“There have been a couple great documentaries about the deterioration in Seattle”
Great overview of the deterioration in Seattle.
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The same thing has happened in Portland and Seattle, both cities with increasing amounts of property crime, increasing amounts of homeless campers taking up public spaces, increasing amounts of harassment from vagrants, widespread open drug-abuse, increasing amounts of blight as pristine greenbelts are trashed, and a revolving door of criminals who are released into the public without consequence by a permissive city leadership. Calls for "restorative justice" always mean being soft on crime, which removes deterrents for crime, and therefore enable increased crime. It's all so obvious and predictable, but these cities are such extreme political echo chambers that no other perspective is really represented or considered at all. In Seattle, these policies were spurred on by motivated progressive activists who aggressively shouted down all dissent in protests, council meetings, and in social media. The rush of transplants from outside Washington state changed local politics significantly over the last decade, importing a lot of SF's policies as the voting constituency changed. As a result, Seattle experiences all the same blight SF does, but with a time delay of a few years. There have been a couple great documentaries about the deterioration in Seattle such as "Seattle is Dying" ( link ) and "The Fight for the Soul of Seattle" ( this video ) that provide a great overview of the issues. The business community also wrote two comprehensive reports about the failure of restorative j