The article focuses on a woman — Chrystal Audet, 49 — who was living in her Ford Fusion with her 26-year old daughter and her dog. What's most shocking is that Audet is a social worker, employed by the state, who earns over $72,000 a year.
October 17, 2023
"The Lake Washington United Methodist Church began experimenting with offering a beachhead for the 'mobile homeless' in 2011 in response to Seattle’s 'scofflaw ordinance'..."
"... which called for the impounding of cars that had accrued multiple parking tickets, a law that was disastrous for people forced to live in their cars. 'Our simple idea was, "Hey, if they’re in our parking lot, they won’t get parking tickets. And they won’t get booted and towed,"' said Karina O’Malley, who helped create the program.
Now it is one of 12 in Washington State...."
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60 comments:
There is something missing in this situation. No one making $72,000 a year and getting government health benefits needs to live in a car.
Letting people live in a car on your parking lot is NOT helping them. They need to enter the many government programs to receive benefits and help for their addictions and psychological problems.
Evictions will pretty much lock you out of the housing market.
We need more single room occupancies, boarding houses and extended-stay hotels for the sort of people who don't pay their rent, are combative or drug addicts or whatever.
"What's most shocking is that Audet is a social worker, employed by the state, who earns over $72,000 a year."
From what I know of Washington State employees (and I know a lot), any high-functioning addict can hold down a job there. For Washington State hiring, better than nothing is a very low bar indeed.
It's staggering the coddled clownishness they'll allow.
Ah, the typical modern journalism problem of finding your human interest hook to your story, but being so oblivious that you pick someone who undermines the premise.
I’m just so full of envy. Those ladies are lucky to just live in a place like Seattle and to make income of $70k; I just can not imagine a utopia like it. I’m curious, how do they keep their EV charged? It is an EV, right? Because this is Seattle, and they would not allow an ICE vehicle like mine. Well maybe now they are ok, but 2035 isn’t that far away, and I wouldn’t be able to afford another car living there. I heard it gets cold at night, so it must be important to keep the EV charged.
Is the daughter disabled? I am otherwise puzzled at how two adults, one of whom earns $72K/year are homeless, even in Seattle.
The whole situation cries out, "drug addiction."
Something else is going on here, IMO.
Questions that came to my mind . . .
There was no mention of bankruptcy in the article. That was not my field when I practiced, but I find it odd that her situation, with lots of old bills eating into her take home pay, couldn't have been improved by some sort of bankruptcy proceedings.
Another thought I had was that Washington state's Social and Health Services agency must have offices all over the state. Wasn't any mention of her trying to get transferred to another locale, not so near where Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos lived, where the cost of living didn't include paying more than $3/sf/month for an apartment.
Finally, with her daughter in college, I can only hope she's getting trained in something useful so she can contribute cash to the family, instead of using cash.
I wonder why none of these relevant questions appear to have been addressed by NYT's crack team of 7 (seven!) reporters and researchers.
"bad luck, bad debt and a bad credit score"
That bad debt must be something else.
"so oblivious that you pick someone who undermines the premise"
Au contraire, I'm sure the reporter found her story compelling and quite relatable! Because the truly poor are icky eww.
She's a terrible example if they're trying to generate sympathy. There are plenty of people who are at the end of their rope due to factors beyond their ability to control. Not this woman. If you repeatedly don't pay your bills when you could have people quit lending you money or renting you space.
Also, "an apartment in a market where the median rent is $2,200."
So what? Maybe she could look at the half that are for rent below $2,200. Plenty available at $1,000 or below on Zillow.
The pit could be a problem.
When you make it very difficult to build, supply can't respond to demand. And, shockingly, we have a housing affordability crisis, and a homelessness crisis.
But nobody wants to make it easy to build. So we're stuck.
"Dysfunction" has many forms including financial, but with that said please note that millionaires go bankrupt sometimes. This fact does beg for further scrutiny though.
Allowing people to sleep in their car is not compassion...
Critter said...
