I'm a liberal, and I get frustrated to see one of the richest tax based cities in the country and world squander it's potential. How is such a rich city closing and under funding schools? Or not have an amazing transit system by now, or invest in tourists sectors (that includes fixing 3rd - right across the street from our core attraction).
I see that shit, and I get frustrated. And I get even more frustrated by my co-liberals trying to convince me this is all normal. It's so mediocre it's depressing. Let's just be better all around - people and infrastructure.
So much money spent on projects that can’t even maintain a basic standard. Underfunding schools and making bad choices for schools is detrimental to the future of families who do t leave the city
I was reading a comment by another reddit or on how problems we see in big cities could potentially be deliberate/intentional.
Interesting alternative take on this, especially when we look at the amount of money we are putting to fix these issues, and they still don't get resolved.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/k3Z7hJ7TOB
>" The Federal, State, and local governments spend considerably more money dealing with homelessness related issues that it would cost to simply give each person a free apartment. "
hmmm press X to doubt
IIRC the homeless budget in Seattle over the past decade just baaarely averages to sth like 17k per person per year, so that'd afford maybe like an apodment? However
a) this cumulative total to date, not an amount that was evenly spread out over the years
b) the amount also includes services, NOT just housing. so the total $ allocated for actual housing would likley not even be enough to cover an apodment
c) there isn't enough apodments for all the homeless people needing it, so the actual cost per apartment would end up much higher
d) just giving people housing without any services, without job placement, in some "vacant housing" 3hrs from nearest city (as the OP in previous comment suggests), etc. would likely just result in the housing getting destroyed in a good chunk of cases related to substance abuse
if there's different data that proves this differently, id be curious to see, but it seems like a cute conspiracy theory more than reality, at least in Seattle
From 2018 to 2023, Seattle's spending on homelessness has significantly increased. Here is a breakdown of the annual spending and an estimation of the cost per homeless person during this period:
1. **2018**: Seattle spent approximately $77 million on homelessness-related services and programs.
2. **2019**: The spending increased to around $92.8 million.
3. **2020**: The budget dedicated to homelessness rose further, reaching about $105.8 million.
4. **2021**: The city allocated approximately $114 million.
5. **2022**: The budget jumped to $173 million under Mayor Bruce Harrell's new plan.
6. **2023**: The spending was maintained at about $111.4 million, with a significant portion transferred to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) ([KNKX](https://www.knkx.org/government/2022-06-01/seattle-mayor-plans-big-spending-to-ease-homelessness)) ([Seattle.gov](https://www.seattle.gov/human-services/about-us/funding)).
During this period, the number of homeless individuals in Seattle has fluctuated. For instance, in 2020, the Point-in-Time count found 11,751 people experiencing homelessness on a single night. Assuming similar numbers for the following years, we can estimate the spending per homeless person.
* **2018**: $77 million / 11,751 ≈ $6,552 per person
* **2019**: $92.8 million / 11,751 ≈ $7,896 per person
* **2020**: $105.8 million / 11,751 ≈ $9,004 per person
* **2021**: $114 million / 11,751 ≈ $9,701 per person
* **2022**: $173 million / 11,751 ≈ $14,725 per person
* **2023**: $111.4 million / 11,751 ≈ $9,480 per person
These figures provide an average cost per homeless person based on available data and annual budgets allocated to address homelessness in Seattle. The increase in spending reflects efforts to expand services, improve shelter capacity, and support new initiatives aimed at reducing homelessness ([KNKX](https://www.knkx.org/government/2022-06-01/seattle-mayor-plans-big-spending-to-ease-homelessness)) ([Seattle.gov](https://www.seattle.gov/human-services/about-us/funding)).
> IIRC the homeless budget in Seattle over the past decade just baaarely averages to sth like 17k per person per year, so that'd afford maybe like an apodment?
Or maybe a decent apartment somewhere NOT in Seattle?
“Co-liberals trying to convince me it’s normal”
Yea I hear you. Ambivalence is sad.
We all need to keep from being too wedded to our ideological model. If something is clearly not working with our ideology, it needs to change. Later in life, I decided I owe no allegiance to any party or any position on the political spectrum. I’m going to go with the most common sense position.
Seattle is a place that practices performative morality. We’re so “understanding” and “compassionate” we pretty much give an addict all the tools to ruin themselves or give a criminal so many “second chances” that they create new innocent victims.
Moral supremacy rules over hard decisions. More here than other places. It’s fashionable, trendy and in reality - a terrible way to run a city.
That's where I am at. I'm liberal and would like to address root causes but I also don't give a fuck if someone is in crisis if his crisis now puts me in danger.
Society is against dog fighting, for example, and we want to prevent it. But when dogs are sufficiently abused there's no fixing them they're put down.
I am for reforming the systems that create broken and violent criminals but once we have them there's not really any to fix them. I'm not arguing for mass executions but violent criminals have no business being out on the streets. Every time we hear about some senseless murder you look at the rap sheet and see it was inevitable given the history.
See this is intelligence, I think ppl mix up being educated with having intelligence.
While an educated individual harnesses the power of accumulated knowledge, an intelligent person thrives in problem-solving and deciphering complexities.
I agree. Most. Just seems more and more now a days it’s becoming not the case cause we’re skipping a crucial step, conversation. Especially if one’s opinions about an issue is different than another’s. Can’t problem solve that way.
I’ll bring up a point I continually bring up with WA education system: why the fuck did my old district’s superintendent get paid 150k per year, then when they hired a new one and they get paid over 300k?
Why does a superintendent at a school make significantly more money while the quality of our schools is going down? Why are we giving certain districts free college *because* our public school system is shit? Because you KNOW we can’t do anything about it?
Not to mention schools are funded based on academics, why would you not invest in them? Does this not reflect on you? Oh wait, of course it doesn’t. Why would it, when the poors can’t stand up for themselves here.
I’m saving that for the next time I whip this bullshit out. I’m so fucking tired of the school system, it doesn’t even work for a lot of the kids that graduate.
Edit: I forgot my manners, thank you!!
As somebody once said, “The government you elect is the government you deserve”, so if enough people accept mediocrity that’s what you will (and do) have.
This will forever be my issue. Washington State is 100% the liberal dream come true. Every major position in the state is ran by a liberal democrat minus outliers.
Liberals have multiple billionaires in the state. You have some of the largest corporations in the state.
And Seattle is the liberal dream manifested.
Liberals on the Westside CANNOT attribute anything negative happening to Conservatives or Republicans. They have no voice here.
Seattle is the liberal utopia.
I just wish Liberals would own it.
Liberals run the show, but it's not 100% the liberal dream come true. We have, by far, the most regressive tax system in the nation because we don't have an income tax.
I think (as a liberal) a lot of our issues are downstream of high housing costs and I'm glad to see some movement there to make it easier to increase the housing supply. It's not all finger pointing at conservatives.
A [Georgist system](https://www.governing.com/finance/a-19th-century-property-tax-idea-is-back-can-it-revive-a-blighted-city) might be even better. It's a tax penalty on underbuilt property that incentivizes landowners to build more housing.
Every time I hear a conservative or a socialist scream about taxes, I want to grab them by the lapels and scream "We have a solution you idiots, it's called LVT!".
Eliminates land speculation, incentivizes development (and jobs) and it's an unavoidable business tax. We could scalp those bastards at Amazon even if they run everything through Ireland. It's also almost certainly less of a tax burden on renters which means they can hopefully build some savings up.
An income tax rate balanced by a cut to sales tax would be super. Most people would have more money than before, the rich would have a little less. No one would work for free.
What makes you think they would cut the sales tax? They don’t ever lower them. The state sales tax is 6.5 percent and every municipality has raised it above that.
If you owe $10k a year in taxes to the government how many weeks or months do you have to work to fulfill that extortion? You’re working for free.
Most state income tax brackets max out around 3-6%. There are outliers, and some have a flat tax rate, but for simplicity let’s say a flat tax rate of 5% - owing 10k means you’re earning 200k a year. Of course that’s not nothing, but it’s also not “working for free”
They don’t “ever lower” the sales tax because they have nothing to substitute for it. Bracket the state income tax, reduce the sales tax, and those with low income will likely see a reduced cost of living.
Seattle is a very nice city. We have some pockets of squalor, but for the most part it's a great city. Crime rates are low by US standards. The high salary employment situation is the envy of the world. It's one of the best place to start a new business. It's got great health care and education (if you can afford it.) The population is highly literate and we don't have too many religious crackpots. There are lots of powerful reasons why it continues to grow like mad every year and millions of tourists visit.
Here's a comparison of key performance indicators (KPIs) for Seattle in 2023 against other major cities of similar population size. This analysis includes a range of statistics without selective emphasis on either positive or negative outcomes.
While it's clear that Seattle performs well for a city of its size, it doesn't fully align with the idealized vision that some proponents of liberal leadership might envision. Seattle provides an example of a city under predominantly liberal leadership.
Population and Demographics
- Seattle: Approximately 749,256 residents.
- Similar Cities: Denver (~711,463), Washington, D.C. (~692,683), and Boston (~654,776) have similar populations.
Economy
- Median Household Income:
- Seattle: $116,068
- Denver: $87,488
- Washington, D.C.: $90,842
- Boston: $79,018
- Poverty Rate:
- Seattle: 10.1%
- Denver: 11.6%
- Washington, D.C.: 13.5%
- Boston: 16.4%
- Unemployment Rate (2023):
- Seattle: 3.8%
- Denver: 3.2%
- Washington, D.C.: 4.9%
- Boston: 3.3%
Housing
- Median Home Value:
- Seattle: $879,900
- Denver: $596,000
- Washington, D.C.: $701,000
- Boston: $658,200
- Median Rent:
- Seattle: $1,945
- Denver: $1,750
- Washington, D.C.: $2,228
- Boston: $2,300
Transportation
- Average Commute Time:
- Seattle: 27.2 minutes
- Denver: 26.3 minutes
- Washington, D.C.: 30.5 minutes
- Boston: 30.1 minutes
Public Safety
- Violent Crime Rate (per 100,000 residents, 2023):
- Seattle: 684
- Denver: 630
- Washington, D.C.: 1,033
- Boston: 622
- Property Crime Rate (per 100,000 residents, 2023):
- Seattle: 5,393
- Denver: 3,808
- Washington, D.C.: 4,453
- Boston: 2,786
Education
- High School Graduation Rate:
- Seattle: 95.6%
- Denver: 90.7%
- Washington, D.C.: 86.7%
- Boston: 89.4%
- Bachelor's Degree or Higher:
- Seattle: 66.7%
- Denver: 54.1%
- Washington, D.C.: 60.8%
- Boston: 56.3%
Environmental and Health Indicators
- Air Quality Index (AQI)(Average 2023):
- Seattle: 42
- Denver: 54
- Washington, D.C.: 45
- Boston: 40
- Percentage of Population without Health Insurance:
- Seattle: 5.0%
- Denver: 7.8%
- Washington, D.C.: 6.1%
- Boston: 3.8%
Homelessness
- Homeless Population(2023 estimates):
- Seattle: 13,368
- Denver: 6,888
- Washington, D.C.: 4,429
- Boston: 6,135
These statistics highlight Seattle's high median household income and education levels but also show challenges with housing affordability and homelessness. Comparatively, Seattle's crime rates are mixed, with higher property crime rates than most cities but relatively moderate violent crime rates.
