeless problem, and that problem is named the 9th Circuit.
While I'm sure the 9th Circuit's decisions aren't ideal, this feels like cope to me. It reminds me of the people who still, still, blame "Reagan shutting down the asylums" for the current homelessness epidemic.
Things were a lot worse a couple years ago. Our new mayor Bruce Harrell has done a decent job clearing out some of the worst encampments, proving that it's not actually impossible after all.
I don't know what it would be cope for. I agree completely that local politics can make things much worse or much better, but it is still the fact that the 9th Circuit has tied the hands of any polity that wants to do something about the problem.
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I am disinclined to blame Reagan, but deciding that crazy people should be free does seem like the primary root cause of people being accosted by belligerent vagrants.
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When they are brazenly smoking crack and dealing drugs right in front of a squad of police, the problem isn't the 9th circuit ruling.
It's not the 9th circuit (and it's not even the US), but if you go just a bit north then using hard drugs in a playground is not illegal.
(background info)
In San Francisco, we got a homeless pedophile advertising free fentanyl to kids from pre-k to 8th grade outside their school:
https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-free-fentanyl-sign-child-molester-adam-moore-found-guilty-stella-maris-academy-sf/14215982/
(In fairness, he did end up arrested and convicted, but only after public outcry.)
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That law only had to be passed because BC decriminalized hard drug consumption. They fucked themselves, and then the court ruled that if you’re going to allow hard drug consumption then the risk to the addict means they should be allowed to do them in public. That’s obviously ridiculous, but if they had never decriminalized this farce wouldn’t even be taking place because police could just seize the drugs as illegal substances anyway.
That said, Vancouver is still much nicer than any major US West Coast City. Chinatown / Downtown East is a shithole, but the rest is largely fine.
That is a "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" situation. What the hell did they think would happen? Drugs are now legal (sorry, decriminalised), cops can't bust you for having them, so - what? all the junkies would politely stay at home out of sight to shoot up?
That guy in SF was lucky the cops eventually arrested him, upon first reading the story I had no idea why some of the fathers/male caregivers didn't organise to 'encourage him to relocate'. Why the hell he ever got out of jail in the first place I have no idea, but at least one parent did have a backbone:
I realise his attorney has to do the best she can for her client, but honestly, if she succeeds in getting him released once more, he's going to end up pissing off somebody who won't care about the poor little homeless guy being persecuted by the big, mean cops and he'll end up dead. He's safer in jail.
This is probably an explanatory factor for why it was in San Francisco and not other places.
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It is, in fact, possible and consistent to have legal drugs which are illegal to consume in public. It's even enforceable, and in some cities (or parts of cities) enforced with respect to alcohol. The only reason there's a slippery slope from decriminalization to junkies shooting up in the street with impunity is that the powers that be want there to be one.
Worth a mention on the illegality and relative enforcement levels, some of the open container laws are enforced in with a very light touch as long as people aren't doing something too egregious. There are quite a few parks where open containers are technically illegal, but no one will give you shit for having a beer with a picnic. If the raison d'être of a get together is drinking, yeah, you're going to have an issue, but enforcement is ultimately discretionary and there is no law of the universe that the discretion has to be maximally retarded.
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The cops would suddenly remember that it is actually possible to arrest people, the DA would recollect that it is possible to prosecute violence, and they would be fired for punching down at a disabled person having a mental health crisis. Also, there's a good chance that they're a pack of cowards even in the absence of the above.
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Isn't that what happened here? In 1972, King County was 92% White. In 2022, it was 63% White. We imported a bunch of people who are incapable of maintaining American civilization, and they vote with their coethnics for racial spoils. In Seattle, most of this is Asians, of various stripes, but it's also Mexicans, and more recently Africans.
People like this are the reason why Seattle is circling the drain. These are the type of whites who are committed to autogenocide, and who are responsible for the lamentable condition of the city today. They are the ones who deny that there even exists a problem, because to admit it would be to admit that their opponents are correct.
It's not unrelated, it's directly related. Both of these are the result of substituting ideology for reality. There's no such thing as a transwoman, and downtown Seattle sucks and is dangerous. Yet ideology demands that you pretend otherwise, that dozens of people shooting up on the street aren't hurting anyone, that you need to call that man, "ma'am." Ignoring the reality of one goes hand in hand with ignoring the reality of the other, because the ideology demands it of its believers.
And this is also why Portland is worse. It's worse on crime and it has more transvestites. These two things have the same cause. Their ideologues are more numerous, and more committed. For Portland, there's no Bellevue across the lake to act as a beacon of sanity and order. There's no lake to keep the indigent away.
These people don't want a competent government, they want to decolonize the United States. They want to dismantle the cisheteropatriarchy. They want to tear down structures of oppression. They want, in short, to throw a tantrum and wreck their parent's house because they have no sense of civility, civic duty, responsibility, or history. Or, more likely, it's not their parent's house that their wrecking, but the parents of one of their friends, since they aren't local, and in many cases aren't even American.
I have lived in King County for the vast majority of my life. I have never lived in Seattle. I can vote for King County Council, and King County Executive, and for State Senator and Representatives, and Governor. And for my entire voting life, and for considerable time before that, every single person in every single one of those positions has been a Democrat.
Shout out to Rob McKenna, who was a Republican AG until he ran for Governor and lost to Jay Inslee in a close race. If he had won, things may have been different. To my great shame, I voted Inslee.
For the first time in my voting life, I'll be voting for a major party president in 2024, and it's not going to be for the Democrats. I'll be voting straight party ticket, too. But it won't matter. My home is being strangled by idiot gay race communists, and there's nothing I can do about it.
And now I've gotten all riled up.
The schizo bums may not be, but white Americans from Seattle are the ones pushing the lunacy to let them do whatever they want.
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I watched the video you linked. Nothing, at this point, will change my idea that American Leftism is only the left-wing version of libertarianism
"Are the drug dealers and homeless bothering you? Why do you bother?" is a complete abdication of any social responsability towards the others and the fellow man.
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Amazing to describe a bunch of Asians and Indians making $300K+ at Amazon and Microsoft as “incapable of maintaining American civilization.”
