In September 2017, it held a rally under the banner of Housing for All, with new coalition members- even a group of concerned tech workers calling themselves Tech 4 Housing- and a call for new revenue to tackle the problem. Next, the coalition took on homelessness. The tax would face a challenge but it was a start, the first income tax passed in the state in over eighty years. The Transit Riders Union built a coalition and soon had its first big win-the city council unanimously passed an income tax on the city’s wealthiest households, part of a wave of progressive legislation that also included laws mandating a $15 minimum wage and paid leave. Those who found this disjunction unacceptable included Katie Wilson, the co-founder of the Transit Riders Union, which had been created to fight for more tax revenues for public transportation but had branched into other causes. “I look out the bus and I see a guy taking his pants down and then I get off the bus and glance down an alley and see a guy shooting up,” one downtown boutique employee told the Times. It was, it sometimes seemed, everywhere you turned. It was there in the encampments that popped up in open patches smack in the middle of stable neighborhoods of $800,000 Arts and Crafts bungalows. It was there at the southwest corner of Third Avenue and James Street downtown, where the crowd hoping for a table at Il Corvo restaurant overlapped with the crowd waiting for a spot in the nearby shelter that night. But what the city was experiencing now was on a new scale, an indictment both of its hyper-prosperity and of its liberal political ethos, whose claim to humanitarian concern and general decency was looking dubious. Seattle had been home to the original skid row: Skid Road, down which greased logs would skid to Henry Yesler’s sawmill in the 1850s. And more homeless people had died in the streets that year than ever-by September, King County’s tally of fatalities had surpassed those the year prior, and by the end of November, it had far surpassed the highest tally on record, with 133. The number of homeless kids in city schools hit an all-time high of 4,280. Of these, 5,485, or nearly half, were “unsheltered”-living in the street or in tents-a 21 percent increase over the year before. In early December 2017, The Seattle Times reported that King County now had the third-largest homeless population of any jurisdiction in the country, behind only the far larger cities of New York and Los Angeles: according to a new federal tally, there were 11,643 people without homes in Seattle and its immediate surroundings. An excerpt from Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillisĪs Amazon expanded in Seattle last decade, the endless stories of record real-estate prices were followed by superlatives of a different sort.
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