To me all of these issues seem like the same ones San Francisco is facing, which leads me to conclude that neither lowering income taxes nor raising income taxes is likely to solve them.
I've lived in both those cities this decade; the results are in some cases similar, but the issues are in fact different. The thing that's similar: both cities are warm enough so that you can reasonably live on the streets year round. Boston's an intensely liberal city and nobody uses it as an example of how liberal cities always have homeless problems.
Similarly, Google "dallas homeless problem" sometime. Warm city, poor coordination of solutions for the homeless -- whoa, homeless populations are rising! But that once more does not fit the narrative, so nobody talks about it in threads like this.
(Houston is doing much better. Houston, unlike Seattle, has put a priority on coordinating efforts to help homeless. HUH.)
That said you're right -- it's not just about taxes. Seattle is low on revenue, but that's only part of why the city has failed to produce a coordinated response to homelessness. Bad organizational skills are not restricted to the right or the left, though.
a) Probably wise not to conflate homelessness with the opioid crisis. I would be a fool to argue that the latter correlates in any way with winter temperatures.
b) Different scale, man. Seattle's issues are way bigger than Methadone Mile. (I've lived in Boston too.)
Similarly, Google "dallas homeless problem" sometime. Warm city, poor coordination of solutions for the homeless -- whoa, homeless populations are rising! But that once more does not fit the narrative, so nobody talks about it in threads like this.
(Houston is doing much better. Houston, unlike Seattle, has put a priority on coordinating efforts to help homeless. HUH.)
That said you're right -- it's not just about taxes. Seattle is low on revenue, but that's only part of why the city has failed to produce a coordinated response to homelessness. Bad organizational skills are not restricted to the right or the left, though.