So I work at Microsoft and I live in Redmond (Seattle suburb). I live in a large neighborhood that is 95% Indian families. My family is white and my daughter is the only white girl on the playground. It's a weird change from growing up in a place that was 95% white people for most of my life. Everyone is friendly but it hasn't been easy for us to integrate hyper-locally. I sometimes feel like our family is intruding in this neighborhood with our non-Indian-ness.
I've noticed that there are lots of teams that are primarily Indian folks and this is true not just of the contractors and India based teams. I really don't know about the dynamics of the caste system and whether not they are at play within MSFT, AMZN or other Seattle/tech companies, but just like most (all?) ethnicities there is certainly a tendency to stick together and live in the same areas / work on the same teams from what I've seen.
On a mostly unrelated note, Seattle proper (as I mentioned, I live in a suburb which is an affluent one) has really gone downhill in the last 10 years. The homeless/drug problem is very bad and the local government seems so entirely incompetent to do anything other than woke signaling.
> On a mostly unrelated note, Seattle proper (as I mentioned, I live in a suburb which is an affluent one) has really gone downhill in the last 10 years. The homeless/drug problem is very bad and the local government seems so entirely incompetent to do anything other than woke signaling.
I don't mean to be unduly harsh (yet probably will come across that way anyway) but did we have to drag that into this conversation? I have lived in Seattle my entire life, was born in Ballard, and raised two kids here. It's getting kind of frustrating that every time my hometown comes up, someone inevitably mentions this without bringing up any of the complexities as to why. (For one, it would be nice if your suburb, nominally one of Seattle's regional partners in the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, would actually do their part and construct some social services for various groups.)
Our mayor, who lives half-time in Bellevue I hasten to point out, is busy saying it's all the Council's fault and the Council passes budget items and ordinances that the mayor simply ignores. Meanwhile, every city in the region is busy shoving everyone who looks like they earn less than $75,000 per year over to Seattle and then crying about how Seattle is "doing nothing".
The Council is attempting to do something good, so sure, let's bring up the massive social services crisis that's by no means unique to Seattle or Puget Sound, but probably looks like a Seattle-specific problem from a perch on the Eastside.
> It's getting kind of frustrating that every time my hometown comes up, someone inevitably mentions this without bringing up any of the complexities as to why.
Maybe because it is true and that’s hard for you to face?
I didn’t grow up in Seattle, but I lived in the city for 25 years. The problems have only exponentially increased over the last decade. The pandemic didn’t help things either.
For all the posturing, Seattle doesn’t ACTUALLY want to fix anything. They want to do things that get them karma on social media, that keep politicians getting re-elected. Politicians, churches, average citizens, doesn’t matter. A dramatic change is needed in Seattle to make it better for everyone involved, but I don’t see that happening in my lifetime.
FWIW I lived in Seattle for 4 months in 2019 and was shocked at how abhorrent the downtown has gotten, compared to how it was in 2013. I’ve lived in cities all over the east coast, and none of them have compared to the amount of poverty and drug culture I saw in Seattle.
I moved to NYC and couldn’t be happier. I’m genuinely of the opinion that Seattle, Portland, SF, etc are broken and any comments which try to downplay that are only making things worse in the long run.
Maybe the issue lies with America not Seattle? A harsh unforgiving society coupled with a lack of a social safety net.
Throw in easy access to drugs and things go to hell quickly.
That is so easy to disprove. SF spends 1.1B on homelessness (more than 50K per homeless person). Federal government spends 6-700B on medicaid (health services for poor). California's 2022-23 spending plan provides over $25 billion from the General Fund for human services programs.
Maybe, you can complain that that spending is "inefficient", but that becomes a political barb-trading after that.
These cities also have a housing affordability issue. They all refuse to build enough housing - especially mixed development. It’s not really a shock as to why homelessness is rising when you literally can’t afford a roof and everything else gets more expensive because of landlords leaching all the money out of the economy.
It's replicated all over America, because the zoning policies adopted in the 70s-90s have proven disastrous, but Seattle is absolutely responsible for its part in failing to build enough housing to keep up with growth.
These problems don't exist in NEARLY the same magnitude in the rest of the country. Fucking Detroit is a much nicer place to be than Seattle now, because _they're working on fixing their problems_. Seattle just blames Trump and warns against hobophobia, then continues along blindly.
Homeless services have probably gotten better in the last 10 years (I assume) while homelessness has gotten much worse. I assume the underlying issue isn’t the services but rather something else. My guess is housing has become too expensive.
