Free Republic

Seattle is overwhelmed by garbage and filth, but the city’s leaders won’t admit it. Over the past few years, Seattle has become a dumping ground for millions of pounds of garbage, needles, feces, and biohazardous waste, largely emanating from the hundreds of homeless encampments that have sprouted across the city. Now, the Emerald City is on the verge of a full-blown public-health crisis. Last year saw a 400 percent increase in HIV infections among mostly homeless addicts and prostitutes in the city’s northern corridor. Public-health officials are sounding the alarms about the return of diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, and trench...

Philip Ray Lester, 61, was identified by police as the assailant and arrested after the street brawl on Tuesday in a quiet residential section of Fresno, California. Police say that Lester sparked the brawl by going up to an area where another homeless man was encamped and trying to tear down his tent. The other man confronted him with a metal rod from a bed frame and Lester faced him down with a baseball bat, police say. Video shot by horrified residents shows the two men squaring off in the middle of the street, near the intersection of Michigan Avenue and...

Venice is now home to the largest concentration of homeless anywhere on L.A.'s Westside, with nearly 1,000 non-domiciled people. During the past 18 months, several encampments have swelled in more residential areas where homes can easily sell for eight figures and up. Tents, many of them equipped with mini refrigerators, cupboards, televisions and heaters, vie with pedestrian traffic. Residents who live near the encampments say mail regularly goes missing. Break-ins have jumped. Hypodermic needles and human waste are appearing on sidewalks and at local playgrounds. Residents have complained to police about harassment and even physical assaults. "This is more of...

With swelling transient encampments abutting seven-figure homes, the beachside enclave has emerged as a flashpoint for the inequality shaping Los Angeles — and a real-world test case for the liberal ideology of the area’s showbiz residents. After the first attack, Randy Osborn figured it was just his turn. Tire slashings in his east Venice Beach neighborhood had become commonplace. But when his vintage Land Rover was hit a sixth time in the course of a few months, Osborn, who runs a small virtual reality company and has lived in Venice for seven years, began to worry he was being singled...

The latest fad in criminal-justice activism is the concept of “survival crime.” The theory holds that the homeless, the poor, and people of color commit property crimes and low-level infractions in order to secure their basic survival. Any enforcement of these laws is thus a violation of their basic human rights and should be relaxed—that is, local governments should stop enforcing any laws that “criminalize homelessness” and “criminalize poverty.” Survival crime theory is the flipside of Broken Windows theory. They deal with the same class of offenses—mainly property crime, drug possession, and public nuisances—in precisely the opposite way. Broken Windows...

George Opudo used to drive for Uber. Picking up and dropping off customers at Union Station in Washington, just steps away from the U.S. Capitol, he’d look at homeless people and think: “That’d never be me.” But in September 2017, Opudo lost his car, his job, and all of his worldly possessions. With no place to go and no food to eat, Opudo was homeless. “I was so hungry, I didn’t know what to do,” Opudo told The Daily Signal. Walking around Union Station, he asked a woman where he could find some food. “She said, ‘Go down to the...

New Mexico has had an uptick in homelessness, and it’s at the top nationally when it comes to the percentage of people experiencing chronic homelessness. In New Mexico, about 12 of every 10,000 people were experiencing homelessness, an increase of 2.8 percent from 2017. About 42 percent of them had been continuously homeless for a year or more. Only the District of Columbia had as high of a percentage of chronically homeless people. The problem has long vexed the state’s largest metro area, Albuquerque, as well as other communities around New Mexico. Albuquerque’s mayor has highlighted homelessness as one of...

Homelessness in the U.S. increased in 2018 for the second straight year after being in decline for 7 years previously, according to the Wall Street Journal. The small 0.3 percent increase from last year comes as the economy is booming and unemployment is at its lowest point in decades. The homelessness rate is included in an annual report given to Congress Monday conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). HUD secretary Ben Carson called the rise in homelessness last year relatively muted, saying that for it “to be relatively flat is actually pretty good” given the rise...

On January 1, 2014, Colorado legalized the medical and recreational use of Marijuana. They claimed that it would add millions of dollars to the state’s revenue via state taxes which includes a 2.9% sales tax, 10% special sales tax and 15% excise tax, meaning the state would collect $27.90 for every $100 of recreational marijuana sold in the Rocky Mountain state. In April 2014, 19 year old foreign exchange student Levy Thamba plunged off a hotel balcony and died after eating legally purchased marijuana laced cookies. After eating just one cookie, Thamba became agitated and ran out onto the balcony...

According to a press release sent out by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, nine individuals have been charged "with a dozen felony counts for allegedly offering money and cigarettes to homeless people on Skid Row in exchange for false and forged signatures on ballot petitions and voter registration forms." "The defendants are accused of engaging in the solicitation of hundreds of false and/or forged signatures on state ballot petitions and voter registration forms by allegedly offering homeless people $1 and/or cigarettes for their participation, prosecutors said. The alleged offenses occurred during the 2016 and 2018 election cycles," the release...

