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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.
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?
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 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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