There is something missing in this situation. No one making $72,000 a year and getting government health benefits needs to live in a car.
If you read the article; "But a combination of bad luck, bad debt and a bad credit score priced her out of her apartment in Bellevue, another suburb of Seattle, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.
Bellevue is full of tech exec types and is horribly expensive. I suspect her job is there and she either doesn't want to have to commute or doesn't want to transfer to somewhere more affordable.
Not sure how this figures in but the State Of Washington lists her salary for 2022 as about $50k.
Nice raise if the Times figure is correct. I have questions.
I'm in Seattle right now visiting friends - used to live here when it was the height of grunge and the beginnings of craft brewing. The homeless problem seems less now than a year or two ago, I was commenting to our friend; he said it's because they're arresting homeless people and transporting them to the nearby towns like Kent. He thought this was appropriate and was scornful of the people who were upset by it because they moved to the burbs to get away from Seattle's problems.
My first thought was that it would seem logical to me that the needed social services are likely to be in Seattle than in a small town. But I don't know that for sure; maybe they're allocating resources to where they're taking people. In any case, the policy seems to me to be just NIMBY for affluent progressives.
Maybe this parking lot thing is too. Not my circus; not my monkeys.
Blogger Tom T. said...
The whole situation cries out, "drug addiction."
Or psychosis. More than n50% of homeless were psychotic back before cities started paying them.
If you want to see an alternate view of living in your car check out CheepRVLiving on YouTube. Plenty of very happy people living in their cars, vans, campers. Bob Wells also has a website with the same name. In January all the folks living in their cars/vans meet on the CA/AZ border. (They used to have a burning van ceremony at the end - burning a small cardboard replica of a van.)
In my area we occasionally get people with poorly behaved dogs who are homeless because they have been evicted from "no pet" apartments when they smuggled their dogs in, or are unwilling to pay the additional 'pet fee' for monthly rent in places that will allow pets.
So they choose to be homeless rather than rehoming their dog. Which is their choice but is also a completely different issue from those who can't afford any home at all, and I don't think we ought to concentrate resources on "I just don't WANT any of the apartments I can afford and would rather keep my dog and live in a tent."
"who earns over $72,000 a year"
It's a mystery.
"But a combination of bad luck, bad debt and a bad credit score priced her out of her apartment in Bellevue, another suburb of Seattle, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country."
Since she has a car, couldn't she get an apartment further away in a cheaper area and commute? (Like the rest of us.)
What was the shocking part - that someone making $72k is homeless, or that social work pays $72k per year?
Bad jones
Dat’s whatcha got, dat’s whatcha got
Supply and demand. It's difficult to build new supply, especially in blue cities and states. We are also admitting millions of newcomers each year thanks to blue policies. Maybe this can be a teachable moment as they say.
Years ago in Iowa a Vietnamese refugee lived in his old beat up station wagon in the parking lot of the plant he worked at. Someone gave him a crock pot so he cooked pigeon eggs he collected in the rafters using the old electric engine block heater plugs in the lot. He thought he was very well off.
Oh my, that’s CheapRVLiving on YouTube! Sorry about the misspelling!
Lake Washington United Methodist is located in Kirkland, not Seattle. Kirkland is not a neighborhood of Seattle. It is an independent city.
I'm not sure why Seattle Scofflaw polices are being followed.
Quartzite Arizona in January is a thing to behold. Gem and mineral dealers from all over the world (the ones too shabby to make the Tucson gen and mineral show), brik a brak, junk, antiques, swap meet crap, the naked bookstore owner, and of course, all the bums and van/car life people. My family and I will be there again this year for the tenth year running. We desert camp, buy gems and whatnot, and have dinner at the yacht club. Then we donate our dollar store pillows to some random bums along with whatever is left of our whiskey and wine. Good times. One of my sons is returning from Ireland to make the trip with us again. It's a family tradition.
That Biden economy.
Imagine if we werent so fortunate?
"There is something missing in this situation. No one making $72,000 a year and getting government health benefits needs to live in a car."