Aside from Bezos, Nadella has probably done more than anyone for property values in Seattle in the last 10 years.
The homeless are definitely a problem but it’s more fixable than this mindset of racial division that both you and the DEI people preach.
You can't blame me for thinking I'd be earning three times my wage without having to compete with that "bunch of Asians and Indians." That my grandchildren will earn less because of it, too.
That my parents earned less, too.
American civilization is one of colonization of the frontier. Wealth and technology, but also conquest on the margin. And yes, descent from the 13 colonies who threw in together against the crown. And not from the same people who chose otherwise (leafs).
I can blame you for being economically illiterate such that you think those high tech salaries from valuable companies would exist without having imported a lot of people with relevant abilities.
You wouldn’t make more if all the immigrant tech talent vanished because they aren’t what’s preventing you from having the relevant skills to have those jobs.
Zero-sum thinking is just factually incorrect here.
Just as Mexican aliens in the US drive down the employment prospects of native-born Blacks, so too do Asian aliens in the US drive down employment prospects of native-born Whites.
It doesn't have to be zero-sum in order to be a net negative me me and my kind. Also, it's not factually incorrect either.
While it’s possible for an influx of new labor to drive down wages for a short time or in a particular field without much of a barrier to entry, you’re just wrong, theoretically and empirically.
Think about babies. They start off small and helpless. All they do is consume for close to two decades, which isn’t helped by child labor laws.
But eventually, they will join the workforce, driving down the cost of labor. Right?
Except, workers are also consumers. So they work to earn money and then spend that money, which creates a demand for other people to have jobs.
A country with a high population growth rate from fertility has a very similar labor economics situation with one having the same from immigration.
Wages go up, on average, from increased productivity. Not restraining labor supply, which is ultimately self-defeating in a modern economy.
People get pissy over immigrants and over outsourcing, but ultimately it’s mostly just hating the necessary dynamism and creative destruction that makes the American economy so much better than any peer.
Do you have anything to back this?
Does remittances factor in this hypothetical?
So line goes up Meme and to hell with the rust belt. Without taking into account that that was the reason that empowered China and made it the menace that it is today.
The “anything to back this” is the explanation I go on to give. You can also read Cato, who also mentions the points that immigrants tend to take jobs we citizens don’t want, and that the large-scale entry of women into the workforce is another point of comparison for significant labor force changes.
It’s not a hypothetical, in other words. We can observe countries with different levels of population growth from births and immigration over time, as well as women entering into the workforce. What matters most is productivity. Scarcity of labor only drives up wages to the point a firm can afford.
Remittances aren’t a major variable and also foreigners buy US products.
The Rust Belt needs to adapt to a changing economy. Trying to lock in a given situation, changing factors be dammed, is the very definition of stagnation. I don’t want to end up like Europe thank you very much.
Empowering China was not a problem in pure economic terms, it was a problem in geopolitical ones. In a better world, we would had given more business to say Mexico/Canada/Brazil until China had demonstrated actual willingness to play nice with the US-led international world order. In other words, the Rust Belt can still get fucked for not being a competitive place to run a factory. Whining about it and trying to use government intervention to prevent the outcomes of markets, instead of doing a good job of competing for new industries, is some leftist bullshit that makes me very annoyed at today’s GOP.
That actually brings up another point. If you don’t let labor come to the US sufficient to keep up with hiring demands, you drive up the incentive to outsource production to where there is available labor.
So support free trade and sensible immigration policy. (I’m in the Tyler Cowen/Garret Jones camp, not the Bryan Caplan one.)
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These people belong to civilizations that have existed for longer than the West has been the West.
But you are missing the point. They can maintain their own social structures and idioms, but can't maintain Western ones. Only Westerners can do that by definition.
I think Gobineau goes too far when he says that "civilization is incommunicable" as some individuals can clearly be assimilated, but collectively he is right. If you swapped out Western and Eastern elites in an instant, neither society would be able to function correctly anymore.
The racial division you bemoan is the cause of much disarray, but it is also the consequence of a multicultural society that has refused to impose a common culture in the name of Liberal ideals. And as we can see, economic success cannot alone mend this gap, only paper over it.
Eastern countries with homeless people are those that are very poor in comparison with the US. Rich Asian countries like Singapore do not have a homeless problem whatsoever. None of the countries have psychotic and aggressive homeless.
The homeless pathology of big American cities is totally unique and there's simply no way to explain it by blaming Asians. Especially since the voters and government is mostly white people - the "swapping" you talk about is a figment.
I'm taking this swap as an hypothetical to illustrate the social upheaval that is created by radically altering the makeup of a society over a short period of time. The UAE, Singapore, these are multicultural societies that are successful and orderly. They also require a great deal of authority and legitimacy to maintain.
This, in turn, require long lasting institutions that are either a monopoly of a specific ethnic group or the product of ruthless objective competition, which is essentially the same as it synthesizes a bureaucrat class that becomes its own ethnos (see China).
Without this chain, you get South Africa.
Now if you decide to understand pointing out this reality as "blaming Asians", I'm afraid that's on you.
The "radically altered makeup" of Seattle has precious little to do with this considering that it's whites who are most enamored with pro homeless politics.
Singapore's parliament is a mix of Indians, Chinese, and Malays. It's not a homogeneous elite and in a (de facto) one party state there's not much objective competition to get on the ballot.
Look I understand you've been taught that your political formula does this in school, but there's very little reason to believe this is true. In fact I'm more ready to consider Aristotle when he argues the opposite is true.
I think it requires a lot more intelligence and studying to become a civil servant in Singapore than in Seattle. And indeed that this is how it's elite self selects in lieu of ethnic preference.
Civil servant? We're talking about elected positions. Please post the objective requirements to get elected in Singapore.
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I've never heard of a place where the white vote swings harder for the Democrats than non-whites. Is Seattle an exception?
In Seattle and Portland it is whites who vote most zealously for the radical left. Blacks and Asians are both more moderate.
