’60 Minutes’ special on Seattle homeless crisis missed one, key point
Dec 4, 2019, 12:21 PM | Updated: Oct 1, 2024, 11:14 am
The dazzling baby blues of Anderson Cooper looked into our souls and asked the question, “Why are so many people in Seattle homeless?”
We watched the story of a family (with jobs) who were unsheltered — a mail carrier and a database coordinator — but it really ended there when discussing employment and it shouldn’t have because that is a MAJOR FACTOR in our local homelessness conversation.
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I acknowledge that homelessness overall is a blooming onion of obstacles but let’s just focus on salary and housing here.
The HENRYS [High Earning, Not Rich Yet millennial] are real. First and foremost, they are high earners, so let’s look at this logically. What happens when high earners flood into a city invited by multiple companies at the same time? The housing prices go up and others (like your non-HENRY mail carriers) are out of the city or are $200 away from being out on the street.
This is not the HENRY’S fault, this is not the tech companies fault but it is a factor in the current problem. The city could have taken a radical pro-active approach by building housing options for the upcoming boom of lower to middle class residents but they didn’t.
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The homeless in Seattle 60 Minutes special missed a key point: Tech companies.
Why did 60 Minutes shy away from talking about the tech companies impact on Seattle’s homelessness crisis? It probably has nothing to do with the fact Amazon has a multi-million dollar content-licensing deal with CBS who owns 60 Minutes.
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