That was the thing that jumped out at me, too. I could see how a fast food worker might not have much in the way of health insurance, but a government job that pays $72k/year is hardly entry-level work.
"I was commenting to our friend; he said it's because they're arresting homeless people and transporting them to the nearby towns like Kent. He thought this was appropriate and was scornful of the people who were upset by it because they moved to the burbs to get away from Seattle's problems."
And if I was a resident of Kent I'd see about having the city leaders instruct the local police to transport them right back to Seattle.
@Jaime
I live in Portland, and I am familiar with the weird punitive attitude of homeless advocates who feel that for some reason middle class people must pay a penance for the existence of homeless people. Somehow it's my fault.
Fuck you, no it's not.
The other thing people say is that if they are not allowed to camp on a street that they'll just go somewhere else.
I don't care. They have to be somewhere, but they don't have to be where I am. That's a win for me. I don't understand why I, and everyone else, are somehow at fault for not wanting the trash and violence.
Not every possible choice has to be possible or survivable. It's not my duty, or anyone's duty, to accommodate every possible bad decision.
The 26-year-old daughter is a college student, who helps her mother deliver for DoorDash. I'd loved to know where she's enrolled, what she's studying and why she doesn't have a 20-hour-a-week job to help pay the bills.
My synagogue is starting a "safe parking" program with a church. (We share a large parking lot.) There are lots of working people who can't afford rent in Silicon Valley, but few earn that much money -- and with health benefits!
Things what don't add up:
1. $72 K income and still homeless. But has a car. If she commuted from any number of small towns and rural areas less than one hour away she should be able to afford home plus commute on that salary. Millions of us in this area do that very thing.
2. Seattle ordinances don't apply in Kirkland, which is an entirely different city separated from Seattle by a large body of water. The Seattle ordinance is therefore a non-sequitur.
3. She was living in Bellevue, one of the most expensive places in the Puget Sound area, but how does she go straight from that to homeless without hitting intermediately priced housing a little farther out?
Conclusion: the NYT is being sold a bill of goods and does not anyone on the story who knows anything about Washington State (and can't access a map), or the NYT does know these things but is deliberately not letting it get in the way of the narrative.
Plenty of people local to the Seattle area just in these comments are calling this out. Now think of all the articles the New York Times runs: how likely is it that the Seattle area is the only one where they get it so badly wrong?
Journalism is the selective recitation of facts in support of a pre-chosen narrative.
"I believe in the future I may live in my car,
My radio tuned to the voice of star."
I wish I had saved the substack link to a fairly persuasive article that tied homelessness largely to the affordability of housing in a given area. If I recall the arguments they were that the mentally ill/substance abusing population levels don't vary that much, and that for most other variables (assistance/welfare, climate, etc) you can find comparable locations with widely different levels of homeless populations.
"Now think of all the articles the New York Times runs: how likely is it that the Seattle area is the only one where they get it so badly wrong?"
How likely? Not very.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” ― Michael Crichton
Damn student loans…
"I wish I had saved the substack link to a fairly persuasive article that tied homelessness largely to the affordability of housing in a given area."
Bullshit. "Homelessness" is tied quite directly to the amount of money the city administration pays people to come and be homeless in their city. In places where the city administration does not pay people to be homeless, there are no homeless people. It's a very competitive market, up and down I-5. Seattle, Portland, Eugene, SF, LA. They have to keep raising taxes so they can afford to have an "unhoused community". Of course, most of the money goes to the various consultants and activists and non-profits and other parasites. They have college degrees!
Gabriel said...
Conclusion: the NYT is being sold a bill of goods...
No, being typical American news media they are running up with fists full of cash yelling; "Please! Take my money!".
They will wring their hands over the worst slobs and scoundrels then pat themselves on the back for doing so.
"of a star."
In a hurry.
No one making $72,000 a year and getting government health benefits needs to live in a car.
Drugs ain't cheap.