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Seattle's district hasn't elected a Republican representative since the seventies, it is fully a one party polity. The only distinction is within flavors of democrats. In my experience, the most pro-homeless people are white, and Asians have much less sympathy for letting people colonize the streets.
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Perhaps Dino Rossi was our last chance for salvation.
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Most of the hobos I saw in Seattle were white, and of the black ones I’d guess at least a substantial proportion were ADOS. And your own video link does, in your own words, show that the primary proponents of this kind of thing are white locals, whose ancestors have presumably been in America for at least some time. That suggests it’s self inflicted by locals rather than a product of federal immigration policy. The Asians and Latinos who push these policies are usually just those assimilated into that white progressive milieu. I very much doubt the Asians in general are hugely in favor of this, they seem largely apolitical and are disproportionately targeted by criminals in the crime wave (eg the pregnant Asian woman randomly shot at the intersection last year).
Of course they’re both examples of dysfunctional liberalism in practice. But it was unrelated to the story.
I will say there's a certain dynamic of Asian and Indian immigrants in Seattle where they would prefer a nice city, but they're not willing to DO anything about it, including vote for anyone with an (R) next to their name.
The International District has been turned into an absolute cesspool, and there is a minor epidemic of Asians being randomly targeted and attacked by black people, but there has been almost no political organization around this topic.
The workers who make their money in tech will be gone in a few years, taking their millions in RSU's with them, but leaving behind a legacy of voting for the luxury beliefs that have made the city a much worse place.
Perhaps those with an (R) next to their name support certain policies that are a bigger issue for Chinese and Indian immigrants than violent junkie hobos in the downtown?
It's not a snark, I honestly don't know why Asian Americans have become pro-Dem after being pro-GOP in the 90's.
I know why. It's the same transition that happened among college-educated whites. Voting progressive signals high status.
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Of course neither party will have policies which exactly line up with every interest group. But as it turns out, for nearly all interest groups, the most important policies are the ones where they line up with Democrats on. Sure, the Democrats may not handle garbage pickup and be soft-on-crime and promote high taxes for you and yours and discriminate against your ethnic group, but abortion or religion or racism. And this is true even if the local Republican candidate is pro-choice, not particuarly religious, and the "racism" is merely noting COVID's Chinese origins. Because it is the Democrats who pick the salient issues for everyone, through the press.
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Yes, there is: Vancouver, WA. It's across a river rather than across a lake, but the political relationship is very similar.
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South Africa was also from within, at least in part. The ANC won their elections.
(Though they may lose this next one, which leads to the scary possibility of a coalition with the EFF of "kill the boer" fame, who in the near term, profess only to want to take their wealth.)
The ANC won their elections, but their voters won the vote because of international pressure, of course.
Yeah, hence my concession of "in part."
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The sanctions and external pressure was a big influence on South Africa. There's no rule that says you have to have elections, or that you need to put everyone's names on the ballot. China certainly doesn't! Even in liberal democracies there are all kinds of ways to suppress undesirable parties - the campaign against the AFD for instance.
If the Anglosphere stood behind white South Africa rather than against it, it'd still be here today.
The Anglosphere standing behind white South Africa here means something like ‘American troops keeping the Afrikaner minority government in power’. Apartheid might have lasted another few years without international pressure, but it fell mostly because pro-apartheid forces were losing a war(and their opponents were not backed by the Anglosphere) and de Klerk chose to negotiate rather than take his chances.
Yes, in hindsight it was foreseeable that the black majority can’t govern a functional country for themselves. But 8% of the population can’t rule over a majority actively waging war against them indefinitely. Some solution needed to be come to to replace apartheid.
What war were they losing? The South Africans had Mandela in prison, it was De Klerk who gave up before giving war a try (due to the arms embargo amongst other things). The Anglosphere absolutely were against white South Africa (logically they supported the rebels), they sabotaged white South Africa until they gave up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Anti-Apartheid_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_apartheid
It never came to a war, the South African govt never even tried serious repression because of Western pressure.
Meanwhile, when Israel uses repression the US showers them with military aid. Have as many bombs and shells as you need! Lo and behold, Jewish Israel is still around, having forcibly expelled a good number of undesirables.
American sanctions didn’t have much impact on the Safrican economy, most of their econ indicators get slightly better after 86 even. This is likely in large part due to Reagan being opposed to them (they were passed over his veto) and slow walking their enforcement. The Treasury said they had lists of Safrican SOEs but not lists of which goods originated from them, so they were pretty limited in application. There was I believe a GAO report saying basically “sanctions didn’t hit most companies, those it did hit just rerouted trade through third party intermediaries in neutral countries”
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The South African government was increasingly unable to control its own territory while adventurism in the near abroad was going much worse than it had been(not that it had ever been going particularly well). The ANC was an insurgent group that was actually literally fighting the apartheid government with weapons and the fighting was going more and more poorly for the government as time went on. The white population found itself unable to bring more into the coalition- the cape coloreds wanted racial equality- the way alawites could count on support from Syria’s Christians and other minorities and chose to negotiate as an alternative to losing the war, which would result in either an attempted great leap forwards or a massacre of the white population.
Apartheid was not long term sustainable without mass deaths among the black population, or importing several million additional whites. Neither of those were in the cards; Israel treats the Palestinians pretty badly, but not as badly as South Africa would have had to treat the Bantus to maintain apartheid. Being a majority of the population instead of a single digit percentage has its advantages.
If Afrikaners had managed to boost their birth rate in the 60’s and 70’s perhaps they would have been able to maintain apartheid. They couldn’t, because that’s a really hard problem to solve, so demographic reasons meant their system was going to unravel.
The Portuguese gave up after a military coup toppled the govt, they didn't lose on the battlefield. They were winning the war on the battlefield. Rhodesia was strangled by sanctions, as was South Africa. Without sanctions and with assistance, they could easily have survived. When Israel gets into spats with Lebanon or bomb their neighbours they enjoy the unconditional assistance of the US, who'll happily lend munitions and vehicles. South Africa was paying their own way: they had an arms embargo and had to design their own jet fighters to counter the Soviets. The cost of having to prepare for proxy wars against a superpower is too much for a small country by itself.
