Free Republic

'We're tired': 116-year-old Seattle business to close shop over encampment safety concerns by HANNAH EVERMAN and JEREMY HARRIS Friday, February 3rd 2023 SEATTLE HOMELESS CRISIS FORCES CLOSURE OF 116 YEAR-OLD BUSINESS Thea Sand: "We’ve just kind of had it with what’s happening in Seattle" SEATTLE (KOMO) — A business in Seattle's SODO neighborhood has survived everything from world wars to the Great Depression and even multiple pandemics, but says it can't continue to stay open anymore due to the homeless crisis downtown. Thea Sand, the fifth-generation owner of Emmanuel's Rug and Upholstery Cleaners SODO, said she is closing her business...

By unanimous resolution last week, the city of San Diego declared that “housing is a human right.” But no one knows exactly what that means.The city went on to reaffirm “its commitment to providing more housing services geared toward putting a roof over the head of every San Diegan.”Quick to downplay the legal implications, city attorney Dan Eaton said of the resolution, “it’s pretty clear it doesn’t have any legal effect.” So, what does the declaration mean?The city council rightly values housing as “a component of a standard of living adequate for health and well-being.” The resolution affirms that “housing...

PORTLAND, Ore. — Marcy Landolfo is at her breaking point. This week marked the 15th break-in at Rains PDX within a year and a half. Landolfo said most of those repairs at the Northeast Portland location were paid for out of pocket. Other times, she just left the windows boarded up. "It’s just too much with the losses that are not covered by insurance, the damages, everything. It’s just not sustainable," Landolfo said. KATU asked why Landolfo decided to close now, instead of keeping doors open through the holiday shopping season. ... The owner at Rains tells me after five...

Believe it or not, California thinks it has a solution to the homelessness problem that can be solved with additional taxation! Go figure.A new measure in Los Angeles, called Measure ULA, is set to generate $900 million in taxes that will then be used for housing subsidies and tenant protections. The tax is essentially a levy on all property sales of more than $5 million, according to Bloomberg.This "mansion tax", if it passes, will look to "speed new construction and deliver a way out of the city’s spiraling homelessness crisis", according to Bloomberg. It could generate some $900 million per...

Oregon is typically known as a bastion of West Coast liberalism, where Democrats are easily elected and a Republican hasn’t served as governor since the early 1980s. But with an unusually competitive three-way contest for governor, the Democratic candidate’s success is hardly a guarantee this year. As mail-in ballots become available to voters next week, Oregon is becoming the unlikely site of one of the most competitive governor’s races in the country. The main reason for the race’s unpredictability is Betsy Johnson, a longtime former Democratic lawmaker with a fondness for salty language who is aiming to become the first...

Violent crime continues to rise across the United States, and Democratic politicians are struggling to defend their anti-law enforcement policies that have in some cases resulted in preventable deaths. This alarming crime wave has coincided with a marked increase in the number of Democratic donors, operatives, and elected officials (and other left-wing maniacs) arrested and charged with violent crimes. Here are a few of the most notable Democratic Party officials and associates to be charged, prosecuted, or sentenced for violent crimes in 2022: Sean Caddle, a longtime Democratic consultant in New Jersey, pleaded guilty in January to hiring two people...

San Diego saw a record-high of 1,609 homeless people in the downtown area alone earlier this month, and Bill Walton has had enough. The NBA legend has sent a number of emails to Mayor Todd Gloria about the crisis and how he has failed. Now, Walton is making his complaints public. According to The Voice of San Diego, Walton emailed Mayor Gloria as early as Aug. 28 about his failures while explaining that he had recently been assaulted by the homeless while riding his bike.

The number of encounters with illegal immigrants at the border has passed 2 million in a single fiscal year for the first time in U.S. history, according to new U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics released on Monday. Southwest land border encounters jumped to 203,598 in the month of August from 200,195 the prior month. Of those encountered in August, 22% "had at least one prior encounter in the previous 12 months." The total number of encounters so far in the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30, is now 2,150,639, according to CBP. For comparison, last fiscal...

“Homelessness in New York City has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s,” the Coalition for the Homeless reports.After decades of failure, New York City homelessness keeps getting worse. The only people who appear to be benefiting are the ones who make a pretty penny “serving” the homeless. The homeless–an ever expanding group in our major cities–are still sleeping rough and dying of overdoses.New York City’s homeless population has surged in recent years to 80,000 people, according to The Bowery Mission, a 150-year-old agency serving the hungry and homeless, citing federal data.This despite the fact that...