Because it has endless strings, hoops, paperwork, and relinquishing freedom attached to it that no one in their right mind would go through or agree with, let alone people who are homeless and barely have the capacity to wake up in the morning.
For some yes, but I'm specifically talking about the cohort who choose that lifestyle and wouldn't take housing no matter what. They prefer to live in a tent in the hillside, with not a shred of responsibility or authority telling them what to do. Many use substances. Our modern society has largely given them the Ok to live this lifestyle with minimal friction, and so they will continue to live it because it's what they desire to do.
My understanding is that around 60-70% of the homeless in SF used to have a home/work and wish to be productive members of society but have fallen on hard times for one reason or another. So 30-40% are in the "wouldn't take the housing if you gave it to them" group.
Housing has gotten more expensive and there's been a huge wave of immigration to the region. I've lived here 35 years, the resistance from single family homeowners on any push to improve is staggering.
I’m not as plugged into local politics as you seem to be, but I’ve lived in Redmond and now live in Seattle. I have never felt unsafe, or like things were “very bad.” There seems to be a lot of pearl clutching because some homeless people exist in a large city. A city that has grown significantly in the last decade (and the decade before that). I’d like for those folks to be thrown a ladder as much as anyone.
Credit where credit is due, the east side has way nicer roads. Money helps, I suppose.
Eastside also buses homeless folks out (or at least used to). They very much care about the facade of cleanliness on the Eastside but not about people nearly as much.
And yeah, agree with you and the parent poster - the issue isn't unique to Seattle, local areas aren't doing enough, and housing has not met demand.
They don’t bus anymore. They just enforce laws really strict so Seattle looks appealing (where laws are more loosely enforced), and then metro won’t stop you from boarding if you can’t pay the fare.
If only. KC judges and prosecutors are loathe to put people in jail these days. They were even talking about releasing that guy who bashed in the head of an Amazon worker in beltown.
In Seattle you can throw up a tent and you might have to remove it a few weeks later. In Bellevue, you lay down on a bench and swat is out in 5 minutes (even if you won’t go to jail, the police will harass you enough that you’ll leave). Bellevue makes it annoying to do illegal things, Seattle makes it convenient, so of course they are going to head to Seattle, it’s simply the path of least resistance.
It is illegal to ban camping unless free housing is available: https://mrsc.org/stay-informed/mrsc-insight/october-2022/new... It's Bellevue that is violating the law by enforcing an unconstitutional ordinance, rather than the people sleeping on benches.
It’s basically enforce laws aggressively, and make the problem go to the more permissive city. It wouldn’t work if Seattle police started enforcing laws, Bellevue would be screwed at that point.
Bellevue doesn’t really have to directly shunt people to Seattle. All they have to do is be annoying enough in strictly enforcing their laws (via arrest, even if king county won’t prosecute), which just makes it more convenient to be in Seattle if you want to sleep on a bench or something (Bellevue will have swat out in 5 minutes if you so much as lay down on a bench in a park). And there is a huge fentanyl crisis going on, and Seattle’s drug permissive law enforcement just means we get more of it (especially here in Ballard).
I lived in the city proper for a long time and only moved out (Tacoma - I wonder what your opinion is of here?) post-pandemic, and honestly the city was never that bad for the most part. Now, there are tougher parts, sure. But I think a lot of the city is fine. You may see someone doing drugs in broad daylight but that is never actually dangerous to me in my experience.
Why wouldn't the caste system be in play? If you imagine a company in a foreign country that hired a lot of Americans, would you not expect the same problems with racial discrimination that happen in the US to arise among these American employees?
Having worked at the overseas operation of an American company that had a lot of American expats, no, not really, because those expats are not a random sampling of American society: they're overwhelmingly white and Asian, and the few that weren't were all upper class/highly educated and not viewed as threats.
You can see the same effect in the Indian diaspora in America as well. I'm having trouble finding stats on this, but by and large it's also highly educated, from the upper crust of society in India, overwhelmingly Brahmin and many groups (eg. Gujaratis) are statistically overrepresented compared to the Indian population at large.
I have this theory that caste discrimination is more common in the US for some of the reasons you told. First of all India banned caste discrimination a long time ago and has an affirmative-action-like law that discriminates in the other direction against upper castes for things like university placement. Caste discrimination (upper caste against lower) is still a thing there but I wasn't really aware of it being seen as a pressing issue in India and it gets merged into religious and ethnic conflict.