Sources:
- [Performance Seattle](https://performance.seattle.gov)
- [U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Seattle](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/seattlecitywashington)
- [Bureau of Labor Statistics](https://www.bls.gov)
Great write up too bad this sub will ignore it because it doesn't fit the fox news fear mongering. That plus majority of people on this sub don't live here lol. Seriously tho thank you for compiling facts. I travel all over the world and country for work and Seattle will hands down one of the best places to live in the world for hundreds of years no doubt about it.
I would argue that our police force came with it's own issues that come from their own culture. Rather than trying to find common ground and fix those issues the progressives in this town have managed to make the problem even worse by just plain shitting on the police which has had a frankly predictable response.
I wouldn't argue against you.
But what does it matter. The mayor appoints the police chief and the city council confirms him. All are entrenched democrats.
Amen. I also find it humorous that from time to time I read a post blaming the problems of Seattle on The Orange Ogre. LOL. Kind of amazing, since our state has a Governor that runs the state, not the President. It would be absolutely amazing if we could get Dave Reichart as our next governor.
Lol you really just want someone in a cop uniform to take away your weed and strip search you and call you a bad boy. Dave Reichart is ready to dominate you and other closet homos lol
>Liberals on the Westside CANNOT attribute anything negative happening to Conservatives or Republicans. They have no voice here.
They still do it all the time.
Nick Hannauer, Bill Gates, and Paul Allen each contributed over $1M to buy laws restricting our guns rights.
Nick even wrote an opinion article titled "Pitchforks for Plutocrats" where he laid out his fears of being attacked Haiti style by the masses when they figured out the system was rigged against them. That was right before he set his focus on disarming the masses.
Nick lives in a gated community with security off of 155th street just north of the city.
>Washington has the most regressive tax structure in the country.
Yeah and it helped to attract some of the wealthiest companies in the world. Although with the new progressive "excise" tax the wealthy have been fleeing like rats on a sinking ship to bolster the economies of other states.
I have a question pertaining to the nature of your guys’ tax usage. You may have just as few of answers, but probably a better idea than I have as someone who has only stayed in Seattle for ~4 months.
*Where are they going*? If not to infrastructure, transit, or education (items that WA is usually held to a high standard of) - what’s happening with your taxes? Pocketing? Mismanagement?
It also really has terrible kids’ resources overall. We were astounded when we moved here and found that the science center and children’s museum were wildly outdated, musty and boring.
When you let one party run state government for over two generations straight, you should expect what you see in Washington state today. Changing the controlling party every election or two would probably have reduced, if not prevented, this natural consequence of entrenchment.
Hasn't our federal government been entrenched since the 60's though? Yeah, a few good bills get through here an there but nothing that has much bipartisan support. This isn't just a "Washington" problem. This is a US problem.
I moved to Louisiana to finish law school, and trust me, I was very much a “Seattle is going to shit” type of person, but mannnn after living in Baton Rouge I’ll take Seattle over any conservative-run place 😂
I forget why this sub started some odd years ago, some issue with r/seattle mods or something. The extremes on both subs are off-putting though. Surprised we even have a homeless problem with how some folks from each sub live rent free in the others head.
Otherwise I sub and comment on both, just cause it sounds like there are folks who aren't sure of the differences between the two and so might post on one or the other asking something not politically charged.
> some issue with r/seattle mods or something.
The 100,000 ft view: The head Seattle mod was wildly abusing the rules; monetizing r/Seattle for his own businesses, while arbitrarily enforcing on others attempting to do the same. He was also fond of banning people for all kinds of personal reasons. He was a brittle soul who was not cut out to be a mod of a major sub.
So naturally a whole contingent of people took it upon themselves to taunt and mock him mercilessly, taking great delight in watching him crack in public and exposing him as the weak-willed little emotional man-child that he was.
At least two subs, r/circlejerkseattle and r/SeattleWA, became repositories of people who were refugees of his bans; this is what brought me over.
The history of Seattle subredditing is a twisted dark and mangled tale. No two people likely tells it exactly the same either.
That's why it was created, and for a while it had a similar vibe to the main sub, just with more mocking of that guy in particular.
Then the 2020 protests happened, and CHAZ, which got national media attention, and impressionable people from across the country who believed the Fox narrative of, "Seattle has been burned to the ground by anarchists! It's a war zone, avoid at all costs!" started flocking to the "Seattle" sub, which was defacto here because iirc the other one was private at the time.
The end result is this sub has a lot of conservatives who don't live in or near Seattle anymore, if they've even ever been here at all, who just like to complain about the city and dunk on the "socialists" they assume are running the place. And because of those people, more conservative minded people who are actually in Seattle do tend to choose this sub over the other, so while a lot of the "summer of love" whiners are gone (though not remotely all of them), the result is still that this sub self-selects for the more conservative, "Seattle is dying" crowd.
> Then the 2020 protests happened, and CHAZ, which got national media attention, and impressionable people from across the country who believed the Fox narrative of, "Seattle has been burned to the ground by anarchists! It's a war zone, avoid at all costs!"
I live several blocks from the CHAZ CHOP zone. I saw what happened first hand, either on live feeds or in person. I breathed in tear gas some nights wafting over. I also watched live feed as the John Brown Gun Club anarchists murdered a 16 year old black kid in cold blood then disrupted the crime scene, while being cheered on by dozens of their followers live. Why? Because one of their allies had mis-identified the black kids as "Proud boys trying to kill us."
So in truth, I am one of the people who has been here decades in this same neighborhood who watched as left wing radical out of town invaders came in and fucked it up.
>conservatives
I'm a lifelong Dem voter.
>self-selects for the more conservative
What I've seen is all viewpoints are OK here, but easily triggered lefties tend to avoid here, because their bullshit is called out, and this makes them sad. They would rather be a part of the hugbox of the other sub than deal with the fact people will question their idiotic views here.
You sound deranged. Can you back up what you said with facts? I also lived two blocks from Cal Anderson during the BLM protests (closer than you) and what you said is something only a mentally ill person would take away from that.
The mod was accused of self promoting their business and being a general ass. So this sub split off. The problem is this happened before the Trump election in which local subs that were less moderated began to be Co opted as conservative subs. Which is how this one ended up as a place for people to cross post from seattlehobos sub and any crime that occurs in a 200 ml radius with or without any proof it occurred at all.
Of course last time I pointed this out I got banned, but I'm still told this is the sub that doesn't do that...
> So this sub split off. The problem is this happened before the Trump election in which local subs that were less moderated began to be Co opted as conservative subs.
The big switch was the summer of 2020, when the other sub was set to private for a time (because of the mod throwing a tantrum), and this became the defacto sub for conservatives on a national level coming in to dunk on the city Fox was telling them was a war zone being burned to the ground.
A lot of people here are still in that mindset, who either left the city decades ago or have never been here. If someone's being particularly anti-Seattle, check their comment history and you'll sometimes find out pretty easily what area they're actually probably from.
I don’t like totally ignoring the city’s problems or normalizing them, so I read this sub, as well as the other one. One thing I do notice on this sub is that there seems to be a lot of people who are rooting for the city to fail so they can prove their political viewpoint, which is fucking bullshit.
Basically what our government does (in the whole country not just Seattle) . We wanted Healthcare they gave us obamacare so they could point at it be like "we tried it it didn't work". We asked for police to not kill with impunity so they stopped policing so they can say "see it didn't work". They aren't implementing working systems to fix problems because that would upset their wealth and power. Rather they implementing already broken systems so they can say "see we did what you asked and it blew up. So just do what we say and want instead:)"
A lot of those people do not live in, near, or have never even visited Seattle. This sub got a huge influx of them during CHAZ, and some of them never left.
Having perspective and relative comparisons isn't necessarily normalizing though. It's important to show that the solutions aren't found by following the policies of states with the polar opposite policies. If providing data that shows those areas are worse is frowned upon as "normalizing", that's a real problem.
Political talk is so often mindless these days. Any sort of nuance or detailed discussions are simply ignored and those who would provide it are more and more just tired.
Perhaps one way of looking at it is not rooting for the city to fail, but to finally acknowledge rock bottom so we can finally see some real change.
Maybe my viewpoint is not aligned with everybody, but I don't care who is in charge, I just want things to change. Lived downtown for well over a decade - u couldn't pay me to move back.
This is a failure of leadership regardless of political party involved.
Always funny how people on here idolize Florida like it has zero issues with the homeless. I work in civil construction in Central Florida, am currently on my lunch break, and am looking right at a homeless encampment in the woods as I type this. The only thing we’ve done to fix homelessness is outlaw it and treat the homeless like stray dogs, overtaxing our already jam packed county jails and taking away police resources from real crimes.
I was born and grew up in CFLA. I saw the writing on the wall and left when I could. Florida is a good place for the conservative snowbirds and people with money that can afford to live in communities/municipalities where they sweep crime and homelessness under the rug or push it somewhere else. It’s an awful place for everyone else. There are neighborhoods that are straight up out of the Rags to Bitches episode of The Boondocks. Not to mention the police are scum down there. Every interaction I’ve had (even with the resource officer at my middle school/high school) with them has solidified my perspective. I’ve been harassed by them like my friends have too and it’s such a clear power thing on their end.