The South Africans could easily have copied Israel's notes and just expelled anyone they didn't like the look of to maintain their demography. Demography is mutable. It's only appearances that stopped them, they weren't fully committed to the settler-garrison state way of life and they knew the West would suppress them if they did.
Israel got away with the nakba in the 40s, and South Africa realized it had the choice of nakba or majority rule in the 80s. Yes, alawites rule Syria without being a much bigger minority, but they’re seen as preferable to the Sunni majority by most people who are neither, and also have Russian troops keeping them in power. Without an influx of several million more whites apartheid couldn’t stay.
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Israel is vastly more Jewish (even counting neighboring Palestinians) than South Africa was white. And I’m not sure your analysis of what happened in Portugal is entirely correct, Angola had a very small white population, many other Portuguese colonies had already been lost (eg in India) and the people in the metropole were tired of their tax money being spent and young men being sent off to die in the colonies. In addition, the regime limped along after Salazar’s death and his replacements were widely disliked within the military.
Hydro is correct that the primary reason apartheid was unsustainable is that the Afrikaners were utterly unable to offer anything much to the rest of the non-Bantu population. Not to the indigenous Khoisan, not to the Indians and Cape Colored (who were also officially lesser under apartheid), and not even to the Anglos and Jews, who dominated business but who were systematically discriminated against in government and had to deal with corruption and kickbacks to the Afrikaners (not to mention spurious lawsuits, fines and other harassment) who ran the National Party, all of which built up a huge amount of resentment.
So - unlike the Alawites in Syria - it was unclear to non-Afrikaners in South Africa that they were going to ‘get massacred’ if popular democracy was implemented. Remember also that this was in the early 90s, a decade before Mugabe started seizing white land, and when whites in Botswana, Namibia and so on appeared to be doing fine under black-majority rule.
None of this is to dispute the fact that, yes, a sufficiently motivated bloc of 4 million Afrikaners probably could have held South Africa indefinitely (even under sanctions, given the nation’s bountiful natural resources and the fact that the Israelis and others would have continued buying from them). But there was little popular desire for that, in part because the pressure valve of emigration back to the West was open.
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Presumably, Apartheid could have been maintained if South Africa's white leaders chose to become a North Korea-style shithole. At least for a time, it was a good thing that they chose another path, it's simply a shame that those under the ANC's flag were so corrupt that SA is probably going to become a NK-tier basketcase anyways.
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It's evident this topic is a massive hobby horse of yours, not that I totally disagree, but I do find myself scratching my head at some parts. Boston a shithole? Really? Methuen that is a 20 minute drive away yes. But Boston ?
Small favor but I want you to tell me how much do these following cities rank in the shithole scale. Assume Seattle is a 100. Sorry for all East coast US cities, I think that's the only place where we might cross paths in the last few months. I want to see how much more sensitive you are than me. I'll reveal what I think after the fact.
Also isn't this problem solved if people just... Not cede territory to the crazy. How is the evaporative cooling so strong here?
Seattle adjusted for Covid hard. So for two months, it was immoral to walk around outside. And then for two years it became immoral to walk around outside without a mask. And going for a walk with a mask gets uncomfortable. So by the time people felt like they could go outside again, the streets were already, percentage-wise, more homeless than not.
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Boston isn’t a shithole; Back Bay is probably second only to Greenwich Village / Lower Manhattan in terms of quality walkable neighborhoods in the US. But it is interesting that in other countries, these psycho fentanyl hobos don’t really exist. They may have homeless people, most places do, but they’re of a substantially different kind. They’re not terrifying and mostly pose no risk to anyone but themselves and sometimes each other.
I haven’t been to a lot of places in your list, certainly not in the last few years, but I’ll answer for the ones I have.
Bronx: Too big for a universal judgment, there are a lot of nice parts of the Bronx along with some shitholes. The devastating thing for Seattle isn’t that the bad part of town is bad, it’s that the central business district is a bad part of town. I’d say the Bronx is 70 on this scale.
Flushing: Flushing is fine, it’s not a great neighborhood but it’s not a bad or dangerous place IMHO, 60.
Lower Manhattan: huge variety, but overall the best urban environment in America. Declined since COVID although nowhere near Seattle’s level. 55, Restrict if just to the village and it’s 50. Psychotic hobos are absolutely an issue but there’s safety in numbers and there are always people around. The subway is a bigger issue.
Ithaca: Eternal shithole, long has been, long will be. Those who must live there deserve nothing but pity. I’ve heard it’s even worse now, but how that’s possible is beyond me. 100.
I assume Buffalo is also 90-100, it’s not a place you hear great things about. Asheville was nice 7 or 8 years ago, would be a shame if it had deteriorated.
(By this scale San Francisco is 90, Vancouver 40, London is 25, Paris and Berlin 30, Tokyo 10, Singapore 5)
I would not say Greenwich Village is meaningfully better than the rest of lower Manhattan on this issue. The crowded parts closer to Washington Square Park are full of psychos. The park itself has a corner that is essentially Hamsterdam and the only place that’s worse in lower Manhattan is the area around the Bowery and Grand Street station in Chinatown
I don’t think the village is meaningfully better than the rest of Manhattan on this issue, I just think it’s the best place to live in lower Manhattan and that’s broadly reflected in eg property prices and neighborhood cachet anyway. There are psychotic hobos around but it’s probably the busiest or one of the busiest parts of lower Manhattan at all hours, certainly in the warmer months there are always students and other residents around at night, it’s rare to feel unsafe in my experience (having lived there my entire life between 1995 and 2017 when I moved to England, and having returned very frequently since). Which corner of the park is like Hamsterdam? You’re more likely to encounter students drinking and smoking weed than to be accosted by psychotic hobos.
The northwest corner is full of groups of junkies and psychotic people screaming at each other.
Here’s a NYPOST link, obviously they are a bit of a tabloid but what they report is true. https://nypost.com/2021/05/29/washington-square-park-drug-den-horrifies-greenwich-village/
Try walking through there on your next visit and compare to the rest of the park, there’s a very distinct vibe shift and I’ve seen a lot of wild shit there.
