Seattle’s tolerance of people living on the street is ‘cruel’

There could be more bad than good being done by allowing people to live in tents on Seattle’s streets.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani wrote an op-ed for the New York Post that lead with “a city with homeless on its streets is a city with no love for its people.” Though he’s talking about the Big Apple, he could easily be talking about Seattle, KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson pointed out.

Giuliani argues that the “progressive view” that people have the right to live on the streets has no merit and is “inhumane, indecent and dangerous.” He blames Bill de Blasio for the city’s current state of affairs, which he compares to the Dark Ages.

“People living on the street, urinating and defecating there, marked the Dark Ages of Western civilization,” he wrote.

That may sound familiar to anyone who lives or works in Seattle, where homeless congregate under bridges, on the side of freeways, and in the city’s parks. There is a “shocking” amount of homeless people in Seattle, Dori said. It’s a city that now has one of the highest homeless populations in the country.

“It has grown quite a bit. It’s not just something you’re noticing; we’re noticing it as well,” Travis Phelps, spokesperson for the Washington State Department of Transportation, said about an increase in homeless people living under Seattle’s freeways.

Homeless camps, such as the three new ones proposed around the city, are temporary solutions to the problem, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said. But there are people living on the streets who need more than a safe place to pitch a tent.

A better way to help a city’s homeless population would be to first consider how someone would treat their children, Giuliani suggests. If he found a loved one living on the streets, he wouldn’t just let him or her stay there. He would figure out the problem and intervene.

“Under no circumstances would I leave him an option that does not and should not exist in a loving city &#8212 a right to live on the streets,” he wrote.

Giuliani states that, under his watch, the city did what it could to remove the homeless from the streets &#8212 a fact that has been refuted by de Blasio. Whether Giuliani’s memory of how he handled the homeless population during his time in office is accurate or not, he pointed out reasons against allowing people to live on the streets. People’s situations deteriorate when they are homeless and they end up abusing drugs and alcohol, he points out. And mental illness becomes worse, leading to violence, he added.

If what Giuliani writes is true, then the progressive way &#8212 the Seattle way &#8212 is the most cruel of all, Dori said.