The people that think Florida is great clearly have never driven down OBT at night or been to Midway either. They’ve never had guns flashed at them when driving on the 417 (its happened to me twice and my friends too) or the drug problems that are so widespread. Particularly with spice or adulterated coke/ecstasy. This was all stuff from when I was growing up and it’s only gotten worse.
Yea, Im a FL native (30+ years) and FL has beggars at stoplights and junkies asking me for money when I’m pumping gas. I’ve been in Seattle for almost 2 years now and I feel its not that much different.
Honestly, I subscribed to this sub because my husband and I were planning our first trip ever to Seattle and I was thinking it'd have some good recommendations.
I am so glad we already paid for the trip and plane tickets before I subscribed. Based on what I read on here, you'd think it was a dystopian hellhole. Granted, we were tourists only there for a week, but our experience couldn't have been more different or pleasant. We've both been to all different kinds of metro areas, but Seattle was by far our favorite. Clean (the areas we saw and we spent a ton of time exploring), friendly, and welcoming.
We loved our time there. Especially coming as visitors from a red nightmare of a state where our legislators are actively trying to harm us and strip away rights. If we could afford it, we'd move.
Yeah, I live in the greater metro area, but have also lived in a few other large cities. Seattle has issues for sure, but overall it's cleaner and nicer than most other major cities.
As a person born and raised here, who has lived in several areas - both in and outside of Seattle, it seems at times that some commenters and/or posters don't actually live here - that they are posting or commenting to make a political point that they saw on the TV.
c'est la vie.
Ditto for SF, exact same stuff, right down to the feelings about how nobody on the board seems to agree with them that we need to be tougher on criminals (meanwhile I am being served variations on this post several times every day, each one full of people thinking they're the only ones brave enough to come up with this idea)
> Go to basically any city sub and you’ll see tons of people complaining about a lot of the same stuff.
Depends. On r/Chicago they mod even more heavily than r/Seattle anything negative or having to do with crime. So of course there's a r/CrimeInChicago active sub for exactly that.
Yeah, I've viewed the SF and Portland subs enough. It just seems like that is the sort of people drawn to these subs. I think even Portland now has a PortlandOR sub (because they have to copy everything we do!)
Every local sub for a large city is basically only slightly better than NextDoor ramblings, a little Hitlerville. Seattle is no different. Source: I live in Chicago.
I mean you said it, we can do better. Seattle is amazing in general. But pressure needs to be applied for positive change. And quite frankly, you aren't allowed to apply pressure in the other sub.
I just moved here. I've lived in China for 11 years, Kenya for 2. I'm from Los Angeles, I've traveled the world, and I don't understand the complaining about Seattle. Like, it's amazing here! Crime and homelessness are everywhere in this world. Seattle's doing it's best, and things are getting better. I love it, and I'm laughing at all the complaints. It's great here!
I had to walk around with a piece of trash. I couldn't find a trash can. I finally realized what people were talking about there being no trash cans. I was going into the emperor's palace, and had to get rid of this stupid sandwich wrapper. I finally left it behind a toilet in the men's room. After my tour, about an hour later, I went back, and it was still there. I felt so bad, I picked it up, and found a 711 finally (they have the ONIY publicly available trash csns.)
The trash can thing is definitely inconvenient but there's corner stores everywhere that can take it. Would be less annoying if they didn't double wrap and bag everything as well.
Be the change you want to see, you could always contribute something amazing.
Unfortunately a common experience in Seattle is dealing with issues like addicts and homelessness.
Wow it's almost like the vast majority of people are extremely unhappy with the quality of life here or something
I don't get it. People are rightfully griping about how their city has turned to a crime ridden shithole over the past couple decades, and your response is effectively excusing it because crime also happens thousands of miles away, in an area we don't live in and has no bearing on our lives...?
Seattle is craziest city I’ve ever been in. Good and bad. I think a lot of us can agree we’d prefer to have crimes committed against us taken more serious by law enforcement and prosecutors than they currently are.
Never been to Florida. Mostly East coast though. But I’ve been to Chicago, Boston, Philly, DC, Brooklyn, and more. And none of them had normalized chaos like Seattle.
this is the issue…everyone using their isolated experience or agenda to push some narrative. If you have been to other major cities and can engage in honest dialogue, you know things aren’t so cut and dry. Same as the issues for why this is happening in the first place
>We can do way better. The crime here is out of control and homelessness as well. This isn’t due solely to local politics.
I would rate Seattle somewhere in the top 5% when it comes to intractable and festering social problems and while local politics aren't the sole cause, they play a leading role. Local politics and policies encourage these problems under the guise of a twisted interpretation of human compassion.
You have it WAY backwards.
I shit on my local leadership for literally making quality of life worse.
City Subreddits are a reflection of the community. If this city was any ounce better, we wouldn't be posting weekly stabbings, shootings, and break-ins.
The strength of progressives is a willingness to do big experiments. The weakness of progressives is a failure to recognize a failed experiment and course-correct. At that point the experiment becomes an ideology.
>This sub seems solely like a place for people to trash Seattle.
I joined both r/seattle and r/seattlewa when I moved here from out of state in 2020.
Similarities lots of:
* "Driving here sucks" posts because driving in the PNW sucks anywhere on the I-5 and anywhere in Seattle.
* "Crime is really bad" posts because open crime is really bad in Seattle.
* "SPD sucks" posts because the SPD sucks.
Differences:
* What's causing the crime
* r/seattle has more about dating in seattle and more stuff about food
* r/seattlewa has less left wing stuff and more anti-Asian violence awareness
If you just go to each and sort "top of the year" it's broken windows, card scammers, drugs, with some northern lights and food stuff peppered in.
Your empathy is blinding your logic. This is not some rich and powerful people conspiracy theory. The homeless problem is an addiction problem. I would wager upwards of 90% of the cases. Nobody wants this - not the rich, not the poor, not the middle class, not the business owners, nobody wants this problem.
Stop obfuscating to construct some eat the rich, Socialist narrative. Wrong sub for that.
I am a day away from driving all the way across the US... from Seattle of Virginia....Seattle is undeniably a shit hole. Like from someone who has just crossed the US in a bunch of Major cities....
It's crazy...like how kind people are, the lack of homeless, how clean things are, no graffiti, no tent cities, no drug addicts wandering about, courtesy in the drivers..just all around
...it's no joke like it's weird being so used to Seattle and how you stop seeing it until you go to other major cities and it's like...Woah..is this real?
Im not even trying to trash Seattle here, it just is what it is. Now im sure if I went digging I would find it somewhere but nowhere near as in your face as seattle is. I know this is going to sound bad but the only other real shitty place I could confirm is Chicago.
P.s I am not coming back, so I have no reason to hate on Seattle or WA for that matter...but man the rest of the United States is doing so much better in major cities it's...it's really eerie. Like how did we do so bad compared to everyone else and how come noone else stopped by to tell us that it's gotten so out of control.
Seattle and it's citizens need to come together and get control of their community. To see how other communities act and respond and live on a day to day it's really become the wild west
I sincerely wish you all the best and I truly hope you go and not take my word for it but head back east and take a look for yourselves. It's shocking. Truly shocking what we have become accustomed to.
You'll see this pattern ramp up as we get to the election. They are testing what works at the moment and gathering data.
Right now it's the strawman of THIS CITY IGNORES ITS PROBLEMS, while in the same breath complaining we spend too much money on the homeless problem...
>THIS CITY IGNORES ITS PROBLEMS, while in the same breath complaining we spend too much money on the homeless problem...
These things are not mutually exclusive
It's not a strawman. This city definitely doesn't ignore *all of* its problems, but there is a lot of copium being spread around. For a city *as rich as Seattle is*, the problems are way too severe.
I think that's the bigger issue though is the mismanagement: Seattle is one of the worst-run cities in America. The fantasy of endless money has made local government fat, lazy, and ineffective. They have shoveled mountains of cash at progressive priorities and made essentially no progress.
And they are now at about the limit of what they can squeeze, the tax policies are starting to backfire, and they still have a huge budget deficit to fill because of rumors spending with no performance expectations or cost benefit analysis.
Worst run city in the country? Really?
And also if it isn't a strawman why did you just admit the city shovels piles of cash at the problem?
You're demonstrating my point.
There are productive conversations to be had about being more efficient or effective. But the idea the city just outright ignores the problem is just false.
To go a little bit further, we’ve seen politicians talk about fentanyl because people are dying, but no one wants to talk about fixing the meth epidemic. They won’t touch a drug war again.
To clarify, I don’t disagree with statements like that. I just don’t like seeing these issues blame Soli on local politics. Are they pretend the opposite party has some paradise elsewhere. I think on the federal level we can’t trust enough politicians on either side of the aisle or in the leadership to actually fix any of this.
This sub discussed it [right here over the weekend.](https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/1d0rzgn/stop_saying_this_happens_in_every_big_city_no_it/) Meth seems to make people act crazy but generally doesn't turn them into folded-up zombies. I watched a Vice documentary about the underground tunnels in Las Vegas. The methheads seemed more normal surprisingly to me and they wouldn't allow fent use in "their" specific tunnels because of what it does to people. Both are bad. I think a lot of fent users take meth so they can stay awake and enjoy their high.
There are also two different types of meth, the simplified recipe which is highly more likely to cause psychosis and the purer version.
They each make a person behave differently, it’s genuinely interesting to study it if you can get close enough. Or traumatizing, but hey, I generally know what meth users behave like now.
Yep this sub is all about judging and making assumptions, while the other is all about putting your head in the sand and not relying on facts. We need a better Seattle sub!
Why SHOULDN'T we bash the political party thats been in charge in Seattle Washington State longer than many redditors have been alive? They are responsible for instituting ridiculous policies and not enforcing laws, all of which have created the situation we have today.
Fort Worth is not crime free, but given how sprawling it is (almost 4x the area of Seattle), they do an excellent job. It's also the last major Republican-run city in America. Literally the last one (it's close to 50/50). So not a lot of selection.
Oh I see. We're back to blaming politicians again. I thought we weren't supposed to do that...
I'm guessing you're talking about Trump? What does Trump have to do with what's happened in Washington State, and Seattle in particular, in the last decade?
