For reasons I won't bother to go into here, my wife and I recently had occasion to spend three days in Seattle. We flew into the Seattle/Tacoma airport - SEATAC - and took an Uber up to Seattle (we also used Uber's services to navigate our various appointments in that city).
I had last been in Seattle in 1986 when I took some Army training at Ft. Lewis. On that occasion, we had one weekend off, so I went to Seattle with some buddies and spent the weekend exploring the city. Granted that one's memory can play tricks at that distance in time, but my memory is uncommonly good, and I remember distinct images of Seattle as a clean, pleasant city that my buddies and I (granted we were four young, tough, healthy soldiers) felt safe exploring, day and night.
That's not the case any longer.
There were no big homeless encampments in 1986 - at least, none that we saw. On our recent trip to Seattle, there were several big, trashy encampments visible from Interstate 5, which runs north into the city from the airport. Graffiti, too - I remember some in 1986, but now every available surface is covered by what some clueless apologists call "urban art" but which is actually vandalism.
I am given to understand, although we did not observe this, that drug use and prostitution are common in these areas, and the city is seemingly unable to deal effectively with it.
The Seattle City Council passed two new laws on Tuesday meant to crack down on public drug use and sales and on prostitution.
The first creates Stay Out of Drug Areas (SODA) in the city core and the U District that allow judges to bar people accused of certain drug crimes from entering. The bill, introduced by City Attorney Ann Davison and sponsored by Councilmember Bob Kettle, passed 8 to 1, with Councilmember Tammy Morales voting no.
The second, which establishes a prostitution loitering law and a Stay Out of Area of Prostitution (SOAP) zone along Aurora Avenue in north Seattle, is intended to have a similar effect on prostitution and related violence. It was sponsored by Councilmember Cathy Moore and passed 8 to 1, with Morales again the lone no.
I'm sure the druggies and prostitutes will scrupulously obey the stay-out areas.
These observations aren't unique to Seattle. We have family in the Denver area, and my Seattle observations are similar to those in Denver. And even here, in the Great Land, we have homeless enclaves in Anchorage, where the trash-strewn encampments run the extra, exciting possibility of attracting bears.
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As is my habit, when traveling about Seattle in the course of our business, I conducted some informal interviews with our Uber drivers. One, interestingly, a recently naturalized American citizen, observed that "it's much better than west Africa." I'm sure he's right. But another, a man about my age (early 60s) who was born and raised in Seattle, talked in sad tones about how his home city had deteriorated since his youth. He has lived in Seattle all his life, his love for the city was apparent in the emotional tone of his voice, and he is considering leaving.
My observations, separated by 38 years, bear that out. It's one thing to read about the decline of a city in the news media, or even to see it in video. It's quite another thing to see it in person - and Seattle doesn't have problems on the scale of, say, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, or, of course, San Francisco, that city that Gavin Newsom ruined before he moved on to ruin California.
It's a sad take on what's happening in our nation's cities. I've often written about my father and his visit to San Francisco in 1945, and how a young man from a small town in Iowa saw what he described as a beautiful, prosperous city. One of my uncles was stationed in San Francisco in the early '50s and had similar impressions; he spoke often of hitting Chinatown on Saturday afternoons for lunch.
I spent most of 2017 in the Bay Area, and one foray into downtown San Francisco was enough to deter me from going back. Silicon Valley was nutty, but San Francisco was filthy - and, frankly, didn't feel safe.
The decline of our major cities, and even some of our smaller cities, like Anchorage, only seems to be getting worse. I worry that these cities may be past the point of no return. Decades of Democrat rule have wrought this. The residents of those cities, largely divided between the dependency class and the urban elites whose wealth shields them from the consequences of Democrat policies, keep voting the same lunatics back in charge of the asylums.
There are solutions to these problems. Restore order to the streets. Remove the homeless enclaves that are threats to public health and safety. And, most of all, remove the "progressive" politicians who allowed our cities to descend into this chaos. Until that happens, our cities will continue to deteriorate, and the end stage of that decay is not something that bears contemplation.
