[ahelwer]

* World-class rock climbing, mountaineering, and hiking less than an hour's drive from downtown

* I moved here from Canada, the weather really isn't that bad; it's been a beautiful spring here while all my Canadian friends are still dealing with snow

* Seattle has a huge number of sakura and so the city has beautiful pink cherry blossom clouds everywhere for the entire month of April

* The entire environment is so incredibly lush & green; it's called the Emerald City for a reason!

* The food is quite good, actually

It's funny that the thing you think Seattle has going for it - low taxes - directly contributes to the issue of homelessness and half of your complaints.

[zachthewf]

The uniquely differentiating thing in Seattle is the geography (as you say). If you don't care about having nearby skiing and mountaineering (and more but you get the idea), you can do better elsewhere.

[WalterBright]

> low taxes - directly contributes to the issue of homelessness and half of your complaints.

I've lived here for 40 years. It's always had low taxes, but the problems you're talking about are very recent.

[ahelwer]

Yes, the rise in rent has been quite dramatic recently - and our social services have been utterly ill-prepared to handle the fallout, because of low taxes.

[malandrew]

So you're saying that we should raise taxes to spend on the homeless problem? That hasn't worked for San Francisco, which spends a crazy amount per person and the only thing they have to show for it is more homelessness. Perhaps your heuristic is wrong. Perhaps, when you pay for something, you tend to get more of it, not less.

I can't think of a single place that spends money on homelessness that doesn't get more of it.

Furthermore, if a city is expensive and getting more expensive like SF and Seattle, it means that city is becoming harder for people without decent earning power to stick around. It's like a video game being changed from easy mode to hard mode. Seattle and SF are hard mode, which means most people at the bottom will fail to ever succeed there. By spending the money in Seattle and San Francisco, you're throwing good money after bad money because you're helping many people stay in a place in which they likely won't ever succeed. The money would be better spent in locales around the country where it's easy mode for someone to get back on their feet.

Trying to solve homelessness in Seattle and San Francisco is one of the most egregious wastes of money I've ever seen. It's practically a homelessness industrial complex in San Francisco already and starting to become one in Seattle. Everyone advocating most ardently for it are people whose salary is paid from these tax dollars. It's the Shirky Principle in action.

https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/

[ahelwer]

The only viable long-term solution to homelessness is building socialized housing with integrated mental health services. The patchwork of shelters and social programs will never work. Building socialized housing requires a lot of money, and this is what the Tax Amazon movement is trying to accomplish: https://www.taxamazon.net/sign

I ardently advocate for this and my salary isn't paid by it, because I want to live in a strong society where shelter is provided for everyone who needs it. Your vision of society is, what, to ship people off somewhere else? Out of sight out of mind, right?

[malandrew]

> The only viable long-term solution to homelessness is building socialized housing with integrated mental health services.

Back up that assertion with evidence. Also include evidence showing that places like Seattle and San Francisco are the best places to implement such solutions.

> and this is what the Tax Amazon movement is trying to accomplish: https://www.taxamazon.net/sign

Why should Amazon pay for this? If you think this is so important and the right solution, how much money have you donated towards this? If you're expecting Amazon to pay for this then you've got no skin in the game and risk nothing by being wrong.

> I ardently advocate for this and my salary isn't paid by it

And as an ardent advocate, how much have you spent on this?

> Your vision of society is, what, to ship people off somewhere else? Out of sight out of mind, right?

I have no vision. I'm a utilitarian and care purely about successful outcomes, optics be damned. I'm just not so naive as to think that the best place to try and get people back on their feet are places where they stand the least chance of doing so because even competent, educated people that have no vices like drug addiction have to work hard to succeed in a place like Seattle and San Francisco.

Your approach just puts people in the middle of the ocean, but gives them a life jackets. They are almost certainly still going to drown under those conditions. My proposal is to find a kiddy pool or at least someplace shallow with calm waters and give them a life jacket.

You have to have more heart than brains to think some of the most expensive, competitive markets like Seattle and San Francisco are good places to try and get people back on their feet again. And if you genuinely think that such an approach is a good one, you should be the first to spend your hard-earned money to prove it.

[ahelwer]

I donated $12.5k to Plymouth Housing (housing-first org in Seattle) last year, which was matched by Microsoft to $25k. It barely matters, voluntary individual charity won't solve structural problems. Given that half your post is now an utterly wrong & irrelevant personal attack, I have license to tell you your mode of interaction here (and in other comments, from a brief perusal of your profile) comes off as incredibly smug and not nearly so clever as you clearly believe. We've all read Taleb, you don't have intellectual superpowers from knowing what skin in the game is.

The Tax Amazon movement would also levy a tax on Microsoft, because it's a tax on all big businesses which operate within Seattle, which I'm perfectly happy about, but I'm sure you're very used to being wrong about everything so this matters not.

I have no idea how you can care about "successful outcomes" without vision since success is not a value-free metric. That should suffice to make you think a bit, I'm going to cut short the gish-gallop here because interacting with you is generally unpleasant. Goodbye.

[WalterBright]

Despite low tax rates, tax revenue for the city has risen dramatically alongside the local economic boom.

[ahelwer]

Yes, but real estate prices have risen even faster - and helping people experiencing homelessness fundamentally requires real estate to house them.