My friend is Brahmin but non practicing. For her it's just something she is proud of and a lot of upper caste Indians end up going to the US for school because they didn't get into IIT. There are big differences between the older and younger generations but I wonder if maybe the immigrants from India come here with kind of their own distinct culture where caste is a part of identity so not having that caste makes you an outsider here. idk =/
Not necessarily: foreign workers are a not at all representative of the country they come from, there's huge selection bias at play. For a real-world case, the vast majority of Russian co-workers I've met over the course of my software career are very much against the invasion of Ukraine versus ~70% of the Russian populace as a whole. I don't think this is preference falsification, given that they're open about other things like opposition to NATO expansion. This disparity exists even inside of Russia, professionals support the war less than average, but I bet among people who choose to work abroad there's greater degree of cosmopolitanism [1]. And for discrimination, I bet foreign workers are more empathetic about discrimination being a minority themselves in a different country. Of course every company should be vigilant against discrimination, regardless of the demographics of their workforce.
Yeah this is very true. I'm Indian born in the Bay Area and oddly enough there's entire apartment communities that end up being 95% indian families because of costs/school districts. This translates to housing too (Mountain House, San Ramon) though it typically has nothing to do with caste, just circumstance.
I just came back from attending a conference in the US. I stopped by san francisco to visit a friend before going to DC for the conference. I hadn't been in DC before but visited California 10 years ago. I was surprised by how pervasive homelessness and drug use was in both places too, especially San Francisco where it definitely felt like things took a turn for the worse. Even in DC there were guys just collapsed on the sidewalk, not sure from drug use or whatever (there were people there who called an ambulance). People also just didn't seem very happy in general, although I could be imagining that since I was only there for a few days. In any case it was very surprising and not quite what I expected.
I've lived in Seattle for almost 40 years. The homeless issue is not really unique to our city, and there's a hugely complex systemic set of issues causing it. (Not least of which is the incredibly high median income driving up home prices, due in part to tech immigration).
The city council has been trying to fix the issue, but had been stalled by the mayor, stalled by other cities in the region, and stalled in how they can build systemic fixes.
Eastside is tougher on crime, more conservative, and actually enforces laws frequently unlike Seattle, which is more progressive and extremely soft on crime.
A man bashed in the head of a female Amazon software engineer in Seattle and last I checked, they were considering letting him go free.
But getting back to my original question, I seriously doubt "tough on crime" policies in Redmond were implemented to help the homeless. More likely, they were implemented to keep poor people away.
My theory is that most people complaining about homelessness in cities like Seattle don't actually care about the homeless people. What they care about is that they have to see homelessness. So long as homelessness isn't visible then it's not a problem and whether that's done through charity or relocation or incarceration is irrelevant.
But I hope I'm wrong! I'd like to believe people aren't that cruel, so if Redmond has a solution that is compassionate and helpful I would genuinely love to know what they're doing.
How would living in Seattle proper provide a qualitatively different perspective from living in Redmond and visiting? Are you saying you eventually get used to people on mind altering drugs living in tents (sometimes growling at you as you walk by), and it stops bothering you? Genuinely asking. I have a similar opinion of the city but also have never lived on that side of the lake, and I wonder what I am missing…
It gives you an actual sense of what is dangerous rather than one built upon fear of the unknown and media spin, mostly.
I went up to Seattle recently and spent an evening running around Belltown. Not the nicest area of the city but also not the worst. I lived there for years. It was fine. I did see and interact with homeless people and I wouldn't be surprised if some were high.
Thanks for the reply. The Eastside is for sure boring. I agree that media consumption in general leads to instinctive overestimation of danger, since our brains are built to live in small villages where if you hear about 10 people being assaulted in a year it means you are really in serious danger of being assaulted personally. Whereas in a city, 10 assaults barely moves the needle in terms of actual risk to each person, and our instincts can’t tell the difference.
It’s interesting though, if I’m hearing you correctly you are indeed basically saying that you do become desensitized to the ambient homeless through exposure over time. This is assuming that a person without any media exposure at all would still find the homeless situation shocking and unpleasant to be around, which I imagine you wouldn’t disagree with?
“Shocking” — hardly, given the aforementioned extensive media coverage of the situation.