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I assume this is the part where you're taking the piss. Ithaca's always struck me as a very nice place, whenever I've gone there to visit family. Or is there a different Ithaca, one that doesn't host Cornell?
The whole thing feels like taking the piss to me. Genuinely, this is all so bizarre. I've traveled to major cities, for school and work and for pleasure, typically by myself, I nearly always end up having booked a hotel in a worse neighborhood than I thought I had because I'm cheap and pick a cheap one, and I've never experienced anything like this. I've never taken any particular effort to "protect" myself or to avoid bad neighborhoods, I've nearly always walked where physically possible. NYC, DC, SF, Baltimore, Philly, Pittsburgh, Chicago. I've never experienced anything remotely close to this. Closest I ever came was the first time I was in Boston, ten years ago, I saw two homeless guys get into a knife fight. No one has ever accosted me, people who ask me for money generally respond just fine to a firm No, or if I'm feeling the spirit I'll offer to buy them a sandwich which they will occasionally take. The only time I can recall ever having a really negative interaction with a street person was at 18 getting talked into spending $10 on somebody's struggle rap demo at Penn Station. I've walked miles through the Bronx or Brooklyn or Harlem drunk in the middle of the night, I've wandered around SF aimlessly. I've gone to midnight concerts in the wrong part of town and wandered back at 2am. I've gone to games, concerts, fight nights, bars, parties, walked around drunk and high and stupid. I've always looked like a preppy white guy, I'm not tough, I've more Hayseed than Street Smart about me, I should be a target in a what they say of "bad" neighborhoods, yet I have never had the slightest bit of trouble. The residents of "bad" neighborhoods have generally been friendly to me. The last "bad" experience I ever had was a black guy on the Broad Street Line trying to sell me liquor on the Septa train after an Eagles game; I told him I didn't drink because I was Muslim, we had a brief conversation about that and he asked me to subscribe to his Youtube channel. He later tried to steal somebody's duffel bag, another black guy's, but was chased off.
These diatribes feel like two movies one screen to me, at best. I'm reminded of a trade show I once attended in Baltimore, years ago. I was going to a bar to meet a friend of mine from high school, as I was leaving a guy from West Virginia who I had met at the show latched onto me. Wanted to go out for a drink. He walked with me. Nice enough guy. A little drunk already. Every time we saw two black guys standing next to each other, he would grab me and hustle along, say don't look at them, MOVE. And then say "phew, really dodged a bullet there, you're lucky I was here dude." We split up at the bar after he got bored of the conversation, I walked back drunk, by myself. Somehow, despite being alone and not following his advice, no one accosted me. This has been my experience over and over: actual violence is vanishingly rare, and has never touched me despite my best efforts to make myself vulnerable, but some people perceive violence all around them.*
Objection 1: But FHM, you might think of yourself as a giant pussy, but be fair, practically speaking you are a male of average height and you've lifted your bodyweight overhead every year since Obama's second term, you are not factually a soft target. Maybe you carry yourself like less of a pussy than you perceive yourself as?
Sure, this makes some degree of sense. Maybe I'm not perceiving my own privilege. But...this kinda flips the political valence of so much of the argument? Does it make sense to say that the Red Tribe is the tribe of tough, independent, masculinity if the online whinging about urban crime seems to consist of people scared by all this, while the girly effeminate or feminine Blue Tribers walk around feeling fine? If women and the weak are the ones threatened, why is the pro-police party so masculine?
Objection 2: Maybe you've just gotten lucky? Odds are...
Sure, but people who whinge about this kind of thing online, like my learned friend in argument @2rafa , seem to run into this all the time. While I have, over my entire adult life, never once. If merely traveling to these cities gives one person a dozen experiences in a day, living in them for years, attending school and going to parties and events, should have given me at least one.
Objection 3: You're the one taking the piss!
Fair enough. We're at an impasse.
*All the actual crime I've suffered from has been of the annoying, pissant, middle of the night variety. I reckon I've had more stolen from me than most around here, but it's been people kicking in the door of a house we were working on and walking off with wire and a table saw. Or catalytic converters! God the catalytic converters I've lost. Recently someone broke into our junkyard and graffiti'd an old trailer. Honestly, I was unlikely to catch them, and the cops would never give a shit, so I left a note: "Hey, I don't really care if you put your name on the broken down stuff, your art ain't bad, but no penises, no swastikas, no swear words. Don't make me do something about this." So far, they've listened. Go figure.
Seattle is much worse than any East Coast or Midwest city I’ve visited in this way, even though objectively violent crime is much higher in St Louis, Detroit, New Orleans etc, even after Seattle’s spike. I’d say the situation is also different. In Baltimore and Philly and even Chicago the primary risk is that a couple of guys come up to you, take out a gun or a knife and demand your wallet and phone. They may be mildly fucked up but it is, ultimately, a robbery. The thing about psychotic hobos on the West Coast is that they’re unpredictable because they’re strung out and dealing with severe mental illness. There is no predictability. My dad has stories about NYC in the ‘70s and ‘80s but fundamentally if you had $20 and/or handed over your wallet you were safe, especially as a man but mostly in general too. The people who got shot or shivved were for the most part the guys who decided to be heroes and fight back.
And I’d be wary of saying I’m an extreme prude about this. I grew up in NYC, as I said to Nybbler I’ve frequented the sketchiest, OK second-sketchiest Manhattan McDonalds as a teenager and young adult that was regularly the scene of drug abuse, knife fights, hobo brawls and the settling of various other armed disputes, and that was life. I’ve walked through much of lower Manhattan at 2am countless times, in my more reckless days by myself, have taken the subway at all hours. I’m not a wide-eyed suburban naïf who crosses the street at the sight of two loitering black men (or, in NYC, one would pretty much never go outside). But this was sketchy, and I think it’s clear in the behavior of the population.
The ‘red tribe’ often exaggerates problems with urban crime. In Britain, conservatives like to suggest knife crime is a big problem in London (it isn’t, London is one of the safest cities in the West with a 100% murder clearance rate and almost every knife homicide victim is either in a domestic violence situation or a young black man involved in gangs on tough project housing). And the hysteria about NYC, certainly since Giuliani, is very much misplaced.
