Coils of razor wire
I sometimes burble about the jaw-dropping beauties of Seattle and its suburbs, so maybe it’s time for a look at the other side.
A black metal fence, topped with coils of razor wire, surrounds Lam’s Seafood Asian Market in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood.
The fencing, which cost $50,000, went up in summer 2023 to stop people from pitching tents and building fires in the parking lot after-hours and breaking into the grocery store and warehouse next door. Security cameras are mounted inside and out, so far costing $15,000 as more are added to cover every checkout lane and newly discovered blind spot.
“This is the last thing we wanted to do,” said Teizi Mersai, Lam’s business operations manager, gesturing to the fence along South King Street. “It makes us look like a prison. It’s not very welcoming.”
I saw that store and the razor wire just a couple of weeks ago, when I was heading for a massive Goodwill store in the nabe. Just before seeing that, I had seen a knot of police cars and a much bigger knot of people hanging out doing who tf knows what. The combination of the two was very squalid and disgusting and depressing, and also all too common. There’s another hot spot of that kind on another edge of downtown, that I see almost every day because it’s on the bus route from my nabe to the center. The hot spot of that hot spot is another grocery store and I wonder every time I look at it from the bus how it can possibly be surviving. I never see any knots of cop cars there though.
While the fence has done its job keeping people out when the market is closed, it hasn’t deterred the throngs of people, often numbering in the dozens, who gather on the sidewalk to smoke fentanyl or shoot up other street drugs. The fence also can’t stop the rampant EBT fraud that plays out daily in the store and parking lot, with some shoppers agreeing to give cash in exchange for purchases made with state-provided benefits to low-income people, often for 20 to 50 cents on the dollar, said Mersai, who has aided police and state investigators.
Just so. This is what I see from the 2 bus as well: about four blocks crowded with people just hanging around, some with junk laid out on a blanket apparently for sale though I can never figure out who tf would want to buy junk off a blanket on the street.
I’m not a nice person. Seeing this doesn’t cause me to well up with compassion; all it causes is disgust and loathing. I know it shouldn’t, but it does anyway.
Community members in Little Saigon, a roughly eight-block neighborhood on the east end of the Chinatown International District, are grappling with the despairing effects of crime, public drug use, shuttered storefronts and concentrated homelessness. Led by neighborhood group Friends of Little Sài Gòn, residents and business owners have teamed up with Seattle police and other city and county departments to develop a safety plan that addresses root causes of crime and street disorder.
Great. Do that. But in the meantime – why do the police and city and county departments do nothing about the ongoing mess on the streets?
David Tran, whose family bought Lam’s Seafood from the original owners a decade ago, wonders if they can hold out long enough for the Phố Ðẹp funding and safety plan’s interventions to come to fruition.
“It might be a little too late,” he said. “There’s not a lot of community members left to get involved.”
According to Tran, many of his customers have been scared away by people loitering, doing drugs, blocking traffic and sometimes acting aggressively or erratically on and near his property — a situation that saw the store’s February sales plummet to the lowest ever in a single month.
Well quite – so why is nothing done about it? I realize it’s cruel to move people along when they have nowhere to go, but it’s not exactly kind to shrug and let them rot on the street while scaring off everyone else.
While Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan has cleaned up Third Avenue and Pine Street in downtown and 12th Avenue South and South Jackson Street, Tran said there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency by the city to address the social issues that have been pushed to the streets south of the latter intersection.
Yes and the streets north of the former intersection – that’s the area I regularly have to navigate.
Seattle’s dirty big secrets.
Yet my local paper (Sacramento Bee) publishes op eds saying the REAL problem is not rampant crime but the very existence of the Target Store on Broadway which somehow causes fentanyl abuse
I go by “folded” street people every day. Some of our customers are afraid to come into the city core. I can’t say I blame them. There are several allies and alcoves in the same block as my workplace where people smoke up and shoot up in the open. A local NGO support group has lobbied against police crackdowns or “moving people along,” because such measures will result in users going to use in places where they will be more isolated and less safe, like in parks along the river. Sure, there are balances that need to be struck, but I’m not sure that doing little or nothing helps.
I see folded people on the bus sometimes. Always an urban thrill.
The solution is more police and more prisons but recruitment is down and political will (and y’know, straight up funding) is lacking to build the infrastructure.
I’m all for building more affordable housing (we need lots of it, so cutting the red tape is essential) and increasing the amount of shelter space would be welcome, but regardless we can’t have these people clogging up the streets. If I could wave a magic wand I’d force the druggies into rehab, institutionalize the mentally ill and get them fully medicated, and channel those that would be an asset to the labor pool into employment. Unfortunately I lack that wand.
Don’t you already have enough of those? Aren’t your prisons already overflowing because people are jailed for the most minor crimes, especially the impoverished and the wrong colour?
Why is prison the best option for people with a mental illness? And before you say you only “want to jail the druggies”, drug addiction is a form of mental illness, and untreated mental illness is often a gateway to self medication. And how many become addicted to street drugs because they’re cheaper than the ridiculously high prices Americans are forced to pay for Rx drugs?
You may not have noticed it yet, but the tRump disease is infecting you all. Your compassion and empathy for your fellow citizens is floating away in the breeze.
Yeah I know, we’re Seppos. Your compassion and empathy however are unimpeachable.
Note also that you brand all of us as without compassion and empathy on the basis of a remark by one person. Not very compassion and empathy of you is it.
Because allowing the lost to destroy themselves and their neighbors is the height of compassion. And yes,if you are looting someone’s business …repeatedly…some jail time may be needed.
Yeah Rev, no need to impugn other people; I do lack compassion and am a monster, as I’ve stated many times. I believe in incarceration, not punishment and overcrowded prisons are inhumane and pointless. We need to efficiently use our human resources and protect communities and businesses from those we cannot rehabilitate while at the same time making the lives of the imprisoned comfortable if not free.
My local police blotter almost entirely consists of “person of no fixed abode” engaging in violent or antisocial behavior usually to be let go several hours later, often multiple times the same day. In one instance we had a guy who’d been let go earlier in the day for similar activities break into a woman’s house and start strangling her. This is a problem.
The problem is that we’ve tried policing the problems away, and that absolutely hasn’t worked; it’s only served to line the pockets of the private prison industry. The prisoners go in, and then come out in even worse shape than they went in, because now they’re branded as felons (and thus unable to get a job), while having been further traumatized (increasing the desire for drugs). Many also make contact with gangs, becoming members for protection, which then carries back over to their life outside. It creates a cycle, and doesn’t clean up the problem (at best, it literally moves it into the next available neighborhood).
What might actually work is a better funded and operated rehab system–hell, bring back the halfway houses (where low-level offenders could be ordered to live, under supervision, but still having contact with normal society, and without getting branded as felons).
That sounds like a vastly better idea.
Yes, for profit prisons are utterly unacceptable for purpose. I have a more Benthamite vision (which will go nowhere because everything is broken).
Reducing economic disparity reduces homelessness and crime. Prisons don’t help here, especially in USA – already having the most heavily imprisoned population in history. Fewer people looking to escape crushing helplessness of poverty also means fewer folded people. Note also those sellers hawking things from a rug are probably only attractive to the very poor; there’ll be fewer of them too.
Except the ones I have in mind aren’t selling anything useful to the very poor, mostly. I did see someone with a big pile of toilet paper rolls yesterday so that’s obvious enough, but often it’s just random junk. I always wonder if it’s a (feeble) disguise for selling drugs, but if it is I don’t see how it can fool anyone, let alone cops.