“Unpleasant to be around” — I personally find lots of folks unpleasant to be around; the homeless fall somewhere in the middle of the scale. I’m far less concerned with their drug use than with the intoxication of people owning and operating cars, for example. I know far more people negatively and physically impacted by DUI than by random assault by the homeless.
I’m also less bothered by the existence of folks without homes than I am by folks who — upon registering their own discomfort with the situation — seek to move the problem out of view rather than addressing the root cause.
The process you’re seeking to describe as a “desensitization” is instead a growing comfort with a larger swath of communities than folks who don’t live in such cities are fortunate enough to encounter. In reality, it would seem that desensitization actually occurs when folks are exposed to endlessly “othering” media, with very little personal experience to speak of.
Policing has taken a similar path from “community engagement based decision making” to “birds eye statistical algorithmic policing”. It’s going about as well as addressing the actual causes of homelessness.
To split hairs: I would have to assume any person capable of visiting an American city, but somehow without any media exposure at all would have to be homeless themselves, and people are generally not shocked by others living their same experience.
I’m trying to think of another scenario where such a hypothetical person might exist, but my imagination fails me.
Yes, you are totally correct that such a person would probably not visit Seattle. That part of my reply was an abstract clarifying question aimed at "It gives you an actual sense of what is dangerous rather than one built upon fear of the unknown and media spin".
I.e. the negative feeling one gets when one is in a city with people living in tents as they do in Seattle today is not necessarily strictly or even primarily due to media consumption, because (I assert) a theoretical human unexposed to media would still have a qualitatively-same instinctive negative reaction. Do you disagree? If so I am interested in why you disagree.
For example, if you somehow talked an orthodox Amish person into visiting Seattle with you (and perhaps had them read a few books about what cities are like in general first), they would still be shocked by the tent areas and find them unpleasant, despite never being exposed to whatever news outlets you consider inflammatory, immoral, incorrect, etc (and I do agree that all news outlets are all of these things, I personally avoid the stuff).
Relatedly, if you then asked the Amish person if they would prefer to stay in Seattle and help try to fix the problem, or to just return to their Amish village and ignore the problem, I think they would 100% of the time go with the latter? Are they wrong?
No the Amish person is not wrong to return home in such a situation -- in that scenario, it sounds like the Amish person doesn't like the realities of city life, and therefore chooses to remove themselves from the situation, as they dislike elements of the city, and are unwilling to work to address them at their root causes. As opposed to trying to get someone else removed.
My position is that people who do not want to do the work needed to actually combat homelessness -- not simply shift it around -- should move out of the city. They are a selfish drain of city resources, demanding with their greater personal resources that ever greater public resources be spent on their personal peace of mind. A peace of mind that comes at the expense of additional resources directed at actually addressing the issues, long-term.
City life and its advantages are guaranteed to nobody. You have to contribute to your community in order for it to improve. Same with rural life, just in another direction.
But to return to your initial point about a visiting Amish -- the Amish have an existing modern culture and plenty of exposure to media. The real test would be a member of an uncontacted tribe.
Should such a person suddenly find themselves downtown, which do you think they would find more "shocking and unpleasant" -- the group of people living communally and nomadically, or the individual folks in giant metal machines spewing cancerous fog into our shared atmosphere, so they can get to work on time?
Let me dwell for a moment on your nitpicking dismissal of the Amish example. My understanding of the spirit of Amishness is basically to live within a cultural snapshot of preindustrial Germany, since with postindustrial life comes a huge web of dependencies on other people where, if the web collapses, most of us will die. The Amish have placed a very long bet, and it is not clear to me that it will turn out to have been an unwise bet in the end. Sure, more liberal Amish do accept some technology and contact with the outside world, but I believe orthodox Amish, at least aspirationally, do not.
We today are culturally massively(!!!) more similar to preindustrial Germany than to hunter gatherer tribes, and the orthodox Amish are at least abstractly aware of modern technology existing in the outside world. Jumping all the way to hunter gatherers drags in a huge amount of unnecessary confounding factors. Yes, quite obviously, hunter gatherers would be more surprised by cars than by tent people. I believe the Amish would see cars as dirty mechanized wagons, whereas hunter gatherers would see them as (evil?) magic. Also, one can be shocked by more than one thing at a time, and the presence of one type of shock does not invalidate the others.
Just because homelessness is not the worst modern problem, does not mean it is not a problem. The fact that it is a recent problem here in America (to the degree we see it today, anyway) suggests that it may be more tractable than, say, cars or industry (which I don't disagree are also problems).
