As the city’s mayor is rolling out his 2024 budget proposal including tens of millions of dollars for affordable housing and homelessness spending, Seattle’s city attorney is fighting for the legal right for the city to sweep encampments without federal restrictions.
City Attorney Ann Davison announced this week she is joining a group of city attorneys in locations including Tacoma, Anchorage, and San Diego as well as California’s state attorney asking the the U.S. Supreme Court to review a key court decision limiting sweeps and overturn “the Grants Pass decision” by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The decision established sweeps are a violation of the Eighth Amendment and punish people for sleeping in public when there is not adequate shelter available. Under the ruling, cities can restrict how people camp but it cannot execute a blanket ban on camping without adequate shelter resources.
“It should be among our top moral priorities to help the unhoused move into permanent housing,” Davison said in her announcement on joining the legal action. “But a one-size-fits-all legal approach will not create effective solutions for every community. In today’s amicus, I ask that local autonomy be restored to our elected decision makers to appropriately direct resources to our homelessness crisis.”
Davison’s office says 18 local governments and governmental organizations have signed onto the brief, including the National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties.
The filing comes as Mayor Bruce Harrell has included a proposed $106 million in Seattle funding to support the King County Regional Homelessness Authority in 2024.
Meanwhile, Seattle’s efforts to remove encampments from public spaces including parks has continued including efforts around renewed camping on the north end of Capitol Hill’s Cal Anderson Park.
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Go Ann Go!
Throw the homeless in jail, then they won’t be homeless. Genius!
How progressive of Seattle! Asking a stacked panel of judges to rule on the unhoused. Let’s just vote for trump and get it over with!
Looking at the list of municipalities Seattle chooses to associate itself with, let it explain how it will live down the company it keeps. As you intimate, a pattern is emerging.
Ann Davison is a self-described Trump Republican.
Please document what you claim. Yes, she is a Republican, but as far as I know she has never said she is a Trump supporter. Prove me wrong.
She openly became a Republican during the run up to the 2020 election, when Trump was securely entrenched as the de facto leader of the party and people were actively leaving to party due to his influence.
As far as I can tell, she has never criticized Trump and has openly associated with Trump supporters, including some that participated in the Jan 6 Insurrection.
She claimed she left the Democratic Party because it “started to move so far left”, when in reality, the Democrats are now the conservative party in the US, with what I (and many others) would consider left leaning members a minority.
If it looks like a “law and order Trump Republican”, walks like a “law and order Trump Republican” and quacks like a “law and order Trump Republican”, it sure ain’t an Eisenhower Republican.
I’d be curious to see why you DON’T think she’s a Trump Republican. She sure is running the attorney’s office like one.
I’ve seen a few tents in the arboretum lately. Not a good sign
What parts of the arboretum? I used to live in Madison Valley near the arboretum and always wondered why I never saw any tents in that neighborhood.
Really? That makes me angry. So many places to set up a tent and they are so entitled they pick the Arb? Or recently at Cal Anderson? These people don’t give half a shit about living in a society.
why should they care about a society which does not appear to care about them?
Looking at you as a representative ambassador of ‘society’, the reciprocal of society not giving a shit about them seems more true.
About seven years ago my wife and five year old son were threatened by a woman with a needle on the trail from the playfield to Madison across from Pagliacci’s. This crap has been going on far too long. Yeah, it’s turning long time Seattle liberals into so called ‘conservatives.’ So what? It’s time the drug addicts in this town get a lesson in FA&FO. The other day I was picking up used foils from the Leschi playground. Not acceptable by any means.
Amazing to see someone who is the butt of the “Cut a Liberal, A Fascist Bleeds” joke actualize it for once. Like damn, Charles, you gonna hold down a shift at the concentration camps for ‘unproductive drains on society’ when the time comes or just clap for them online knowing thy will has finally been done.
You know nothing about me and my politics. No liberal in Seattle wants to feel this way, but the feel good progressive pablums haven’t been working to make this a safer city, especially for the poorer denizens at that, other than making some privileged Sawantist college kids feel good about the big new words they’ve learned. We need pragmatic liberals, not Marxist play acting.
There’s nothing Marxist about being a good neighbor ahead of being a client-citizen.
So was “pablums” the big new word of the week for you?