But this was bad. And - per your example - the ‘blue tribe’ residents of Seattle were clearly reticent about spending much time on the street in any great numbers.
Sure, but I'm looking at the comparisons you are drawing, and clearly you and I have a significant gap in perception of something. Perhaps it isn't risk of violence?
In the comment thread above you stated:
Maybe we're talking about different things, and your 100 rating is to do with some aesthetic distaste which I don't even notice. What exactly is your 0-100 based on?
Ithaca is, has been for decades, and remains as of last year, ten square miles surrounded by reality. I can't imagine anywhere safer, short of a literal shopping mall or something. I wandered around as a kid, as a drunk undergrad, as a law student, as a middle aged tourist. I've never even heard of violence there that wasn't perpetrated between students, or essentially domestic in nature. Buffalo is...just a city? Not particularly upscale, but neither particularly dangerous nor hassling, I felt no sense of risk going out for wings there. San Francisco and NYC I've lived in, I don't know that I felt THAT much difference from Paris or Berlin, certainly Madrid and Barcelona and Luxembourg were worse experiences for me. Paris certainly I had significantly more hassle from street people, but that might be because I am quite obviously not French. I've heard great things about Singapore, though I've never had the pleasure.
I can accept your assessment of Seattle and Portland, I haven't been to either since I was maybe eleven. But then to say SF, which I have visited, is 90% as bad, and Buffalo and Ithaca which I've been to regularly and enjoy, are also "shitholes" and just as bad...I'm a little lost.
To your point...
I agree, the Republican fear of inner city crime suffers from the same 'boy who cried wolf' problem that Democratic accusations of Naziism and racism have suffered from. And when you call Ithaca a horrifying shithole where residents should be pitied, it destroys credibility of accounts of other places.
To be completely clear, my point about Ithaca was largely intended as a joke. But as the link shows, nowhere is safe from this problem in the US right now.
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I was, but sadly after searching it’s now declined rather steeply, too.
Commons has always been a bit sketchy, but it was a small town "dumb and poor people who go way back and have a mixture of old beefs and enabling habituation to each other's antisocial tendencies" kind of sketchy that should be familiar to those who watch a certain genre of police cam videos for fun. I'm wondering if the homeless in the post are part of that web; Ithaca is not a place where unconnected homeless could easily survive the winter.
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You literally said:
So Boston is only 'probably livable' and equivalent to San Francisco, in your eyes. You said this about San Francisco:
So you say San Francisco is a dump (and by extension, Boston is the same). I assume now you'll try and wriggle out of having used the word shithole by saying you were only talking about Union Square, so whatever.
I was willing to suspend disbelief, never having been to Seattle or Portland myself. But when you start going off on cities I've lived in and indeed bike commute through everyday and call them 'barely livable' I know you're either so snobbish and rich as to be out of touch with the reality the rest of us live in or playing it up to try and make an argument about how we're all ugly people leaving in ugly cities. Granted, I'm not a (presumably) 5 foot something Jewish woman but I can't deny what my lying eyes see every day.
Yes, I literally was only talking about Union Square which has had a hobo problem since well before COVID. I apologize if you think that’s changing my original meaning, but it wasn’t.
And again, you’re comparing neighborhoods to cities. The point is that both Boston and NYC have neighborhoods ‘as bad’ as downtown Seattle. But their core business areas are nowhere near as bad, that’s the tragic thing about Seattle, that the crisis has consumed the city center itself.
Boston is not a shithole. Like literally every major coastal city it has a big problem with homeless drug addicts, but as I said there are nice places. My point was to compare the financial district of San Francisco to Boston in a way that made clear both were ‘liveable’.
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Your point about being held hostage by a relatively small number is so spot on and is what drives me the most nuts about the homeless situation. There really are not that many problem homeless people out there as a % of the population. If we could just figure out a solution for the very worst hundred to a thousand that would make a massive difference.
The solution is institutionalizing the indigent homeless population. Not all of them, not the outlier hobo wandering-workers, the homeless who are principally unable to work. The state running such institutions, or paying for private administration, does open the door to abuses. One is financial, with taxpayer money footing the bill they're incentivizing bad actors who will profit in their delivery of a poor service. Bigger is employment, hiring caring or at least competent staff who aren't sociopaths, something we see facilities in the US failing at pretty regularly. Still, some significant number of the homeless should be institutionalized because they need a level of hard support the church and private charity is no longer equipped to handle, and really it's the domain of the state anyway.
I'm not the first to bring this up, but I don't think I've seen anyone explain why it will be possible in our generation. Changing political sentiment will help, it'll probably be necessary so that people who shouldn't be on the streets stay off them, but technology in that of the human automata, the simulacra, will be the lever. By 2035, wide-production probably 2040, simulacra will exist that are capable of acting as orderlies in healthcare settings. Some successor to GPT or whatever, after direction from the human overseer they are accountable to, will run their scheduling, their pathing, their tasks, the conversing with and monitoring of patients that they can then provide to those human physicians and overseers.
These simulacra will be perfect orderlies: they don't need to sleep, they don't need to fear (in once high-risk settings) a patient sneaking something sharp to shiv them, they won't make mistakes, or they will but certainly fewer by-the-day and more minor than humans make. Patients meanwhile won't have to be afraid of simulacra verbally abusing them or stealing from them or beating them or raping them or killing them. They won't have to fear and suffer from the petty tyrannies of spite, or even just a bad interaction as the brunt of annoyance on a bad day. With time, simulacra will be integral to the delivery of an undeviatingly high standard of care.
I've always assumed Japan will use them first because of their inverse population pyramid. Lots of old people, not enough people to care for them: okay, robots. The success, the quality, the savings, these will see varyingly immediate success and that will spread. Private healthcare in the US first, but there will be policymakers who will be aware of the applications of simulacra in facilities like psychiatric institutions. When it is a guarantee those institutions' patients will be free from the debasing of their humanity (beyond that from being institutionalized) the philosophic argument against becomes very difficult, and then financials get their say. Massive savings for effectiveness in care humans will quickly be incapable of providing, at least in multi-patient environments, will be the big push.