I agree that people who do not want to contribute to a community should leave. There is an interesting symmetry here though - do you feel the same way about non-native (to the city) homeless? Are the homeless contributing? Or are they exempt from this requirement? I assume you will say they are exempt or that they are contributing in some way, and if you don't mind I am interested to hear your reasoning.
Answering this earnestly with the assumption that the final paragraph is in good faith. And stating for the record that the below summarizes my attempt to imagine the best we could do with the ingredients we have. If I were building a world out of whole cloth, my ambition would be grander.
To be clear about the whole Amish/uncontacted tribe/et all scenarios -- the point I intended (but perhaps did not make) was that I'm not especially interested in what hypothetical people think about anything. They don't exist. Every single real world example suffers from problems in the vein of those present with the Amish example. Kowtowing to the needs of hypothetical people has, historically, caused far greater harm than good.
To your questions -- my beliefs in this arena largely boil down to this: each member of a community has an inherent responsibility to contribute that which they are able, both in terms of ability and in terms of resources. No more, but also no less.
The reason this responsibility exists is that every member's success is inextricably linked with their community -- because success (beyond sheer survival) is measured by community. One cannot exist without the other -- and a high tide lifts all boats. In our current global system, living outside of any community is, practically, impossible -- so the responsibility is inherent.
Homeless are not exempt, but consideration would be made for the distinction between folks of comfortable means versus those living on a day-by-day basis. One group has resources and ability in excess of their needs. Another group lacks the resources to sustain ability. To lift them up is to lift the community. Sure some folks would refuse to change in accordance with societal standards -- but a lot less than you might expect, once the barriers of social shame, inefficient and needlessly cruel bureaucracy, and infantilization are removed. And yes, were we to implement this tomorrow, the above wouldn't happen overnight. The point is consistency and transparency in service of making everyone understand that they the individual is part of a greater whole.
Which is to say: I believe that the more one contributes to a community, the more the community becomes what it's meant to be: a collection of disparate people making up a symbiotic human ecosystem.
Obviously this system assumes folks acting in good faith, which feels lacking at the moment. But I'm hardly alone in believing that lack is due in large part to the current lack of everyone having skin the game, due to policies pushing problems back and forth, costing everyone money and attention, and accomplishing nothing but creating frustrated factions.
I mean, someone from rural America who never watches the news would likely feel scared in Seattle. Doesn't mean they are an any point during that fear in any danger.
Framing it as desensitization isn't quite right. That implies that the city folk are mistaken in their perceptions and can't see how bad or dangerous their surroundings are. The city folk have a more correct view of the city than suburbanites and out-of-towners.
If anyone is desensitized to homelessness in the city, it's the people who no longer treat the homeless as people imo.
(sorry for the delayed reply - I would've preferred to be prompt to keep things conversational. But HN said I was going too fast and blocked me from commenting for a while. Which makes me think I got muted due to flagging or something. I posted 3 replies here about Seattle and got immediately hit with it).
Thanks for a level headed reply on this contentious topic.
By desensitization, I mean with respect to the negative instinctive feeling an unacclimated human has when they are in such an environment.
So then, you are saying that city folk eventually stop feeling this feeling, and it starts to feel normal (again, purely at an instinctive feelings level, not saying city folk start to think it is “okay” that people are homeless).
Agree that people living in a place always have a more accurate view on its qualities than outsiders do, and also agree that dehumanizing the homeless is an even greater degree of desensitization.
I wonder then if the normal feeling that comes represents the instinct actually turning off, or the instinct being habituated and simply no longer noticed by the conscious mind? If it’s the latter, then could this result in long term increased mental stress for people living in such cities? That sort of tracks…
The irony in Seattle being Kashma Sawant the socialist city council member for Capitol Hill being partially responsible for a lot of the chaos. I guess it just goes to show you can’t really generalize based on ethnicity.
I've noticed that there are lots of teams that are primarily Indian folks and this is true not just of the contractors and India based teams. I really don't know about the dynamics of the caste system and whether not they are at play within MSFT, AMZN or other Seattle/tech companies, but just like most (all?) ethnicities there is certainly a tendency to stick together and live in the same areas / work on the same teams from what I've seen.
On a mostly unrelated note, Seattle proper (as I mentioned, I live in a suburb which is an affluent one) has really gone downhill in the last 10 years. The homeless/drug problem is very bad and the local government seems so entirely incompetent to do anything other than woke signaling.