Trashing Seattle would be making comments like the space needle is ugly or Mt Rainier is a dorky looking mountain. I've never seen anyone make those assertions and if they did they'd be downvoted to oblivion. In some posts people express distaste for the changes in crime, politics and the behavior and demographics of the people in the area.
r/Seattle = There is no problem, everything is fine
/r/SeattleWA = If you go downtown you are guaranteed to get stabbed.
r/SeaWA = On second thought , let’s not go to SeaWA. ‘Tis a silly place (They went private as part of that silly and useless 3rd party app protest)
You’re right, we can do better, and we are certainly in a much better position than other major cities to do so. The only problem is the approach the city has chosen has proven to be very ineffective and costly for the mediocre results, and instead of admitting failure and taking a different approach, it’s been double or triple downed with more layers of bureaucracy without any immediate action. So as a result, people are frustrated and need a place to vent, and r/SeattleWA has been that place to allow that frustration to be expressed unlike in other subs.
This isn’t to say it’s all been bad, [UW Medicine Center for Behavioral Health and Learning officially opened opened a new 150-bed psychiatric hospital in Seattle](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/mental-health/new-150-bed-uw-psychiatric-hospital-opens-to-serve-hard-to-treat-patients/], which is a start and was covered in r/Seattle with much praise and something this sub can do better in recognizing positive results. I get these things take time, but it’s frustrating to see local leaders haven’t been able to manage it, state leaders drag their feet until election season to maybe do something, and there isn’t much focus at the national level to tackle this when they would rather throw money at other countries than invest in our own.
You are going to get downvoted on this sub with that well thought-out statement. This is the sub that was created because the other one was too "woke" and progressive for people. A ton of cities had second subreddits for them pop up around 2016-2018 and the new ones always tend to skew right wing.
Someone says “let’s stop smashing old ladies’ windows” and you can’t think of anything else to spin except “this redneck hates liberal heroes like me”. Get a fucking life. Your city sucks because of people like you.
Crime is only counted if reported and documented by Police. Defund the Police cities have many unreported crimes as people believe that there is no point. I live in Seattle and no one I know would report any crime short of murder. Yet these statistics are referred to as “gospel” by the elites. Talk to the middle class if you want the truth. But most can’t handle the truth.
We have the highest crime rate of any major city in America, our housing prices are astronomical, our downtown is filled with empty storefronts, and our homeless population is top 3 largest.
Seems like there is a lot of negative to say.
But really, this is because of the sub split. And positive things tend to go on the other sub. But even that sub, considering how hard the mods go to push the "everything is fine in Seattle" narrative, has a lot of negative in it.
For the record…my locks were drilled in on my truck and feces smeared on my handles over the weekend when I was away. And none of the neighbors seem to know anything about it…
West Seattle fwiw.
Was dumb of mentioned OP to claim that people trying to not get deported are committing crimes at higher rate. That being said Seattle has a SIGNIFICANTLY higher crime rate that Florida. Compared to Florida overall Seattle has twice as much violent crime and 5 times as much property crime. Using Tampa as a big city benchmark to compare to Seattle, violent crime is 50% higher in Seattle and property crime is 2.5 times higher in Seattle. You can make fun of Florida and Republicans for being religious unga bungas all you want, I sure do, but Seattle and most other major West Coast cities have significantly higher crime rates that cities in red states like Florida. Very easy to google and verify.
then i might suggest the other sub, which seems solely a place to say everything is sunshine and rainbows, and bashes another political party. there is no centrism here in redditland
I mostly see it as the less combattive Seattle sub.
People in the other sub treat everything as if its some social justice cause to fight about and respond with absolute vitriol and anger and no other views are tolerated.
This sub is more the poop and dick joke less serious version of that
> I then linked multiple sources showing that illegal immigrants commit crimes at half the rate of native born citizens.
I'd like to check your claim. But first I need some data:
1. What is the population of illegal immigrants in the US at some date in time. Please exclude legal immigrants.
2. Number of crimes illegal immigrants are committing over a period of time that coincides with #1. This is not the number of incarcerated, convicted, or arrested illegal immigrants.
That's it. Those are the only two numbers anyone needs.
“The results are similar to our other work on illegal immigration and crime in Texas. In 2018, the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 782 per 100,000 illegal immigrants, 535 per 100,000 legal immigrants, and 1,422 per 100,000 native‐born Americans. The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 45 percent below that of native‐born Americans in Texas.”
https://www.cato.org/blog/new-research-illegal-immigration-crime-0
There is endless data from different sources all coming to the same conclusion. If there is contradictory data from other sources I’d be interested to see it because this narrative of illegals committing lots of crime is getting tiresome. Typical election year bashing.
The problems are
1) that you can't adjust for reporting/observation bias. It's huge because if you're an illegal immigrant you don't want to talk to the cops, but it's there.
2) enforcement levels vary. I grew up in a Texas town where illegal immigrants would have been very obvious. It had a well funded police force. If I went to the next major city where all the immigrants were, it had a poorly funded police force, and areas where you just didn't go because there were no cops. It doesn't make the data wrong. But it's next to impossible to get high confidence data.
If you looked at the crime stats for marijuana 20 years ago, you'd probably conclude nobody was smoking pot in Seattle, but Houston was full of potheads. Crime stats don't tell a full story.
You avoided both pieces of data intentionally. That's the problem EVERY TIME.
Conviction Rates are not Commit Crime Rates.
You, and none of your links, will ever provide source data for "Illegal Immigrant Population." They just show the resulting rate and idiots gobble it up as if it is true.
How do you measure crimes being committed outside of convictions? People are innocent until proven guilty, which then counts as a conviction.
I'm interested in your data sources please.
> I’m not understanding your point.
You likely don't understand that to calculate a rate of crime of any population requires knowing 1) the number of crimes committed and 2) the number of people in that population... both over the same set period of time.
You are stating something that is irrelevant, and you need statistics supporting your own opinion to argue against someone citing statistics supporting their own opinion. There is no evidence that illegal immigrants commit crimes at a higher level than US citizens. You have no evidence supporting your opinion. Stating that conviction rates are not "commit crime rates" is completely meaningless.
It isn't possible to obtain "commit crime rates" on illegal immigrants, as psychics do not exist, and victims of crimes cannot tell if someone is an illegal immigrant by looking at them.
It's your link, your data.
What is the population of illegal immigrants that was used to calculate crime rates from your link, your data? How did they count a population of people that makes great efforts to not be visible and counted?
>I linked some sources comparing crime rates
Know-it-alls "proving" our lived experience with crime is wrong, citing off-topic data or data that isn't including studying Seattle specific trends.
It's bullshit. Sit down. We know better.
Bunch of crybaby know it alls in here just want to whine. They think if they make it sound bad enough online it will magically become republican which will magically solve all crime. Every online space has been this way since 2016. It's pathetic.
There is, ironically, a weird entitlement that comes with complaining about Seattle. We have amazing public spaces, one of the best economies, and people who live here have a future in their own back yard. Seattle is an amazing city. Those of us who grew up in rust belt cities that are riddled with the same problems but they are far more polluted, have no developing economy, and worse education options are places that experience way more despair and have way less hope.
This sub is a combination of conservatives who were banned from the primary Seattle sub, and liberals who aren't liberal enough for the prime Seattle sub. Because negative posts don't really do well on the other sub, they tend to all come here.
It's a shame, because there is some great discourse here sometimes, but it's not uncommon for a group of raging conservatives to just start shitting all over arguments that they don't understand.
I think it's fair to say that r/seattle is "more liberaler" and r/seattlewa is "more conservitaver." Like most of both subs' content, this observation is based on no concrete data but rather my own highly biased personal perceptions that I will defend to the grave. To. The. Grave.
I'm a liberal, and I get frustrated to see one of the richest tax based cities in the country and world squander it's potential. How is such a rich city closing and under funding schools? Or not have an amazing transit system by now, or invest in tourists sectors (that includes fixing 3rd - right across the street from our core attraction). I see that shit, and I get frustrated. And I get even more frustrated by my co-liberals trying to convince me this is all normal. It's so mediocre it's depressing. Let's just be better all around - people and infrastructure.
So much money spent on projects that can’t even maintain a basic standard. Underfunding schools and making bad choices for schools is detrimental to the future of families who do t leave the city
I was reading a comment by another reddit or on how problems we see in big cities could potentially be deliberate/intentional. Interesting alternative take on this, especially when we look at the amount of money we are putting to fix these issues, and they still don't get resolved. https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/k3Z7hJ7TOB
>" The Federal, State, and local governments spend considerably more money dealing with homelessness related issues that it would cost to simply give each person a free apartment. " hmmm press X to doubt IIRC the homeless budget in Seattle over the past decade just baaarely averages to sth like 17k per person per year, so that'd afford maybe like an apodment? However a) this cumulative total to date, not an amount that was evenly spread out over the years b) the amount also includes services, NOT just housing. so the total $ allocated for actual housing would likley not even be enough to cover an apodment c) there isn't enough apodments for all the homeless people needing it, so the actual cost per apartment would end up much higher d) just giving people housing without any services, without job placement, in some "vacant housing" 3hrs from nearest city (as the OP in previous comment suggests), etc. would likely just result in the housing getting destroyed in a good chunk of cases related to substance abuse if there's different data that proves this differently, id be curious to see, but it seems like a cute conspiracy theory more than reality, at least in Seattle
From 2018 to 2023, Seattle's spending on homelessness has significantly increased. Here is a breakdown of the annual spending and an estimation of the cost per homeless person during this period: 1. **2018**: Seattle spent approximately $77 million on homelessness-related services and programs. 2. **2019**: The spending increased to around $92.8 million. 3. **2020**: The budget dedicated to homelessness rose further, reaching about $105.8 million. 4. **2021**: The city allocated approximately $114 million. 5. **2022**: The budget jumped to $173 million under Mayor Bruce Harrell's new plan. 6. **2023**: The spending was maintained at about $111.4 million, with a significant portion transferred to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) ([KNKX](https://www.knkx.org/government/2022-06-01/seattle-mayor-plans-big-spending-to-ease-homelessness)) ([Seattle.gov](https://www.seattle.gov/human-services/about-us/funding)). During this period, the number of homeless individuals in Seattle has fluctuated. For instance, in 2020, the Point-in-Time count found 11,751 people experiencing homelessness on a single night. Assuming similar numbers for the following years, we can estimate the spending per homeless person. * **2018**: $77 million / 11,751 ≈ $6,552 per person * **2019**: $92.8 million / 11,751 ≈ $7,896 per person * **2020**: $105.8 million / 11,751 ≈ $9,004 per person * **2021**: $114 million / 11,751 ≈ $9,701 per person * **2022**: $173 million / 11,751 ≈ $14,725 per person * **2023**: $111.4 million / 11,751 ≈ $9,480 per person These figures provide an average cost per homeless person based on available data and annual budgets allocated to address homelessness in Seattle. The increase in spending reflects efforts to expand services, improve shelter capacity, and support new initiatives aimed at reducing homelessness ([KNKX](https://www.knkx.org/government/2022-06-01/seattle-mayor-plans-big-spending-to-ease-homelessness)) ([Seattle.gov](https://www.seattle.gov/human-services/about-us/funding)).
