homelessness

Mother’s Day Weekend Madness The warm weather is bringing out even more open air drug use and dealers in downtown #Seattle and the #Chinatown-ID area. I’m seeing clusters of people passed out on the streets as locals remain desensitized and tourists literally just walk past the problem. The black market of stolen goods is hopping. People are jumping on and off the King County Metro (@KingCountyMetro) buses with tons of stolen merchandise. It comes and goes in waves. Without fail, evenings are the worst. Might as well call in the National Guard (@WANationalGuard) for a weekend stint. Can’t hurt right? It’s now been about a month since Mayor Bruce Harrell (@MayorofSeattle) announced his Downtown Activation Plan and signed the Executive Read More ›

Send in Reinforcements With the sun shining and temps rising, I wanted to see what it looked like in #Chinatown-ID Thursday afternoon during the lunch rush. Without fail, I saw a crush of fentanyl addicts passed out on the street with foil littering the ground. One dude even spit on me and tried to punch me in the head. Remind me never to go out to a #Seattle drug den with flip flops. Thankfully, King County Sheriff’s Deputies were there and gave me some disinfectant to clean my sleeve and bailed me out. Otherwise, listen to the dire situation right now in the King County Jail. Deputies say they are NOT arresting anyone for misdemeanors out here! In other words, Read More ›

Chris Wilson resides in Bellevue’s Robinswood Dog Park. Depending on who you ask, he’s either a well-known homeless man trying to get by, or an unhinged menace plagued by drug addiction and mental illness. Wilson is known for his erratic behavior at the park. “For the most part, I avoid him,” says Katherine McCarter who claims she was assaulted by Wilson last month after petting his dog. McCarter says she “never dreamed that this level of viciousness would come out,” and captured the entire encounter on a body camera. Bellevue Police officers responded to her call, and separated McCarter and Wilson when they arrived. Body cam footage from McCarter shows her telling officers that Wilson was in her face and Read More ›

My monthly OlaskyBooks newsletter comes out tomorrow, but I didn’t have room in it to write about books on homelessness, and it’s not a topic everyone cares about anyway. So here are mini-reviews of five books: two useful, two mildly interesting, one eminently skippable. Let’s go from best to worst. Cathy Small’s Man in the Dog Park: Coming Up Close to Homelessness (Cornell U. Press, 2020) has truth in titling, because it is a street-level view. Her description of homelessness onset doesn’t take into account the severe mental illness of some, but it’s a useful generalization: “a series of falls from successive slopes, set up by larger conditions, abetted by some personal decision or circumstance; each slip in a lower Read More ›

Exclusive The Yang Gang is in #Seattle this weekend! Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) energized a room full of movers and shakers in the city’s business, media, and political scene. Very impressive crowd. The first Asian American Democrat to ever run for the Oval Office continues to captivate folks from all across the spectrum and on both sides of the aisle. Saturday evening, I was in the same room with people labeled far-left or far-right, searching for common sense solutions. That’s how bad things have gotten in this city. LOL. Of course I had to ask Yang about the drug addiction and homeless crisis happening front and center. BTW, he’s now all in on the Forward Party (@Fwd_Party.) #Math#FWD#ForwardParty#Forward

I left San Francisco just in time — at the end of 2016. Sure, I saw the occasional junkie shooting up in public when I still worked in the city. And yes, I saw men use the sidewalk at the intersection of 5th and Market Streets as a toilet. But I never saw swarms of shoplifters emptying pharmacy shelves. If I needed new shoes, I could pop over to Nordstrom at the Westfield San Francisco Centre at 5th and Market. The number of friends who had stopped going into the city entirely — and switched to shopping in suburban malls — was unsettling, but tourists could help fill the gap. This week, sadly, Nordstrom announced it won’t renew its lease Read More ›

You can see, and smell, the gasoline staining the black top at Wallingford, Seattle’s United States Postal Service (USPS) station. But these aren’t your usual spills. John Pierce is a supervisor at the Wallingford station and says for the past few years, several homeless men have been siphoning gas from his delivery trucks in the parking lot. The men even go underneath the vehicles to cut fuel lines. “Every day’s a challenge,” says Pierce who tells me that the men “collect [gas] with a bucket” and siphon it out of their trucks with hoses. One of the postal service’s most prolific offenders comes by in broad daylight to steal fuel. The man has removed the license plates from his blue Ford Read More ›

By Marvin Olasky and Covenant College students Emma Fallmezger, Jacob Sonke, Elysse Carrillo, Anna McDonald, Charity Chaney, and Lydia Dorman. Los Angeles has been the poster child of homelessness. The first official act of new mayor Karen Bass was to place the city in a “state of emergency.” The Los Angeles Business Council scrutinized LA public opinion on homelessness and found almost unanimous agreement that the problem is serious, with 73 percent saying “very serious.” Most saw a lack of inexpensive housing as the prime reason for homelessness. National attitudes are different. Yes, a recent Rasmussen poll showed 92 percent of American adults saying homelessness is a serious national problem in America — and 65 percent said “very serious.” That Read More ›

Encampment Shooter on the Loose Monday morning, I got tipped off about a shooting in #Chinatown-ID. But once I got there, law enforcement officers were swarming a homeless encampment off Dearborn St. under I-5 on Washington State Department of Transportation (@WSDOT) property. It’s finally being cleared later this week. One person was shot in the ankle. The circumstances remain unclear. Shooter is still on the run. I returned later in the evening and bumped into some fentanyl addicts who were clueless about what happened. More crime and drug related problems in Councilmember Tammy Morales’ (@CMTammyMorales) district. Lets see how she votes on the proposed bill to make open air drug use a misdemeanor. #Seattle @GovInslee @MayorofSeattle @kcexec @SeattleCouncil @KCCouncil @KingCoRHA Read More ›

(The Center Square) – The 2023 point-in-time count numbers show a significant increase for individuals and families without a permanent abode in Spokane, though a large encampment had been drawing down at the time. According to the 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress released earlier this year, “homelessness in Washington state increased 10% overall from 2020 to 2022,” and the Spokane Regional numbers over that same time period are a significant increase on that percentage. The 2023 data, presented during Thursday’s Spokane City Council Study Session, shows 2,390 people from 2,136 households were counted as homeless this year. This is a significant increase compared to the 2022 numbers showing 1,757 people from 1,513 households, a rise of 36% and 41% for Read More ›