Posted on 09/05/2021 4:48:20 PM PDT by simpson96
After moving into a downtown high-rise from the suburbs in 2013 to take advantage of the vibrant atmosphere and walkability of Seattle’s urban core, Ted and Priscilla Tanase are now looking to rent a place on the Eastside to temporarily escape the open-air drug use, lawlessness and filth that’s led them to feel unsafe when they walk out their front door.
“We’re going to live away for a year and see what happens,” said Ted Tanase, 79. “I just need a break from here. We have four adult kids and none of them think it’s safe.”
Haley Mae, a 27-year-old Seattleite who works for a digital marketing company, spent her teen years riding buses along Third Avenue to get to middle school and high school. She’s lived downtown since October and says “it feels the same amount of scary” as it did when she was a kid, though she’s now more aware of her surroundings and avoids walking on Third.
“Growing up, (Seattle) felt really remote. Now, it feels very relevant,” as the city has become wealthier and attracted people from all over to settle here, said Mae, who thinks all downtown residents are experiencing low-level trauma from watching people struggle with homelessness and witnessing others shoot up on the sidewalks. “I wish I knew how to pick up needles safely or that there was a place to put them.”
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...
There was a Jamaican or something restaurant there that I did patronize. That was behind my use of the word ethnic.
My husband has a sister living there but she is up north with a lovely view.
White Center was frightening. But in fact I did eat at an Indian restaurant there once I believe.
Rossi is a republican. I guess that means that this guy is not totally woke.
These druggies need to be locked up and the people who supply them shot.
Yeah - West Seattle would be perfect!!!
Or Rainier Ave.
They are leaving a view to die for.
Is that what we’re calling licentiousness now?
“I spent 20 years in Sammamish, which is a nice community, nice for raising kids, but it bored me to death. There’s an intensity downtown … it’s just a more interesting place to live.”
Just what I don’t need: intensity.
Seattle Times is having trouble handling the cognitive dissonance of the summer of love being a real bummer. Reality Bites!
LOL.
That’s another vibrant community.
I agree. He is 79 and still reluctant to let go of the past.
Exactly the same in Seattle as in Vancouver BC, very wealthy city with a “vibrant, diverse” downtown scene and jammed up against the downtown east side which has a permanent wandering population of about twenty thousand street people.
Can’t speak for Seattle but for Vancouver the reality is that people drift in from all over Canada to live the grotty street life (shooting up, pushing shopping carts through the never-ending winter rain, breaking into vehicles or taking the more legal route of soup kitchens to stay alive). They come to Vancouver because they either know or find out along the way that you basically freeze to death if you try to live this way in Calgary or Regina (a few do, of course, but the authorities there can cope with the small numbers and take them off the streets in the winters).
Also the same thing has popped up in most larger towns in BC where the climate is relatively mild in winter, even in the interior, you’ll find little clusters of addicts living out in the open, under tarps in parks or under bridges mostly. It’s nothing like Vancouver which has to be seen to be believed, there is a ten-square block area which is basically just the domain of the slowly circulating people with no other purpose in life than to be alive the next day as well.
I’ve been to Seattle fairly recently and it struck me that the dynamic looked similar but involved a much smaller number of people. It seems to be concentrated in the area just south of the downtown around the sports stadiums and Chinatown. Rather than tens of thousands of street people, I thought it appeared to be closer to hundreds.
The similar aspect is that Chinatown is wedged in between this street scene and the central business district. Through no fault of Chinese business people, the homeless are basically trashing their formerly much-patronized areas and making it difficult to survive as they keep spending their money on renovation and grafitti removal, not to mention the fact that nobody wants to be around after dark any more.
I suppose in America there are better places to go than Seattle for those who want to live out in the open all year, such as California. In Canada, it’s pretty much a choice between Vancouver and Victoria BC which many of these drifters probably find impossible to reach since you would need money to get there. (ferry travel) Even so, Victoria has a bit of a problem with the same thing, on a smaller scale perhaps.
We have one homeless guy where I live, everyone calls him the Mountain Man, and he was offered a trailer in someone’s driveway, so I guess we are down to zero now. In the nearby town of Trail, B.C., I recently counted half a dozen.
“...said Ted Tanase, 79....”
No fool like an old democrat fool.
Seattle has been busing them out of town for a while. Mt Vernon never had homeless folks to speak of, now it too has become “vibrant”. I’ve seen the buses unloading in town.
Values of downtown condos have probably crashed, so they can’t just sell and buy something really nice elsewhere.
Does anyone have a read on downtown Seattle residential real estate values?
Here in n. Californicator land, we have lot of elite bicoastals living in the Seattle area and here.
Many seem to be spending more time down here this year.
It appears with the exception of $500 to Obama they donated to Republicans. Dino Rossi was cheated by the Dimms fraudulent voting scam.
Seattle “felt remote” in 2001? Yeah... No, I don’t think so. Seattle was already a big city in 2007. Maybe in the 1970s it felt remote. Not in 2001.
If City Council were to rename Martin Luther King aa Richard Simmons Way, I bet a lot of the urban outdoorsmen would pull up stakes.
More than likely. But they will never figure out that the way they vote is why things are the way they are. Insanity run amok.
Nope - I do not believe they have crashed. In fact, real estate around here is totally, absolutely insane. Downtown, condos go for $600, $700, $800 a square foot. So a 1500 sq ft condo costs about $1.2 million.
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