We need a community that cares about their neighbors, not a bunch of folks that care about what political ideology their neighbors are…
I counted three today when I was walking around Green Lake. Two of them have been there for weeks.
This is a move in the right direction. I hope it moves forward
It is time.
How much housing and shelter space has the city and state actually built, relative to the average pace of building, since this initial ruling?
It is long overdue for this insane law that has caused so much death and dystopia across the west to be overturned. The 9th Circuit’s ruling has allowed drug addicts and criminals to privatize and destroy public spaces in cities ancross the west and themselves. No other society allows this. We need a camping ban, strict enforcement of laws and a focus on congregate shelters and bus tickets.
See you for your shift at the congregate shelter then, Reality.
Unfortunately this is a move that needs to ne made. SERVICE RESISTANT campers simply should not have the option of “nah, no thanks, I’ll make a fort of pallets at the park instead”.
The ACLU screwed every city with their actions on this ruling.
You know what makes for a portion service resistance campers? The actual service/assistance offered being experientially awful, and this not being their first time on the floor doing the dance with it.
Now you might chalk this up to ‘anything at all should be taken, how dare they deny this, this is all their fault’ but I ask you, if I threw a ham sandwich at 100 mph and told you to be grateful for the lunch I provided, would you be grateful? And would you take up my next offer of lunch?
There you have it, now eat up.
Honestly, at this point I’m beginning to not have much empathy and just want safe, clean, junkie free streets and sidewalks and parks.
Just because the shelter options are less than ideal for some doesn’t mean we should shrug our shoulders and let them take over parks, sidewalks, etc.
Im all for helping those that need it but the city shouldn’t have to endure this crap from those that don’t want the help offered and prefer to smoke meth or fentanyl all day.
I mean, I want all the benefits of a society not neglecting itself and starving itself into suffering, but that would require some element of reconciling homelessness without thinking you can neglect homeless folks out of existence.
You can’t, it’s pretty shown you can’t in real time as homelessness exists whether the city does nothing at all or is actively beating the homeless out of the city or putting the homeless up in a defunct Ramada. It is something that exists whether or not you even see it, and a lot of this comes down to it just being a visible and unignorable.
We have people in this thread talking about putting people in camps, making specific people another city’s dilemma, and it’s like, I get the sense that most would be satisfied if I handed out cloaks of invisibility to the homeless instead of hoodies and hats, because to their very direct eyes, the problem would be solved.
Yeah I’ll take a ham sandwich at 100 MPH and be grateful. We should help but not hinder and to date we’ve hindered the desire to be self sufficient.
This mentality is destroying our society, cooperation is how humans have been able to achieve unimaginable things, self-sufficiency and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is a myth that is told by those whom benefit from others believing it…
I would say the opposite is. There is nothing bad about being able to take care of your own basic needs, most people want to be independent individuals and in charge of their own destiny. We should assist those that need help but not at their and our community’s expense.
Most people in the US today want all of the benefits of living in a society (which requires cooperation) without the hassle of having to deal with other people. Money can insulate some folks from that, but for the most part society requires working together towards a shared destiny…
Totally agree. Let’s reclaim our public spaces for residents from the addicts and dealers that settled into Seattle due to abundant drugs and absurdly enabling policies created by our clueless, progressive council.
The problem is not with the unhoused for most of us in Seattle, but it is the ones who refuse any kind of shelter or other services.
A chemically inclined / mentally challenged unhoused neighborly individual was stating the most racist vile language – ranting and getting into various transit riders faces last night outside Capitol Hill Light Rail Station. While I understand many blog commenters support unhoused individuals such as this gentleman, I feel that the City should consider all steps that may reduce / limit this particular unroofed person’s freedoms to cause trouble and violate the ears of both myself and those his racists rants were directed towards. If Sawant were back in charge none of this would be happening.
I agree with you, except for your laughable claim that Sawant would solve the homeless/drug use issue. She has been a big part of the problem for years.
On second thought, maybe your last sentence was meant to be satire? Sure hope so!
??? Is this supposed to be satire of some sort? Sawant is much of the reason your vile friend is allowed to simply remain there abusing the greater society in the first place… or do you actually believe he’s just oppressed and if he had a basic income and a cubicle to sleep in he would magically recover his sanity?