You don't think a determined crazy patient, or bunch of them, couldn't wreck a robot orderly? At the very least knock it over on the ground so it can't get up?
Oh yeah, definitely private healthcare providers will be very interested in that. Problem is, once we have robot health workers on the grounds of cost, big institutions for the dregs of society - be they government or private run - will be nasty places. Cheap foodstuffs, lack of anything like education and stimulation, cheapest of everything from clothes to bedding to all the things you need to run a facility, pack in as many as possible, and not even the chance of a human worker who might be sympathetic to one person or help them or whistle blow, because it's all done by robots who won't deviate from their programming. And we the public won't care, because it will be the dregs, the criminals, the junkies, the hopelessly crazy. Do it cheap, why waste our tax money? Already public services are not of good repute, so I understand - nobody wants to end up in the state home because it's cheap, untrained labour and terrible conditions and nobody cares.
I don't object to locking up the hopelessly crazy, but you can't just shove them into crates and feed them on crushed bugs.
The nice nursing homes and hospitals and asylums may have robot workers, but they'll also have the presence of humans on the staff for interacting with the patients and nice living conditions, as long as the family can pay through the nose for all that.
From "The Ball and the Cross", about special cells in a modern, model lunatic asylum:
Determined patients could break a robot, but it's just a robot. Better that than maiming or killing a human. As for the humans currently working in those environments, some are in places where they have a prudent fear of injury or death and I'm sure that informs their interactions with some patients. Simulacras won't fear anything, so their interactions won't be tinged by fear.
More than 90% of labor will be automated in our lifetime. Simulacra will improve, the human facsimile will become seamless and their fine articulation and strength will first match and then permanently exceed humans, or at least those non-cybernetically-augmented. They will be tremendously cost-superior as their minimum effort in work will be better than many humans giving their utmost. So while fears of institutions being black pits for the dregs is valid today, in 30 years a largely simulacra-staffed institution will have patients receiving a higher standard of care than what premium specialized multi-patient care facilities deliver right now.
Some homeless need the hard support of institutions right now. The problem I have with mass institutionalizing advocacy today is I don't trust such institutions to not become abyssal places bereft of human dignity. The government could probably run a non-terrible pilot, but it would be a handful of the homeless and so not solve anything, but run in mass, and especially if turned to privatization, they will become hellish. And some might say, these people are already making cities hellish; they might argue their lives are already hellish, a warm place to sleep, food, and the removal of narcotics would be better; or they might argue the institutions would be hellish because such people inhabit them. To all of these, yeah maybe. But if the perception is these places are worse than prison there will be powerful opposition from the lowest of the individual homeless who fights at being sent, up to well-funded, organized actors working against it.
With the mass automation of labor and comparable-in-impact breakthroughs in other industries, costs of many products will spiral downward. Inflation is a motherfucker but things will either stabilize by the end of the decade or the country will start burning. I choose to believe the former will happen. The robots will look like humans, they sound like humans, they will feel like humans. The reason it will work so well when it's implemented is because that obstacle of "this thing isn't human" will be brief; we can't help but humanize that which isn't human. Look at the affinity for animals. The simulacra will be capable, they will be pleasant, they will remember everything but not hold to particular memories in spite for later cruelty. They will just be better. Not in the transcendent, infinite worth of the human, but as the continued demonstration of the spirit of man in improving the human condition. They are the next great step. On a long enough timeline, a healthy capitalism will compete itself into being socialism. Costs will be so cheap, quality will be so high, so many industries will just cease to exist as some breakthrough renders them entirely obsolete. Food, healthcare and pharma, energy, housing and construction, clothing, entertainment, automation comes for it all. Eventually these institutions will be able to provide what the patients need at the highest quality for a pittance of what it once cost and this is why I know I will eventually support such measures.
I don't see dregs being shoved in capsules and fed bugs. I see the indigent being, yes forcefully, put in institutions where not their wants but their true needs are addressed. Where they eat good food, where they have good rooms, where they have access to education and entertainment, where they receive the medical care they need. Where they have interactions with simulacra that are in the meaningful sense absolutely real, real relationships with simulacra who might be programmed to care but do it so well the patients feel truly cared for, which they will be.
It's utopian, so it's naive and dumb. What future is the alternative? Throw them all in a pit? Might as well send vans around for them to be shot and taken to crematoriums. I know that's reductive, there's an adequate middle ground, but why stop at hoping for a solution that's only adequate? The technology for the best swiftly approaches, why not hope for it in everything? I don't ascribe an unreasonable negativity to you, the concerns you raise of terrible conditions are entirely valid, and if that were the proposal or what ended up actually happening after the ostensibly good proposal, I'd oppose them. But at a certain point in the endless march of technological progress it will take more effort to poorly deliver such a service, it will take actual malice rather than simple avarice, because the avaricious option will so fortunately be the best option for the patients.
...Do you remember the optimism of the early internet? The realization that what we had here was a truly transformative technology with the potential to penetrate into every aspect of our lives and our society, and that seemed to be very near to entirely positive in its effects? The internet was my go-to example to make the case for techno-optimism as late as 2014.
And look at it now. That's your answer: because humans will always, always, always human. You can see the bright future just over the horizon, and the sad part is it might not even be a mirage, but there's still something cheaper, nastier, easier and more available just around the next corner, and the people around you are going to go for that instead, because that's what humans do.
Hasn't it been? Online commerce has improved the lives of millions of citizens. I can call my family in different places around the world with full video capability. I can remotely attend weddings and funerals ,that I never would have been able to before. I can debate with people all around the world. And I can access hundreds of thousands of words written on just about any topic I want from best Dungeons and Dragons feats for a Rogue to how to cook an Olive Garden style deep fried lasagna to web novels spanning millions of words, or how to best fix a shelving unit or replace a bulb in my car. I can download 3d printing specs for gaming terrain or miniatures.