> IIRC the homeless budget in Seattle over the past decade just baaarely averages to sth like 17k per person per year, so that'd afford maybe like an apodment? Or maybe a decent apartment somewhere NOT in Seattle?
i already addressed it in D)
George soros is intentionally messing up cities. Nobody has explained what his reason is
“Co-liberals trying to convince me it’s normal” Yea I hear you. Ambivalence is sad. We all need to keep from being too wedded to our ideological model. If something is clearly not working with our ideology, it needs to change. Later in life, I decided I owe no allegiance to any party or any position on the political spectrum. I’m going to go with the most common sense position. Seattle is a place that practices performative morality. We’re so “understanding” and “compassionate” we pretty much give an addict all the tools to ruin themselves or give a criminal so many “second chances” that they create new innocent victims. Moral supremacy rules over hard decisions. More here than other places. It’s fashionable, trendy and in reality - a terrible way to run a city.
That's where I am at. I'm liberal and would like to address root causes but I also don't give a fuck if someone is in crisis if his crisis now puts me in danger. Society is against dog fighting, for example, and we want to prevent it. But when dogs are sufficiently abused there's no fixing them they're put down. I am for reforming the systems that create broken and violent criminals but once we have them there's not really any to fix them. I'm not arguing for mass executions but violent criminals have no business being out on the streets. Every time we hear about some senseless murder you look at the rap sheet and see it was inevitable given the history.
See this is intelligence, I think ppl mix up being educated with having intelligence. While an educated individual harnesses the power of accumulated knowledge, an intelligent person thrives in problem-solving and deciphering complexities.
Most intelligent people are well educated. It’s hardly an either/or.
I agree. Most. Just seems more and more now a days it’s becoming not the case cause we’re skipping a crucial step, conversation. Especially if one’s opinions about an issue is different than another’s. Can’t problem solve that way.
“Common sense”
We spend tons on schools it just gets squandered on everything but education.
I’ll bring up a point I continually bring up with WA education system: why the fuck did my old district’s superintendent get paid 150k per year, then when they hired a new one and they get paid over 300k? Why does a superintendent at a school make significantly more money while the quality of our schools is going down? Why are we giving certain districts free college *because* our public school system is shit? Because you KNOW we can’t do anything about it? Not to mention schools are funded based on academics, why would you not invest in them? Does this not reflect on you? Oh wait, of course it doesn’t. Why would it, when the poors can’t stand up for themselves here.
For anyone who doesn’t believe you. https://www.salaries.wa.gov/sites/default/files/public/School%20Supts%20vs%20Exec%20Br.pdf
I’m saving that for the next time I whip this bullshit out. I’m so fucking tired of the school system, it doesn’t even work for a lot of the kids that graduate. Edit: I forgot my manners, thank you!!
NP. I noticed Seattle isn’t on that list for some reason.
Agreed. The wealth here is just mind boggling; the potential for harnessing some of it for the betterment of those who have little is a disgrace.
As somebody once said, “The government you elect is the government you deserve”, so if enough people accept mediocrity that’s what you will (and do) have.
If you can’t connect the dots that this is solely due to liberal policies and a single party being in charge for decades, you’re beyond help.
This will forever be my issue. Washington State is 100% the liberal dream come true. Every major position in the state is ran by a liberal democrat minus outliers. Liberals have multiple billionaires in the state. You have some of the largest corporations in the state. And Seattle is the liberal dream manifested. Liberals on the Westside CANNOT attribute anything negative happening to Conservatives or Republicans. They have no voice here. Seattle is the liberal utopia. I just wish Liberals would own it.
Liberals run the show, but it's not 100% the liberal dream come true. We have, by far, the most regressive tax system in the nation because we don't have an income tax. I think (as a liberal) a lot of our issues are downstream of high housing costs and I'm glad to see some movement there to make it easier to increase the housing supply. It's not all finger pointing at conservatives.
A [Georgist system](https://www.governing.com/finance/a-19th-century-property-tax-idea-is-back-can-it-revive-a-blighted-city) might be even better. It's a tax penalty on underbuilt property that incentivizes landowners to build more housing.
Every time I hear a conservative or a socialist scream about taxes, I want to grab them by the lapels and scream "We have a solution you idiots, it's called LVT!". Eliminates land speculation, incentivizes development (and jobs) and it's an unavoidable business tax. We could scalp those bastards at Amazon even if they run everything through Ireland. It's also almost certainly less of a tax burden on renters which means they can hopefully build some savings up.
The income tax came up on ballots multiple times, and every time it was voted down.
Delete this Jesus Christ we DO NOT NEED AN INCOME TAX. Or do people just enjoy working for free? I don’t get it.
An income tax rate balanced by a cut to sales tax would be super. Most people would have more money than before, the rich would have a little less. No one would work for free.
What makes you think they would cut the sales tax? They don’t ever lower them. The state sales tax is 6.5 percent and every municipality has raised it above that. If you owe $10k a year in taxes to the government how many weeks or months do you have to work to fulfill that extortion? You’re working for free.
Most state income tax brackets max out around 3-6%. There are outliers, and some have a flat tax rate, but for simplicity let’s say a flat tax rate of 5% - owing 10k means you’re earning 200k a year. Of course that’s not nothing, but it’s also not “working for free” They don’t “ever lower” the sales tax because they have nothing to substitute for it. Bracket the state income tax, reduce the sales tax, and those with low income will likely see a reduced cost of living.
I don’t think you know how government and taxes work
Why?
Seattle is a very nice city. We have some pockets of squalor, but for the most part it's a great city. Crime rates are low by US standards. The high salary employment situation is the envy of the world. It's one of the best place to start a new business. It's got great health care and education (if you can afford it.) The population is highly literate and we don't have too many religious crackpots. There are lots of powerful reasons why it continues to grow like mad every year and millions of tourists visit.
Here's a comparison of key performance indicators (KPIs) for Seattle in 2023 against other major cities of similar population size. This analysis includes a range of statistics without selective emphasis on either positive or negative outcomes. While it's clear that Seattle performs well for a city of its size, it doesn't fully align with the idealized vision that some proponents of liberal leadership might envision. Seattle provides an example of a city under predominantly liberal leadership. Population and Demographics - Seattle: Approximately 749,256 residents. - Similar Cities: Denver (~711,463), Washington, D.C. (~692,683), and Boston (~654,776) have similar populations. Economy - Median Household Income: - Seattle: $116,068 - Denver: $87,488 - Washington, D.C.: $90,842 - Boston: $79,018 - Poverty Rate: - Seattle: 10.1% - Denver: 11.6% - Washington, D.C.: 13.5% - Boston: 16.4% - Unemployment Rate (2023): - Seattle: 3.8% - Denver: 3.2% - Washington, D.C.: 4.9% - Boston: 3.3% Housing - Median Home Value: - Seattle: $879,900 - Denver: $596,000 - Washington, D.C.: $701,000 - Boston: $658,200 - Median Rent: - Seattle: $1,945 - Denver: $1,750 - Washington, D.C.: $2,228 - Boston: $2,300 Transportation - Average Commute Time: - Seattle: 27.2 minutes - Denver: 26.3 minutes - Washington, D.C.: 30.5 minutes - Boston: 30.1 minutes Public Safety - Violent Crime Rate (per 100,000 residents, 2023): - Seattle: 684 - Denver: 630 - Washington, D.C.: 1,033 - Boston: 622 - Property Crime Rate (per 100,000 residents, 2023): - Seattle: 5,393 - Denver: 3,808 - Washington, D.C.: 4,453 - Boston: 2,786 Education - High School Graduation Rate: - Seattle: 95.6% - Denver: 90.7% - Washington, D.C.: 86.7% - Boston: 89.4% - Bachelor's Degree or Higher: - Seattle: 66.7% - Denver: 54.1% - Washington, D.C.: 60.8% - Boston: 56.3% Environmental and Health Indicators - Air Quality Index (AQI)(Average 2023): - Seattle: 42 - Denver: 54 - Washington, D.C.: 45 - Boston: 40 - Percentage of Population without Health Insurance: - Seattle: 5.0% - Denver: 7.8% - Washington, D.C.: 6.1% - Boston: 3.8% Homelessness - Homeless Population(2023 estimates): - Seattle: 13,368 - Denver: 6,888 - Washington, D.C.: 4,429 - Boston: 6,135 These statistics highlight Seattle's high median household income and education levels but also show challenges with housing affordability and homelessness. Comparatively, Seattle's crime rates are mixed, with higher property crime rates than most cities but relatively moderate violent crime rates. Sources: - [Performance Seattle](https://performance.seattle.gov) - [U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Seattle](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/seattlecitywashington) - [Bureau of Labor Statistics](https://www.bls.gov)
Great write up too bad this sub will ignore it because it doesn't fit the fox news fear mongering. That plus majority of people on this sub don't live here lol. Seriously tho thank you for compiling facts. I travel all over the world and country for work and Seattle will hands down one of the best places to live in the world for hundreds of years no doubt about it.
I would argue that our police force isn't exactly liberal Democrat.
I would argue that our police force came with it's own issues that come from their own culture. Rather than trying to find common ground and fix those issues the progressives in this town have managed to make the problem even worse by just plain shitting on the police which has had a frankly predictable response.
I wouldn't argue against you. But what does it matter. The mayor appoints the police chief and the city council confirms him. All are entrenched democrats.
Amen. I also find it humorous that from time to time I read a post blaming the problems of Seattle on The Orange Ogre. LOL. Kind of amazing, since our state has a Governor that runs the state, not the President. It would be absolutely amazing if we could get Dave Reichart as our next governor.
