The City of Federal Way actually closed it's shelter and gave them all bus tickets to Seattle. I'm trying to find the article about the Portland homeless- Oregon Dept. of Corrections gave the recently paroled bus tickets to Seattle because, if I remember correctly "Seattle has more services and is better equipped to handle them."
Amazingly enough, this summer the Dept. of Parks & Rec. had a meeting in August at the library to discuss the problems in the parks, and the homeless woman with the shopping carts of garbage showed up!
Well, with the closing of the SHARE shelter at Calvery Lutheran, that ought to take at least some of the bums out of local circulation.
The problem with the bums is largely that they do not adhere to the "social contract" with society that the rest of us do. This leads to behaviors observed in Ballard like:
Defecating in the bushes outside the library and in the parks
Urinating in public
Stealing from local stores. Bartells now keeps most of the more expensive small items locked up for this reason. (and the cost of shoplifting is passed along to all of us...and is a factor, albeit not the only one, of some of the stores closing. They can't afford "shoplifting insurance" . No joke, I worked for a women's clothing store that suffered such heavy losses that she finally decided to close. It isn't the biggest reason, but for some stores it may be a "tipping point.")Ask any retail shop owner about this and they will give you an earful. The Fat Chick with pitbull has ripped off pretty much every store in Ballard, for just one instance.
Drug deals. (and the assorted other crimes that leads to.)
Prostitution....and having sex in the parks and the library.
Fights. I've personally witnesses a few spectacular ones.
And the cost to our community? For starters, the vagrants are heavy users of the ER, and the cost is passed along to the rest of us. A friend is an ER nurse down at Swedish, Ballard, and she says that probably 75% of the usage currently is the homeless. We all pay for that.
Losses to our business community. People do not want to come here from other places to shop if you have to run the gauntlet of panhandlers, drug addicts and drunks to do so. Pioneer Square is suffering deeply from this problem.
I hope that the closing of the SHARE shelter at Calvary Lutheran will take some of the vagrants out of circulation.
Downtown Seattle has a "no sitting on the sidewalk during business hours" policy in force; we need to get that extended to here.
How about getting up a petition to the City Council that bans panhandling in Ballard? Tacoma did it, why shouldn't we?
The vagrants are not just an annoying eyesore (and assault to the other senses, like smell), they are a dangerous bunch of drug addicts and drunks roaming our streets, taking over our parks and our library, perpetrating crime. Why should we, as a residential community, have to put up with this?