Any business can now scale customers with a cheap website and I can order trinkets from a shop in California that I would never have seen otherwise. I can watch and listen to pretty much any music I want to and then read about the background of the album. I can play video games with unparalleled speed and connectivity and help my nephew tame sheep in Minecraft while being able to see him giggle.
I can submit test results to my doctor without having to call them or go in to the office, then he can create and fill a prescription for me at a pharmacy of my choosing, who will then email or text me when it is ready. When I switch dentists they email copies of my charts to my new dentist who has them immediately. I can carry out many of the functions of the DMV online and I can do the same for many government agencies.
I can research people I am about to meet in a professional context and I can check out the boys my daughter wants to date. Right now I can have an AI write me code that has a good chance of working to do all kinds of random things. Or create images for my roleplay characters or backstories. I can stalk prices of plane tickets over time to buy at the best time rather having to call and check or go to a travel agent. I can check reviews of hundreds of restaurants and make and cancel reservations much more quickly than ever before. I can use web chats to deal with issues that would have required a phone call or a physical visit before.
The sheer amount of time that the internet saves me in routine tasks compared to the olden days is astonishing.
If you had offered all that to 80s computer geek me, I would have bitten both your hands off to have it! And I can do most of it from a tiny handheld computer!
Sure the internet has negatives as well, but I would say the positives outweigh them significantly. I would suggest for most people in the West the internet is much more positive than negative.
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This is also not really all that much of a puzzle. It's not that we've failed to figure out a solution, it's that there are malevolent attorneys that fight to keep these parasites on the streets and camping in parks.
I think the wider justice reform movement has some more harm than this judgement, along with long term tolerance of this behavior in some places.
I mean, what this really is just the Skid Rowization of every West Coast downtown. But LA has been like this for decades. It can’t just be this one law. If cities cared they still have a lot of levers they can use even with this law, like just defunding all homeless shelters and homeless funding to starve them out and drive them elsewhere, or having cops use laws against drug use and dealing on the books.
Oh, I don't mean just the one ruling, that was intended as an example of the sort of malicious actor that I think can't really be negotiated with and just needs to be defeated if you're going to attempt cleaning things up. That there are people that make their living fighting to prevent towns from preventing vagrants from camping in parks highlights that this is a difficult problem because of those bad actors.
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It's not just this one ruling, but this ruling is tying the hands of anyone who tries to fix the problem: letting those who prefer not to fix it free reign to make things worse.
The ruling doesn’t stop DAs from enforcing existing state drug law in a way that would rapidly clean up a large proportion of the homeless population. I agree the ruling is a bad thing and I’m hopeful it’ll get struck down later this year. But I don’t think it’s the main thing preventing major change.
Yes, true: however, I think the ruling must be having a strong effect because you are not seeing the same street people crises in very left wing cities outside of the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction. The East Coast doesn't have this problem, even though they have quite a few activist DAs.
The East Coast has much harsher weather, I think it’s largely that simple. You see the worst homeless problem in San Diego (it’s just slightly less visible because the city is more suburban), even though SD is more ‘moderate’ than a lot of blue cities in at least some ways, because of the weather. If NYC had Seattle’s climate the crisis would be much worse, but NYC’s politics are also arguably hardened by reverence for the police in some places and a memory of the retaking of the city in the 80s and 90s from a violent crime epidemic. NYC also has a larger black population that tends to vote for more establishment/moderate democrats.
New York has 5 times as many homeless people as Washington: even if weather is harsher in NYC, they still have an enormous population of homeless and manage them better than any city in the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction. 39% of the total number of homeless people in America live in the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction, despite those states making up only 19% of the United States by population.
I don't deny that local politics can make the situation much better or much worse despite the 9th Circuit: but it is clear to me that the 9th Circuit has had a powerful effect on making the problem worse.
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What about the coastal cities of the Southeastern US then? I suppose the weather there is also mild.
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I'm praying the Supreme Court will strike Martin down. If they don't, I see no solution to the problem.
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We have solutions, and it's not the good people of the city being held hostage by the homeless, it's order-desiring people being held hostage by leftist political power.
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I think every, or most, major cities in the US have one McDonalds so notorious for violence, and often located in a relatively unassuming place, that it is instantly recognizable and nick named by the locals. NY, Chicago. etc. If you see a social media post about crime and there's a McDonalds in the background, you are sure to find locals in the comments saying "I knew it was Crackdonald's on 5th without even clicking the link. City should have closed it down 10 years ago at least, poor out of towners don't know to avoid it."
It's always McDonald's. Maybe the bathrooms are to blame. This is why so many stores now have the keypads.
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Yeah, but I was inside and outside the infamous Greenwich Village McDonald’s countless times over the years, including late nights, and it was always sketchy in the mostly fun / entertaining way, not the scary way. This felt different, although I suppose it’s hard to articulate why, but the vibe was scarier.
The Greenwich Village one isn't the worst in NYC -- as the thread linked above says, it's 8th and 35th just north of Penn Station. If it's still there, I fortunately don't need to walk by there any more.
Ah yes, that was indeed pretty grim.
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I curse London every winter when it gets dark at 3:30pm but compared to your experience in Seattle it seems to be paradise. The worst I've ever had in London was an agitated drugged up guy asking for money on the underground but that was easily fixed by not making eye contact and getting off at the next station.
The good thing about the position of Seattle et al. though is that all their problems are self inflicted and they have the choice to snap out of their delusions and fix easily everything which is not an option open to the majority of cities in decline.
Legend has it that there are some hidden paradises where not even this happens.
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Man, it was so nice to come home and have that realization of “I don’t have to look over my shoulder constantly”, we’re lucky to live in what is in real terms such a safe and peaceful city.
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This reminds me of KOMO (one of the Seattle TV stations) clarion call to the broader city about these problems that seems to have been ignored. I think it's crazy that the city can continue to ignore these problems as the reduction in business must be affecting city tax revenues but perhaps they can continue to operate on federal subsidies and stay at home tech taxes indefinitely. I grew up on the other side of the mountains from Seattle and while we all agreed it was a terrible place (even though it wasn't), it's still sad to see it like this today.
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