You said it yourself. Why should the Eastside get to avoid having homeless and subsided housing in their backyard? Certainly the employers of Eastside residents have contributed to the rise in Seattle home prices.
That doesn’t seem like a valid reason to me. Nothing is in a vacuum - so what?
Eastside cities’ residents want a certain degree of density, safety, cleanliness, etc. They also want to avoid losing the ability to have fast point-to-point on-demand transportation (i.e. driving private cars on roads that aren’t overcrowded), which enables them to live better lives by being able to quickly zip between work/schools/activities at a moment’s notice without dealing with the waiting times and schedules of mass transit.
That’s the lifestyle they have now and the lifestyle they want to sustain. I don’t think that should be demonized - people have different wants and needs, especially if they are raising children.
They also aren’t obligated to make their locale affordable to those who want to move there. After all, we are talking about one of the most desirable places to live, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that it is expensive as a result. Why should that necessitate a slide towards heavy urbanization? I realize some people prefer that denser life and might benefit from it (particularly if they are new transplants) but it’s not for everyone and I don’t think a community is obligated to make accommodations just because others now want to live in a particular location at a price point that makes sense for them. America has many places to live, and jobs are more available than they have ever been historically.
Lastly, cities surrounding Seattle also aren’t obligated to absorb the large homeless population Seattle has, which let’s face it, is enabled by lax enforcement of laws. A lot has been written (and is plainly observable) about the permanently homeless in Seattle who refuse all services and drug dealers operating out of roving RVs. For example take the recently swept Northgate homeless camp - an article I read stated that just one of that massive cluster of campers accepted services from the Seattle navigation team. And recently a lady was pricked by a needle at Northgate mall, not far from this camp. Is it really surprising that people in the Eastside don’t want to welcome the same squalor into their neighborhoods?
Your comment does one thing that has always bothered me during these kinds of discussions: you seem to assume that there is nothing at all between "bucolic suburb with frolicking children and wide, empty roads" and "dystopian hellscape of methheads in RVs terrorizing everyone in a Mad Max wonderland."
I'll also get this out of the way: yes, lots of us in Seattle are well and truly tired of the unsanctioned camps at places like Northgate and the RVs parked everywhere. What we're NOT willing to do, at least not yet, is to slam those people with more arrests and more trips through the criminal enforcement system prior to having services in place that will cover a high percentage of needs. (No, our existing shelter system, whether within Seattle or without in the suburbs, does not meet this requirement.) That's mostly humanity but also because the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit says that it is unconstitutional to run someone off from a place to sleep if there are no alternatives and "you must be stone-cold sober in order to enter this shelter" doesn't work for people who are addicted. (That's one reason why the region needs places like needle exchanges and substance abuse centers. Why shouldn't we concentrate them all in Pioneer Square? Well, for one, because the "junkie homeless" are already in places like Bellevue, sleeping out of their cars and scrounging for food, but they camouflage it better.)
Now, as to my original rebuttal. There's a huge need for missing-middle housing in this region. You know, for the people that serve your coffee, deliver your groceries, educate your kids, clean your parks, and paint the lines on those untrammeled roads. The people making well under six figures who shouldn't have to drive for two hours or live beyond the reach of public transit just to get to a job where someone making five times their salary can look down on them for not living in a "good place." That's the kind of housing Microsoft proposes to kick into gear here.
We need all kinds of these services because it's humane and it's fiscally and economically prudent to not sprawl all the way from Bremerton to the Tri-Cities.
> What we're NOT willing to do, at least not yet, is to slam those people with more arrests and more trips through the criminal enforcement system prior to having services in place that will cover a high percentage of needs.
Frankly, you just sound uninformed here.
Look at the Northgate encampment — 100% were offered services, 90% rejected them to remain dangerous vagrants spreading disease.
Until you accept that a component here is willful vagrancy and criminality, the problem will get worse.
No amount of money can fix your denial of the problem, and your position isn’t one of compassion — it’s an abdication of any responsibility: in blindly throwing money while abandoning the rule of law, you’re not helping the vagrants, you’re not helping the non-vagrant homeless the vagrants prey on, and you’re not helping the regular citizens that are getting assaulted or stuck with needles (such as that lady at a Northgate).
You’re the problem.
I want you to answer me honestly: when I was homeless, did I deserve to be assaulted by other homeless people while the police refused to do anything because you personally feel bad a vagrant might get arrested?
You left out the part where y'all scream and cry nonstop about the 520 tolls, toss massive amounts of cash at fighting the potential I-90 tolls, hold up and stall mass transit (mostly via the massive stacks of cash mentioned previously) that could _potentially_ travel over these routes and bring "bad" people to your utopias, oh – and also want to host an NBA team.
You don't get both. The eastside wants all of the perks of being a large(r) city, with none of the less desirable components. Meanwhile, you travel over the bridges you attempt to regulate so heavily, into our city, to collect your paychecks and claim the name 'Seattle' (because nobody knows the name of your city) and then spend your evenings writing nonsense like this.
If the suburbs don't build their fair share of housing, then workers who work in the suburbs gravitate to the cities, gentrifying them and driving out longtime residents.
Legal or not (and it is becoming less legal in places like California), it's a shitty thing to do.