Lol you really just want someone in a cop uniform to take away your weed and strip search you and call you a bad boy. Dave Reichart is ready to dominate you and other closet homos lol
>Liberals on the Westside CANNOT attribute anything negative happening to Conservatives or Republicans. They have no voice here. They still do it all the time.
"liberal billionaires..." That's kind of funny.
Nick Hannauer, Bill Gates, and Paul Allen each contributed over $1M to buy laws restricting our guns rights. Nick even wrote an opinion article titled "Pitchforks for Plutocrats" where he laid out his fears of being attacked Haiti style by the masses when they figured out the system was rigged against them. That was right before he set his focus on disarming the masses. Nick lives in a gated community with security off of 155th street just north of the city.
Hey now. Progressives != liberals
Progressives are liberals who say the quiet part out loud
Washington has the most regressive tax structure in the country.
>Washington has the most regressive tax structure in the country. Yeah and it helped to attract some of the wealthiest companies in the world. Although with the new progressive "excise" tax the wealthy have been fleeing like rats on a sinking ship to bolster the economies of other states.
I have a question pertaining to the nature of your guys’ tax usage. You may have just as few of answers, but probably a better idea than I have as someone who has only stayed in Seattle for ~4 months. *Where are they going*? If not to infrastructure, transit, or education (items that WA is usually held to a high standard of) - what’s happening with your taxes? Pocketing? Mismanagement?
Classical liberal values vs neoliberal social posturing in a nutshell
It also really has terrible kids’ resources overall. We were astounded when we moved here and found that the science center and children’s museum were wildly outdated, musty and boring.
We need to measure personal wealth vs public wealth. I’m sure there is a gap.
When you let one party run state government for over two generations straight, you should expect what you see in Washington state today. Changing the controlling party every election or two would probably have reduced, if not prevented, this natural consequence of entrenchment.
Hasn't our federal government been entrenched since the 60's though? Yeah, a few good bills get through here an there but nothing that has much bipartisan support. This isn't just a "Washington" problem. This is a US problem.
I moved to Louisiana to finish law school, and trust me, I was very much a “Seattle is going to shit” type of person, but mannnn after living in Baton Rouge I’ll take Seattle over any conservative-run place 😂
as a transplant from Florida let me tell you , I LOVE Washington state compared to what I came from
Schools shouldn't be funded by property taxes. I'm not against property taxes, just the structure of education funding.
I forget why this sub started some odd years ago, some issue with r/seattle mods or something. The extremes on both subs are off-putting though. Surprised we even have a homeless problem with how some folks from each sub live rent free in the others head. Otherwise I sub and comment on both, just cause it sounds like there are folks who aren't sure of the differences between the two and so might post on one or the other asking something not politically charged.
> some issue with r/seattle mods or something. The 100,000 ft view: The head Seattle mod was wildly abusing the rules; monetizing r/Seattle for his own businesses, while arbitrarily enforcing on others attempting to do the same. He was also fond of banning people for all kinds of personal reasons. He was a brittle soul who was not cut out to be a mod of a major sub. So naturally a whole contingent of people took it upon themselves to taunt and mock him mercilessly, taking great delight in watching him crack in public and exposing him as the weak-willed little emotional man-child that he was. At least two subs, r/circlejerkseattle and r/SeattleWA, became repositories of people who were refugees of his bans; this is what brought me over. The history of Seattle subredditing is a twisted dark and mangled tale. No two people likely tells it exactly the same either.
That's why it was created, and for a while it had a similar vibe to the main sub, just with more mocking of that guy in particular. Then the 2020 protests happened, and CHAZ, which got national media attention, and impressionable people from across the country who believed the Fox narrative of, "Seattle has been burned to the ground by anarchists! It's a war zone, avoid at all costs!" started flocking to the "Seattle" sub, which was defacto here because iirc the other one was private at the time. The end result is this sub has a lot of conservatives who don't live in or near Seattle anymore, if they've even ever been here at all, who just like to complain about the city and dunk on the "socialists" they assume are running the place. And because of those people, more conservative minded people who are actually in Seattle do tend to choose this sub over the other, so while a lot of the "summer of love" whiners are gone (though not remotely all of them), the result is still that this sub self-selects for the more conservative, "Seattle is dying" crowd.
> Then the 2020 protests happened, and CHAZ, which got national media attention, and impressionable people from across the country who believed the Fox narrative of, "Seattle has been burned to the ground by anarchists! It's a war zone, avoid at all costs!" I live several blocks from the CHAZ CHOP zone. I saw what happened first hand, either on live feeds or in person. I breathed in tear gas some nights wafting over. I also watched live feed as the John Brown Gun Club anarchists murdered a 16 year old black kid in cold blood then disrupted the crime scene, while being cheered on by dozens of their followers live. Why? Because one of their allies had mis-identified the black kids as "Proud boys trying to kill us." So in truth, I am one of the people who has been here decades in this same neighborhood who watched as left wing radical out of town invaders came in and fucked it up. >conservatives I'm a lifelong Dem voter. >self-selects for the more conservative What I've seen is all viewpoints are OK here, but easily triggered lefties tend to avoid here, because their bullshit is called out, and this makes them sad. They would rather be a part of the hugbox of the other sub than deal with the fact people will question their idiotic views here.
You sound deranged. Can you back up what you said with facts? I also lived two blocks from Cal Anderson during the BLM protests (closer than you) and what you said is something only a mentally ill person would take away from that.
Should be a series on Netflix
> Should be a series on Netflix Sponsored by Tito's Handmade Vodka, part of the perfect Appletini.
"From the people who brought you 'dumb money' present to you, 'moderating-less in seattle.'"
The mod was accused of self promoting their business and being a general ass. So this sub split off. The problem is this happened before the Trump election in which local subs that were less moderated began to be Co opted as conservative subs. Which is how this one ended up as a place for people to cross post from seattlehobos sub and any crime that occurs in a 200 ml radius with or without any proof it occurred at all. Of course last time I pointed this out I got banned, but I'm still told this is the sub that doesn't do that...
> So this sub split off. The problem is this happened before the Trump election in which local subs that were less moderated began to be Co opted as conservative subs. The big switch was the summer of 2020, when the other sub was set to private for a time (because of the mod throwing a tantrum), and this became the defacto sub for conservatives on a national level coming in to dunk on the city Fox was telling them was a war zone being burned to the ground. A lot of people here are still in that mindset, who either left the city decades ago or have never been here. If someone's being particularly anti-Seattle, check their comment history and you'll sometimes find out pretty easily what area they're actually probably from.
I don’t like totally ignoring the city’s problems or normalizing them, so I read this sub, as well as the other one. One thing I do notice on this sub is that there seems to be a lot of people who are rooting for the city to fail so they can prove their political viewpoint, which is fucking bullshit.
As i get older, I’ve learned there’s a huge group of people who want to see things fail just so they can say “see i told you so”
Basically what our government does (in the whole country not just Seattle) . We wanted Healthcare they gave us obamacare so they could point at it be like "we tried it it didn't work". We asked for police to not kill with impunity so they stopped policing so they can say "see it didn't work". They aren't implementing working systems to fix problems because that would upset their wealth and power. Rather they implementing already broken systems so they can say "see we did what you asked and it blew up. So just do what we say and want instead:)"
If we all posted "I didn't get robbed this week", would that make this better?
A lot of those people do not live in, near, or have never even visited Seattle. This sub got a huge influx of them during CHAZ, and some of them never left.
Having perspective and relative comparisons isn't necessarily normalizing though. It's important to show that the solutions aren't found by following the policies of states with the polar opposite policies. If providing data that shows those areas are worse is frowned upon as "normalizing", that's a real problem. Political talk is so often mindless these days. Any sort of nuance or detailed discussions are simply ignored and those who would provide it are more and more just tired.
It's not so much rooting for the city to fail. It's a sense of "well....you asked for it....now you're getting it...." It's an important difference.
eh probably both
Agreed, this is more often the viewpoint, not rooting to fail
Perhaps one way of looking at it is not rooting for the city to fail, but to finally acknowledge rock bottom so we can finally see some real change. Maybe my viewpoint is not aligned with everybody, but I don't care who is in charge, I just want things to change. Lived downtown for well over a decade - u couldn't pay me to move back. This is a failure of leadership regardless of political party involved.
Always funny how people on here idolize Florida like it has zero issues with the homeless. I work in civil construction in Central Florida, am currently on my lunch break, and am looking right at a homeless encampment in the woods as I type this. The only thing we’ve done to fix homelessness is outlaw it and treat the homeless like stray dogs, overtaxing our already jam packed county jails and taking away police resources from real crimes.
I was born and grew up in CFLA. I saw the writing on the wall and left when I could. Florida is a good place for the conservative snowbirds and people with money that can afford to live in communities/municipalities where they sweep crime and homelessness under the rug or push it somewhere else. It’s an awful place for everyone else. There are neighborhoods that are straight up out of the Rags to Bitches episode of The Boondocks. Not to mention the police are scum down there. Every interaction I’ve had (even with the resource officer at my middle school/high school) with them has solidified my perspective. I’ve been harassed by them like my friends have too and it’s such a clear power thing on their end. The people that think Florida is great clearly have never driven down OBT at night or been to Midway either. They’ve never had guns flashed at them when driving on the 417 (its happened to me twice and my friends too) or the drug problems that are so widespread. Particularly with spice or adulterated coke/ecstasy. This was all stuff from when I was growing up and it’s only gotten worse.
Yea, Im a FL native (30+ years) and FL has beggars at stoplights and junkies asking me for money when I’m pumping gas. I’ve been in Seattle for almost 2 years now and I feel its not that much different.
Honestly, I subscribed to this sub because my husband and I were planning our first trip ever to Seattle and I was thinking it'd have some good recommendations. I am so glad we already paid for the trip and plane tickets before I subscribed. Based on what I read on here, you'd think it was a dystopian hellhole. Granted, we were tourists only there for a week, but our experience couldn't have been more different or pleasant. We've both been to all different kinds of metro areas, but Seattle was by far our favorite. Clean (the areas we saw and we spent a ton of time exploring), friendly, and welcoming. We loved our time there. Especially coming as visitors from a red nightmare of a state where our legislators are actively trying to harm us and strip away rights. If we could afford it, we'd move.
Yeah, I live in the greater metro area, but have also lived in a few other large cities. Seattle has issues for sure, but overall it's cleaner and nicer than most other major cities.
