City council has recently: Outlawed the use of chemical weapons, slashed the police budget, increased funding to community programs by tens of millions of dollars, created a rent relief program for tenants during Covid, increased minimum wage, increased taxes on high earning large corporations, and more.
All of these have a materially positive effect on the people of Seattle.
I disagree with your assessment of "materially positive".
Police response times have been dismal in my neighborhood in North Seattle, and crime has increased. The maintenance man who worked with my wife downtown was murdered by a tenant recently because there was not enough police resources to accompany the eviction of a tenant who was making violent threats.
The community programs have had no noticeable effect on poverty or homelessness rates, as prosecution and drug court diversion has been discarded. I see needles most times I go for a neighborhood walk, and the children's playground is currently occupied by vagrants who are chopping down trees in our park.
The minimum wage laws pushed my young brother-in-law out of full-time employment in 2019 and led to his moving out of state. Multiple local shops and restaurants have closed over the last few years because they can't keep up with rising artificially imposed costs. The new taxes on businesses and high earners has led to Amazon moving 25,000 jobs out of the city to the east side.
> The community programs have had no noticeable effect on poverty or homelessness rates
I'd be surprised if they did, as they were approved last week.
> Police response times have been dismal in my neighborhood in North Seattle
This sounds like a problem with the police dept independent of funding levels, as the funding was only reduced last week. (I also live in North Seattle, and I haven't seen data on crime increasing or decreasing. In general, I've seen lots of car prowls, but relatively low crime otherwise.
> Multiple local shops and restaurants have closed over the last few years because they can't keep up with rising artificially imposed costs.
This is always the way business works. If those businesses relied on exploiting laborers to make ends meet, then maybe it's better that they are being replaced with other businesses that don't? Also, from what I've seen, rising rents are much more problematic for businesses in North Seattle.
> The new taxes on businesses and high earners has led to Amazon moving 25,000 jobs out of the city to the east side.
I'm not sure they did. Did Amazon reduce their investment in Seattle by 25k? Or did they simply increase it by 25K outside of their core area while they also increased in their core area? The increase in taxes is also relatively recent, so there's no way that Amazon did this in response to a tax increase (as siting 25,000 people takes years of planning.)
Do you have some citations that this is the recent policy of the city?
I agree that a decade or more ago, the city absolutely bungled their housing planning. The current city council has been, from what I've seen, trying to open up development through permitting more Accessory Dwelling Units in residential areas [1], increasing the zoning in many neighborhoods in Seattle [2].
The City Council banned the ownership and use of chemical weapons and undirected crowd control munitions (e.g. blast balls) by the police dept (or their allies). The police were flooding residential areas with CS gas to the point that, at times, you couldn't see down a block.
All of these have a materially positive effect on the people of Seattle.