At death’s door: A dispatch from a once-great American city
It is easy to look at what’s happening down here and think: yes, but that’s the U.S. Everything is bigger and badder and more screwed up. But that would be a mistake. All the problems plaguing these cities are, to some degree, becoming intractable issues in Canada as well.
There is a sense in Seattle, and in some of the other American cities I have been to in the last couple of years, that civic leaders didn’t appreciate the full extent of the problem they had on their hands until they were confronting a full-blown homelessness crisis. A year after Seattle’s city council and community groups devised an ambitious plan to house everyone living on the street, the program has reached only 10 per cent of those in need of long-term housing. It’s taken much longer to hire and train staff than was anticipated – something Canadian cities can learn from.Seattle’s drug court has had mixed success, although many citizens agree with its premise.
I couldn’t help but feel that this is a city someone like federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre could thrive in politically, because everything actuallyBut everything isn’t broken, of course. The city still has a strong economic foundation and offers a home base for several multinational tech companies such as Amazon and Microsoft.
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