On Novermber 2, 2015, Seattle’s Mayor Ed Murray and his counterpart in King County declared a state of emergency over the homeless situation. Since then, local spending on the problem is up sharply but the number of homeless people on the streets is also up. Three years into the emergency, no one seems certain what to do next. From the Seattle Times: For the last three years, Seattle and King County have split their spending on homelessness between immediate responses, like emergency and winter shelters, and longer-term solutions. Emergency shelters are local governments’ second-largest budget item when it comes...

Earlier this year Seattle passed and then, a month later, rescinded a head-tax which would only have applied to the wealthiest companies in the city, places like Amazon and Starbucks. The intent was to raise as much as $40 million a year to fight the homelessness problem the city is struggling with. Next month, San Francisco will vote on a similar proposal. Proposition C is meant to raise as much as $300 million a year from top-earning companies in the city and will spend that money in addition to the $380 million San Francisco is already spending to fight...

he day the fence arrived, Gabe was sitting next to his tent, right at the heart of Los Angeles’ Skid Row. It was a chain link fence – about six feet tall – placed at the edge of the sidewalk, where it neatly enclosed Gabe, his neighbors, and the tented homes they have made for themselves on the streets of what is sometimes called the homeless capital of the country. “They put the whole sidewalk inside the fence,” said Gabe, an older black man with kind eyes and a disarming demeanor who has lived on the streets of Skid Row...

From crime rates to life expectancy to income levels, statistics at the national level are next to useless when it comes to measuring the daily lives of ordinary people in the United States. This is because the United States — which is a huge and geographically diverse country — is simply too large to be summed up in a single number. This sort of generalizing is inappropriate for pretty much any place that's larger than a single metro area, but it's especially bad when applied to a place like the United States. Even the larger European countries are much...

Seattle leaders on Tuesday repealed a tax on large companies such as Amazon and Starbucks after a backlash from businesses, a stark reversal from a month ago when the City Council unanimously approved the effort to combat a growing homelessness crisis. The council voted 7-2 after supporters and opponents packed a meeting with signs saying, "Tax Amazon, housing for all" and "No tax on jobs," with some shouting for more time to discuss the issue. The vote showed Amazon's ability to aggressively push back on government taxes, especially in its affluent hometown where it's the largest employer and where some...

In the wake of Seattle’s decision to enact an Employee Head Tax (EHT) to fight homelessness, media reporting has largely focused on the backlash from large businesses such as Amazon. It’s not hard to see why. Amazon, which employs more than 10 percent of the city’s workforce, has suspended planned investments in protest, and more than 100 leaders of large businesses operating in the city signed an open letter opposing the tax increase. But local residents tired of Seattle’s stagnant economic situation are beginning to take action against the EHT as well. It is truly difficult to imagine a worse...

PORTLAND, Ore. - A man was stabbed 17 times and left for dead by a homeless man trying to camp in the man’s neighborhood, his daughter said. Kasey Lebechuck approached Todd Schneider, 25, Sunday and told Schneider he was camping in a restricted area. Schneider said he needed his phone and instead grabbed a knife from his backpack, according to KPTV. “He is lucky to be alive. He was stabbed 17 times, so I mean he got him everywhere. Lungs, eyes, his stomach, his back, his head,” his daughter Kayla McNeel told KPTV. “He said that he just kept trying...

Homelessness in America is out of control, especially on the West Coast. The total homeless population in the U.S. rose this past year for the first time since 2010, driven primarily by a steep increase in people living on the streets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. City streets are becoming disgusting and dangerous. Residents are worried and regularly don’t feel safe. Something has to be done, but what can actually be accomplished? By Palm Beach Letter There is urine and fecal matter on the streets of San Francisco and used needles all around as drug addicts shoot up...

The Seattle City Council has approved a tax on large businesses such as Amazon and Starbucks to fight homelessness. The council on Monday unanimously backed a compromise tax plan that will charge large businesses about $275 per full-time worker a year. It’s lower than the $500-per-worker tax initially proposed. The tax would begin in 2019 and raise about $48 million a year to pay for affordable housing and homeless services. Some council members acknowledged it wasn’t enough to address urgent housing needs but conceded they couldn’t get the six votes needed to override a potential veto by the mayor. Other...

Alex Berezow, a microbiologist from the University of Washington, is leaving Seattle after fourteen years in what he believed was the most beautiful city in the world. He has penned an eloquent column on his decision for the Seattle Times. It makes for startling reading no matter where you live in the U.S. For starters, Seattle's policies have created a larger homeless population than in the past. Berezow was so concerned about this that he made an appointment with Debora Juarez, the District 5 City Council member for whom Berezow had voted, to talk about the matter: I believe strongly...