King County put together a 10-year plan to end homelessness. Sixteen years ago. Along with Seattle, they created the King County Homeless Authority and hired Mark Dones to run it. Dones was interviewed by John Carlson, the morning host for KVI570 conservative radio. Dones was a nincompoop, who was an expert at buzzword bingo, but had no clue on how to handle homelessness.
Dones recently resigned after running the KCHA into the ground, with no reduction in homelessness, but a substantial increase. The homeless have turned Seattle into another shithole (literally) city. Crime is rampant, stores are closing left and right. Bartell Drugs closed all their Seattle locations because of shoplifting. A pregnant mother was gunned down in downtown Seattle by a deranged druggie. The busses have become traveling drug dens, with drug fumes permeating the interiors. Ridership is way down, as are fare collections.
King County is complaining about its taxing ability. After buying up motels and paying premium prices for them, funding the Homeless Industrial Complex for no results (over $1B since it declared the crisis, 16-ya), it is crying poverty and demanding a sales tax bump and complaining about the 1%/year limit on property tax increases. NO WAY.
rejham,
Allowing people to sleep in their car is not compassion...
So forbidding them to sleep in their car would be?
"it is crying poverty and demanding a sales tax bump and complaining about the 1%/year limit on property tax increases."
Progressives won't be happy with anything less than a 100% tax rate. And probably not even then.
I’d love to know what the commenters thought. Why can’t she and the daughter rent a cheap place with some friends? I wonder what her co-workers will think after they read this? Something’s missing from this story.
"forced to"
My granddaughter graduated from from college in under 5 years. She worked 30 hrs a week in a grocery store the entire time to pay her apt rent, food, and bills. She's now a cell & molecular biology scientist.
Lake Washington United Method Church is offering a safe place for women and children who are victims of domestic violence. That's really the only story here.
We prevented Urban Sprawl, we got Urban Squalor.
Who could believe this story is accurate or representative of homelessness? So why publish it?
Ironically, to support the homelessness industry.
How many times did this well-employed woman pass bad checks or fail to pay credit cards to be so undesirable to any landlord or subsidized program? Why is her 26-year-old daughter still "in college" instead of working regularly to help pay rent? Why doesn't a social worker know how to enroll herself in a program to improve her bad credit history or get help filing taxes as head of household to her daughter, which would certainly qualify them for the programs she claims she cannot access? Isn't it likely that the churches that offer parking lot spaces screen applicants and prefer those with jobs, so the writers are offering utterly dishonest "statistics" about percentages of homeless people with jobs by counting heads there? Why are her health insurance benefits not included in the story?
Are homeless social workers the new "homeless sex offenders living under bridges" according to the Times?
Blogger RMc said...
"Drugs ain't cheap."
The funny thing is, this just isn't true anymore. Drugs are now VERY cheap. $2 -$3 a pill for fentanyl, and $125/oz for crystal meth are the numbers I'm hearing from currently active users. These are shockingly low prices, and explain a lot of the human wreckage out on the streets. I'm surprised that things aren't worse than they are now, but I expect that they will be.
"There is something missing in this situation. No one making $72,000 a year and getting government health benefits needs to live in a car."
$72,000.00 isn't really that much money anymore, relative to the costs of things (especially if 72K is the gross income, not the net). At the same time, it is high enough to suggest the area where she is located may have comparatively expensive housing. I find it easy to imagine someone with that income lacking the funds (or credit) to buy a house.
Lots of people who lack the funds to buy a house rent one instead. Or maybe an apartment. $72k/year is enough to do that. Sure, housing is expensive in some places. So you don't look there, you look where it's cheaper. It's not rocket science.
Old and slow at 637 is correct.
The opening of the Southern border to all and sundry was a gift--probably a knowing gift--to the drug cartels.
Tina Trent at 554 is also correct. The whole story reeks.
According to Zillow, there are hundreds of two-bedroom apartments near Kirkland (Bothell, Lynnwood, Everett) for $1500 to $2000 per month. There is no reason that the average person making $72,000 per year (aka $6,000/month) cannot find an adequate place to live, unless there is something that the NYT "forgot" to mention.
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