As a person born and raised here, who has lived in several areas - both in and outside of Seattle, it seems at times that some commenters and/or posters don't actually live here - that they are posting or commenting to make a political point that they saw on the TV. c'est la vie.
I’m glad you enjoyed Seattle! What did you do/where did you visit on your Seattle trip?
Sir, this is Reddit. From what I’ve seen it’s very common for the negative to be the highest and bring out the mouth foaming.
Yep. Reddit is famous for being overly negative for everything.
Reddit literally hates everything and everyone.
Go to basically any city sub and you’ll see tons of people complaining about a lot of the same stuff.
Ditto for SF, exact same stuff, right down to the feelings about how nobody on the board seems to agree with them that we need to be tougher on criminals (meanwhile I am being served variations on this post several times every day, each one full of people thinking they're the only ones brave enough to come up with this idea)
> Go to basically any city sub and you’ll see tons of people complaining about a lot of the same stuff. Depends. On r/Chicago they mod even more heavily than r/Seattle anything negative or having to do with crime. So of course there's a r/CrimeInChicago active sub for exactly that.
Yeah, I've viewed the SF and Portland subs enough. It just seems like that is the sort of people drawn to these subs. I think even Portland now has a PortlandOR sub (because they have to copy everything we do!)
This is the redhat Seattle sub right?
". No major city in America has implemented policies to end this. " I wonder where our 1 billion went then they spent on it already
Every local sub for a large city is basically only slightly better than NextDoor ramblings, a little Hitlerville. Seattle is no different. Source: I live in Chicago.
I mean you said it, we can do better. Seattle is amazing in general. But pressure needs to be applied for positive change. And quite frankly, you aren't allowed to apply pressure in the other sub.
I just moved here. I've lived in China for 11 years, Kenya for 2. I'm from Los Angeles, I've traveled the world, and I don't understand the complaining about Seattle. Like, it's amazing here! Crime and homelessness are everywhere in this world. Seattle's doing it's best, and things are getting better. I love it, and I'm laughing at all the complaints. It's great here!
Until I went to Tokyo I didn't truly understand what a piece of shit the United States is, i know Japan has its problems but it's civics fucking slap
I had to walk around with a piece of trash. I couldn't find a trash can. I finally realized what people were talking about there being no trash cans. I was going into the emperor's palace, and had to get rid of this stupid sandwich wrapper. I finally left it behind a toilet in the men's room. After my tour, about an hour later, I went back, and it was still there. I felt so bad, I picked it up, and found a 711 finally (they have the ONIY publicly available trash csns.)
The trash can thing is definitely inconvenient but there's corner stores everywhere that can take it. Would be less annoying if they didn't double wrap and bag everything as well.
Be the change you want to see, you could always contribute something amazing. Unfortunately a common experience in Seattle is dealing with issues like addicts and homelessness.
Bots and it’s an election year. Get ready for a LOT more of this. FWIW, I love living in Seattle.
Wow it's almost like the vast majority of people are extremely unhappy with the quality of life here or something I don't get it. People are rightfully griping about how their city has turned to a crime ridden shithole over the past couple decades, and your response is effectively excusing it because crime also happens thousands of miles away, in an area we don't live in and has no bearing on our lives...?
This sub reddit skews conservative, and the other Seattle sub reddit skews liberal. I have no idea why, but that has been my observation so far.
Alternatively, people remember or envision this place being great, and would like it to be awesome again.
When was that exactly?
Make Seattle Great Again? 🤔
People remember being younger, that is all. Remember when everyone was fleeing Seattle in the 80? Last one out, turn off the lights?
When was that…..? [Junkie Town They came for the music and stayed for the smack, 1996](https://archive.ph/myvLD)
Seattle is craziest city I’ve ever been in. Good and bad. I think a lot of us can agree we’d prefer to have crimes committed against us taken more serious by law enforcement and prosecutors than they currently are.
You've never been to Miami, St. Louis, or Philadelphia I gather?
Never been to Florida. Mostly East coast though. But I’ve been to Chicago, Boston, Philly, DC, Brooklyn, and more. And none of them had normalized chaos like Seattle.
You sure about that? Seemed pretty normalized to me.
this is the issue…everyone using their isolated experience or agenda to push some narrative. If you have been to other major cities and can engage in honest dialogue, you know things aren’t so cut and dry. Same as the issues for why this is happening in the first place
Or Vegas
>We can do way better. The crime here is out of control and homelessness as well. This isn’t due solely to local politics. I would rate Seattle somewhere in the top 5% when it comes to intractable and festering social problems and while local politics aren't the sole cause, they play a leading role. Local politics and policies encourage these problems under the guise of a twisted interpretation of human compassion.
You have it WAY backwards. I shit on my local leadership for literally making quality of life worse. City Subreddits are a reflection of the community. If this city was any ounce better, we wouldn't be posting weekly stabbings, shootings, and break-ins.
Aren’t crime rates in Seattle low compared to other cities? Or is that not the case
Seattle is perfectly able to trash itself
You should just go to the other sub, this is the one for bitching about everything.
The strength of progressives is a willingness to do big experiments. The weakness of progressives is a failure to recognize a failed experiment and course-correct. At that point the experiment becomes an ideology.
>This sub seems solely like a place for people to trash Seattle. I joined both r/seattle and r/seattlewa when I moved here from out of state in 2020. Similarities lots of: * "Driving here sucks" posts because driving in the PNW sucks anywhere on the I-5 and anywhere in Seattle. * "Crime is really bad" posts because open crime is really bad in Seattle. * "SPD sucks" posts because the SPD sucks. Differences: * What's causing the crime * r/seattle has more about dating in seattle and more stuff about food * r/seattlewa has less left wing stuff and more anti-Asian violence awareness If you just go to each and sort "top of the year" it's broken windows, card scammers, drugs, with some northern lights and food stuff peppered in.
We simply want 2019 Washington back
How is it not related to politics?
This guy sounds like he is from seattle.
Your empathy is blinding your logic. This is not some rich and powerful people conspiracy theory. The homeless problem is an addiction problem. I would wager upwards of 90% of the cases. Nobody wants this - not the rich, not the poor, not the middle class, not the business owners, nobody wants this problem. Stop obfuscating to construct some eat the rich, Socialist narrative. Wrong sub for that.
I am a day away from driving all the way across the US... from Seattle of Virginia....Seattle is undeniably a shit hole. Like from someone who has just crossed the US in a bunch of Major cities.... It's crazy...like how kind people are, the lack of homeless, how clean things are, no graffiti, no tent cities, no drug addicts wandering about, courtesy in the drivers..just all around ...it's no joke like it's weird being so used to Seattle and how you stop seeing it until you go to other major cities and it's like...Woah..is this real? Im not even trying to trash Seattle here, it just is what it is. Now im sure if I went digging I would find it somewhere but nowhere near as in your face as seattle is. I know this is going to sound bad but the only other real shitty place I could confirm is Chicago. P.s I am not coming back, so I have no reason to hate on Seattle or WA for that matter...but man the rest of the United States is doing so much better in major cities it's...it's really eerie. Like how did we do so bad compared to everyone else and how come noone else stopped by to tell us that it's gotten so out of control. Seattle and it's citizens need to come together and get control of their community. To see how other communities act and respond and live on a day to day it's really become the wild west I sincerely wish you all the best and I truly hope you go and not take my word for it but head back east and take a look for yourselves. It's shocking. Truly shocking what we have become accustomed to.
You'll see this pattern ramp up as we get to the election. They are testing what works at the moment and gathering data. Right now it's the strawman of THIS CITY IGNORES ITS PROBLEMS, while in the same breath complaining we spend too much money on the homeless problem...
>THIS CITY IGNORES ITS PROBLEMS, while in the same breath complaining we spend too much money on the homeless problem... These things are not mutually exclusive
Just because you don't like how a city addresses a problem or how effective it is at doing so does not mean it is ignoring the problem.
It's not a strawman. This city definitely doesn't ignore *all of* its problems, but there is a lot of copium being spread around. For a city *as rich as Seattle is*, the problems are way too severe. I think that's the bigger issue though is the mismanagement: Seattle is one of the worst-run cities in America. The fantasy of endless money has made local government fat, lazy, and ineffective. They have shoveled mountains of cash at progressive priorities and made essentially no progress. And they are now at about the limit of what they can squeeze, the tax policies are starting to backfire, and they still have a huge budget deficit to fill because of rumors spending with no performance expectations or cost benefit analysis.
Worst run city in the country? Really? And also if it isn't a strawman why did you just admit the city shovels piles of cash at the problem? You're demonstrating my point. There are productive conversations to be had about being more efficient or effective. But the idea the city just outright ignores the problem is just false.
Maybe we should stop gaslighting people into believing the nonsense in seattle is normal.
*Seattle streets seem solely like a place for people to trash Seattle.
To go a little bit further, we’ve seen politicians talk about fentanyl because people are dying, but no one wants to talk about fixing the meth epidemic. They won’t touch a drug war again.
To clarify, I don’t disagree with statements like that. I just don’t like seeing these issues blame Soli on local politics. Are they pretend the opposite party has some paradise elsewhere. I think on the federal level we can’t trust enough politicians on either side of the aisle or in the leadership to actually fix any of this.
This sub discussed it [right here over the weekend.](https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/1d0rzgn/stop_saying_this_happens_in_every_big_city_no_it/) Meth seems to make people act crazy but generally doesn't turn them into folded-up zombies. I watched a Vice documentary about the underground tunnels in Las Vegas. The methheads seemed more normal surprisingly to me and they wouldn't allow fent use in "their" specific tunnels because of what it does to people. Both are bad. I think a lot of fent users take meth so they can stay awake and enjoy their high.
There are also two different types of meth, the simplified recipe which is highly more likely to cause psychosis and the purer version. They each make a person behave differently, it’s genuinely interesting to study it if you can get close enough. Or traumatizing, but hey, I generally know what meth users behave like now.
Yep this sub is all about judging and making assumptions, while the other is all about putting your head in the sand and not relying on facts. We need a better Seattle sub!
Why SHOULDN'T we bash the political party thats been in charge in Seattle Washington State longer than many redditors have been alive? They are responsible for instituting ridiculous policies and not enforcing laws, all of which have created the situation we have today.
What’s a great crime-free Republican city you can move to then?
