Seattle's New Normal: Homelessness Is Now Middle Class

[icymist]

The other night, I realized I had reached my last drink at the Quarter Lounger and looked at the Metro app and saw that I had just missed the Route 60 bus. The next one was in 30 minutes. I decided to request a Lyft Line, which is cheap because one shares the ride with others heading in your general direction. The Lyft car arrived two minutes later, I entered it, and found two white people in the backseat. One was a woman, the other a man. The woman had a small dog on her lap. I greeted the couple and their dog...

...Where in the hell where we going? Were these ordinary-looking white Americans heading to a rave with their dog? We reached the train tracks. I feared an endless train would think now was the time to block us for lord knows how long. But the driver made a right, and his car's lights fell on an RV and stopped. The couple behind me got out of the Lyft with their dog, gathered groceries in the back of the car with assistance from the driver, and walked to and entered the RV in front of us. Both I and the driver, who had returned to his seat, stared at them in wonder.

Here is the thing. The couple was perfectly functional. They tipped the driver, they shopped at QFC, they owned a cute dog, they clearly worked, but they were homeless in the conventional sense. The RV was on a dark street that had other RVs and ended with the massif of one of the stadiums. Seattle, with ever-rising rents, has reached a point where homelessness is now fully in its standard circuits. It was no longer a matter of the excluded as theorized by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in A New 'Spirit of Capitalism.

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/03/23/25950929/seattles-new-normal-homelessness-is-now-normal

[Igel]

1. That's a reasonable a headline as

"owning a mansion with servants is now poverty".

Twist the meanings of words enough and you can get anything to mean anything. It was a great ploy once upon a time, and something that a dissenting and moderately irate English socialist wrote an unlong unpoem about in criticizing mostly his own. Truly, a lost art form.

[kcr]

3. Writers often don't get to chose their headlines

I think it was referring to the French socialists' theory, anyway.

[pnwmom]

4. The median sales price for a house in Seattle in Jan. was $639K, which means

that middle income people (with the median household income about $67K) have trouble finding an affordable place to live.

So the title isn't that ridiculous.



https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/eastside-home-prices-surge-to-new-record-capitol-hill-area-hits-1-million-median/

[FuzzyRabbit]

2. The Seattle housing market is insane.

Seattle's streets are clogged with RVs, mostly old decrepit looking ones. Most of the people who live in them have jobs. One bedroom apartments cost about $2000 a month, and two bedrooms go for $2400 (if your landlord is willing to bargain). To buy a small house in a cheap neighborhood costs $600,000 or more, for many the only alternatives are living in an RV or living in a tent next to the freeway.

I sold my little house about a year and a half ago for over $500,000. My realtor had originally listed it at $379,000. Multiple offers with escalation clauses drove up the selling price. Currently there are no houses in that neighborhood for less than $700,000. Some weeks there are no houses available at all. They sell within a week of being listed.

Amazon just announced they were soon going to hire 10,000 more high paid programmers. Google and Facebook are also hiring thousands more highly paid workers, making the housing shortage even worse.

I moved out of the city, many miles north in Snohomish county. The housing prices up here are now escalating quickly, as people look for affordable housing within a 2 or 3 hour commute to their jobs in Seattle.