Pennsylvania Lt. Governor John Fetterman isn’t really running for U.S. Senate. He’s on the ballot. He’s doing some campaign stops. He’s dodging a debate against Dr. Mehmet Oz. But he’s just a placeholder. The real candidate that nobody outside of the powerbrokers in the Democrat Party know about is his radical leftist wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman. The official candidate has been making the news lately with his odd behavior. Just before the primary election, he suffered a stroke and was away from the public eye for over a month. But now that he’s back on the campaign trail, a whole...

Business owners in San Francisco's Castro district have absolutely had it with the city's inaction over burglaries, vandalism, and violent homeless people camping on the sidewalks in front of storefronts and residences.As the American Thinker's Olivia Murray notes:San Francisco has an established reputation as a capital for fringe culture and leftism, much of which converges in the enclave of Castro. The first "Drag Queen Story Hour" event ever took place in the Harvey Milk Memorial Branch Library in the neighborhood and was "well received."Now, under Democrat leadership, the iconically left community is ready to take drastic measures toward radical American...

If brighter days are ahead for the U.S. economy, why are so many tent cities popping up all over the nation? At this point things are so bad that even the New York Times is admitting that “America’s homelessness problem has the makings of an acute crisis”. That article goes on to explain that our homeless population is steadily rising. Tonight, hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans will be sleeping in tents, under bridges, in overcrowded shelters or in their vehicles. Of course there are many that are so addicted to drugs or alcohol that they just sleep wherever...

KGW8 aired a report yesterday about families in North Portland who have had enough of the city’s homeless camps and rising crime. Some of them are seriously thinking about leaving but some have already sold their homes and are moving further out into the suburbs, away from the problems associated with the city.“It makes you not feel that great about living here,” said Greg Dilkes, who has lived in North Portland for 30 years. “It makes living in the neighborhood harder, not as congenial as it could be.”Dilkes said the homeless camps along the Peninsula Crossing Trail near his home...

Newly-appointed Director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) Jeff Olivet visited Houston on April 28 to tout the Bayou City’s “success” in reducing homelessness by 62 percent. On the eve of his trip, he emailed homeless advocates about the city’s efforts, “Houston’s great. We’re not sure if it’s replicable.” The question should be, is it sustainable? Since the Obama administration, the federal government’s approach to reduce homelessness has been based on a simple concept: The homeless are homeless because they don’t have homes. Give them a home and — regardless of underlying addiction or mental illness —...

One of the most detrimental aspects of an inflationary or stagflationary crisis is that, in most cases, housing costs tend to rise while home sales fall. It might seem counterintuitive; one would assume that as sales fall so should prices, but this is the upside-down world of inflation. Certain commodities and products, usually necessities, almost always skyrocket in price, ultimately driving most American families out of the market completely. One of the only exceptions to this rule is when the government institutes rent or price controls. In Weimar Germany, for example, the government enforced strict regulatory controls on landlords, fixing...

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that part of the problem with drugs and homelessness in various major cities is a policy approach that “Nothing is better than anything else” and that “everything is positive. Everything is not positive. You should be ashamed that you’re using, that might get you to stop.” Maher stated, “[P]art of the problem with losing civilization is when you fail to make judgments about how some things are better than others. We have seen this over and over again. Nothing is better than anything else, keeping women in burqas is...

When President Joe Biden recently announced his “House America ” program to address homelessness, California Gov. Gavin Newsom was delighted. After all, it represented a continuation of California’s "housing first" approach to homelessness.... .....In October 2020, HUD and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness released a federally commissioned report — the first ever report on the efficacy of "housing first" policy. In June, the Biden administration quietly removed this report from the government websites housing it..... Why would Biden and House Democrats want to hide this report? That's easy: because it revealed that "housing first" is a failure....

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti recently signed into law an ordinance that criminalizes homelessness in most parts of the city, a motion that has drawn just as much fierce support by some as it has opposition by others. The law specifies certain times and locations where it will be 'unlawful for a person to sit, lie, or sleep, or to store, use, maintain, or place personal property in the public right-of-way'. The ordinance, which will go into effect 30 days from last Thursday, makes it illegal to sit, lie, sleep, or set up encampments within 500 feet from 'sensitive use'...

There are ten new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently. 1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much. Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe that permanent zero-interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or that the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced...

Seattle residents said they were ‘sad’ and ‘depressed’ over encampments that have sprung up across city parks and fields in the past year as the numbers of homeless people soared. The homeless population in Washington State rose in 2020 by more than six per cent - or about three times the national average, according to the latest data. That increase is being felt in the Puget Sound region. Parents say they have had to resort to conducting ‘sweeps’ of public parks to make sure there are no needles on the ground before allowing their kids to play on swing sets,...