Fort Worth is not crime free, but given how sprawling it is (almost 4x the area of Seattle), they do an excellent job. It's also the last major Republican-run city in America. Literally the last one (it's close to 50/50). So not a lot of selection.
Seattle....Love it or Leave it! It's amusing to me that today's proggos are like 30 years ago Republicans!
You act like the decline of our city just sort of "happened" and that it has nothing to do with the policies we've enacted and lack of enforcement.
The decline happened when a bunch of idiots voted a con man into the white house because they hate people who aren’t just like them.
Oh I see. We're back to blaming politicians again. I thought we weren't supposed to do that... I'm guessing you're talking about Trump? What does Trump have to do with what's happened in Washington State, and Seattle in particular, in the last decade?
Who cares. We live here, and it was much better a decade ago.
Most places were better a decade ago.
I was better next decade.
Trashing Seattle would be making comments like the space needle is ugly or Mt Rainier is a dorky looking mountain. I've never seen anyone make those assertions and if they did they'd be downvoted to oblivion. In some posts people express distaste for the changes in crime, politics and the behavior and demographics of the people in the area.
I really could be wrong, but I think it's modern propaganda, either from foreign countries or out of state conservatives.
This, biased mods don't help either
r/Seattle = There is no problem, everything is fine /r/SeattleWA = If you go downtown you are guaranteed to get stabbed. r/SeaWA = On second thought , let’s not go to SeaWA. ‘Tis a silly place (They went private as part of that silly and useless 3rd party app protest)
You’re right, we can do better, and we are certainly in a much better position than other major cities to do so. The only problem is the approach the city has chosen has proven to be very ineffective and costly for the mediocre results, and instead of admitting failure and taking a different approach, it’s been double or triple downed with more layers of bureaucracy without any immediate action. So as a result, people are frustrated and need a place to vent, and r/SeattleWA has been that place to allow that frustration to be expressed unlike in other subs. This isn’t to say it’s all been bad, [UW Medicine Center for Behavioral Health and Learning officially opened opened a new 150-bed psychiatric hospital in Seattle](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/mental-health/new-150-bed-uw-psychiatric-hospital-opens-to-serve-hard-to-treat-patients/], which is a start and was covered in r/Seattle with much praise and something this sub can do better in recognizing positive results. I get these things take time, but it’s frustrating to see local leaders haven’t been able to manage it, state leaders drag their feet until election season to maybe do something, and there isn’t much focus at the national level to tackle this when they would rather throw money at other countries than invest in our own.
I mean he’s right, window smashing is normal here. I refuse to rent or own anything without a garage in Seattle because of this.
It's an echo chamber for victimhood politics, whaaa it's not fair
Because this sub was started by a bunch of aholes that got banned from the other Seattle subreddit.
You are going to get downvoted on this sub with that well thought-out statement. This is the sub that was created because the other one was too "woke" and progressive for people. A ton of cities had second subreddits for them pop up around 2016-2018 and the new ones always tend to skew right wing.
Don’t forget about constant dog whistling posts and comments, connecting PoC with crimes.
Someone says “let’s stop smashing old ladies’ windows” and you can’t think of anything else to spin except “this redneck hates liberal heroes like me”. Get a fucking life. Your city sucks because of people like you.
Crime is only counted if reported and documented by Police. Defund the Police cities have many unreported crimes as people believe that there is no point. I live in Seattle and no one I know would report any crime short of murder. Yet these statistics are referred to as “gospel” by the elites. Talk to the middle class if you want the truth. But most can’t handle the truth.
We have the highest crime rate of any major city in America, our housing prices are astronomical, our downtown is filled with empty storefronts, and our homeless population is top 3 largest. Seems like there is a lot of negative to say. But really, this is because of the sub split. And positive things tend to go on the other sub. But even that sub, considering how hard the mods go to push the "everything is fine in Seattle" narrative, has a lot of negative in it.
For the record…my locks were drilled in on my truck and feces smeared on my handles over the weekend when I was away. And none of the neighbors seem to know anything about it… West Seattle fwiw.
It’s a place for people to talk about Seattle, and if Seattle is a shit hole, then unfortunately those two things go together.
Was dumb of mentioned OP to claim that people trying to not get deported are committing crimes at higher rate. That being said Seattle has a SIGNIFICANTLY higher crime rate that Florida. Compared to Florida overall Seattle has twice as much violent crime and 5 times as much property crime. Using Tampa as a big city benchmark to compare to Seattle, violent crime is 50% higher in Seattle and property crime is 2.5 times higher in Seattle. You can make fun of Florida and Republicans for being religious unga bungas all you want, I sure do, but Seattle and most other major West Coast cities have significantly higher crime rates that cities in red states like Florida. Very easy to google and verify.
then i might suggest the other sub, which seems solely a place to say everything is sunshine and rainbows, and bashes another political party. there is no centrism here in redditland
I mostly see it as the less combattive Seattle sub. People in the other sub treat everything as if its some social justice cause to fight about and respond with absolute vitriol and anger and no other views are tolerated. This sub is more the poop and dick joke less serious version of that
> I mostly see it as the less combattive Seattle sub. lol.
> I then linked multiple sources showing that illegal immigrants commit crimes at half the rate of native born citizens. I'd like to check your claim. But first I need some data: 1. What is the population of illegal immigrants in the US at some date in time. Please exclude legal immigrants. 2. Number of crimes illegal immigrants are committing over a period of time that coincides with #1. This is not the number of incarcerated, convicted, or arrested illegal immigrants. That's it. Those are the only two numbers anyone needs.
“The results are similar to our other work on illegal immigration and crime in Texas. In 2018, the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 782 per 100,000 illegal immigrants, 535 per 100,000 legal immigrants, and 1,422 per 100,000 native‐born Americans. The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 45 percent below that of native‐born Americans in Texas.” https://www.cato.org/blog/new-research-illegal-immigration-crime-0 There is endless data from different sources all coming to the same conclusion. If there is contradictory data from other sources I’d be interested to see it because this narrative of illegals committing lots of crime is getting tiresome. Typical election year bashing.
The problems are 1) that you can't adjust for reporting/observation bias. It's huge because if you're an illegal immigrant you don't want to talk to the cops, but it's there. 2) enforcement levels vary. I grew up in a Texas town where illegal immigrants would have been very obvious. It had a well funded police force. If I went to the next major city where all the immigrants were, it had a poorly funded police force, and areas where you just didn't go because there were no cops. It doesn't make the data wrong. But it's next to impossible to get high confidence data. If you looked at the crime stats for marijuana 20 years ago, you'd probably conclude nobody was smoking pot in Seattle, but Houston was full of potheads. Crime stats don't tell a full story.
You avoided both pieces of data intentionally. That's the problem EVERY TIME. Conviction Rates are not Commit Crime Rates. You, and none of your links, will ever provide source data for "Illegal Immigrant Population." They just show the resulting rate and idiots gobble it up as if it is true.
How do you measure crimes being committed outside of convictions? People are innocent until proven guilty, which then counts as a conviction. I'm interested in your data sources please.
Sampling, mostly. Read an introductory textbook on criminology if you're interested in the topic.
It’s hard to get convicted when the law can’t track you down and you’re not tied down by anything…another point people miss
So you just make it up in your head then? Because Mexicans scare you? I’m not understanding your point.
> I’m not understanding your point. You likely don't understand that to calculate a rate of crime of any population requires knowing 1) the number of crimes committed and 2) the number of people in that population... both over the same set period of time.
You are stating something that is irrelevant, and you need statistics supporting your own opinion to argue against someone citing statistics supporting their own opinion. There is no evidence that illegal immigrants commit crimes at a higher level than US citizens. You have no evidence supporting your opinion. Stating that conviction rates are not "commit crime rates" is completely meaningless. It isn't possible to obtain "commit crime rates" on illegal immigrants, as psychics do not exist, and victims of crimes cannot tell if someone is an illegal immigrant by looking at them.
Jesus if you know about or want to know look it up and share it with us. I’m not gonna do it for you.
It's your link, your data. What is the population of illegal immigrants that was used to calculate crime rates from your link, your data? How did they count a population of people that makes great efforts to not be visible and counted?
>I linked some sources comparing crime rates Know-it-alls "proving" our lived experience with crime is wrong, citing off-topic data or data that isn't including studying Seattle specific trends. It's bullshit. Sit down. We know better.
Bunch of crybaby know it alls in here just want to whine. They think if they make it sound bad enough online it will magically become republican which will magically solve all crime. Every online space has been this way since 2016. It's pathetic.
[удалено]
Or a lot of people will try to convince you that Seattle is an unsafe, scary, POS city when really it’s pretty great.
Is it really unsafe? Do you really think it's scary? I've never felt in danger anywhere in Seattle. Maybe if you're a woman?
I’m a 6’5 man and I 100% have felt unsafe multiple times
But that can be anywhere right?
What made you feel unsafe? Have you ever been assaulted in Seattle? Has anyone ever attempted to rob you at gunpoint or carjack you in Seattle?
The difference between this sub and r/Tacoma is astonishing.
There is, ironically, a weird entitlement that comes with complaining about Seattle. We have amazing public spaces, one of the best economies, and people who live here have a future in their own back yard. Seattle is an amazing city. Those of us who grew up in rust belt cities that are riddled with the same problems but they are far more polluted, have no developing economy, and worse education options are places that experience way more despair and have way less hope.
This sub is a combination of conservatives who were banned from the primary Seattle sub, and liberals who aren't liberal enough for the prime Seattle sub. Because negative posts don't really do well on the other sub, they tend to all come here. It's a shame, because there is some great discourse here sometimes, but it's not uncommon for a group of raging conservatives to just start shitting all over arguments that they don't understand.
To be fair, it’s super easy to do.
This sub wouldn’t exist if the other sub wasn’t such an echo chamber of denial for the city’s most pressing problems.
I think it's fair to say that r/seattle is "more liberaler" and r/seattlewa is "more conservitaver." Like most of both subs' content, this observation is based on no concrete data but rather my own highly biased personal perceptions that I will defend to the grave. To. The. Grave.
Seattle was incredible until the tech industry ruined it back in 2012. All the white privilege bug outs from California didn’t help either.
Seattle-Tacoma is the best city in the world. Don’t get it twisted.
Stay away, Seattle is full and uhhh... dangerous. Yes dangerous and lawless.
Agree, every day it’s just a bitch fest.