In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs

I think the solution is transforming a segment of incarceration into medical help, or expanding medical conservatorship.

If you smell like crap and can't sustain a life because of drug addictions or mental illness, and your behavior causes problems for society, you need to be helped, and maybe against your will.

The vast majority of homeless are actually not visible and look like and act like normal people. They often get out of being homeless in a few years. It's the chronic homeless who need help, might always need help, that ruin the public space for everyone else.

NYC has a right to shelter law. They also have enforcement of basic public space issues like camping and being in parks overnight, or petty street crime.

Those two things together are a good starting point for discussion.

I agree, after living in NYC my jaw did drop when I got to Seattle. I found Seattle to be incredibly clean, open, and welcoming – far less dingy and polluted than where I lived in Manhattan. Green everywhere. Never felt unsafe or taken advantage of. Eventually I moved from NYC to Seattle, and I don't think I'd ever move back.

Since I've been here, over the past 8-ish years, the homeless problem hasn't (in my opinion) become much more of a problem so much as it's become much more of a political issue. It's hard for me to tell if drug use and violence are actually up, or if reporting is up. When I visited in 2011, we were looking at an apartment that was listed on 1st Ave in Pioneer Square. We were charmed by the tree-lined street and the quaint shops leading from the Fairmont downtown toward Pioneer Square, but when we turned toward Occidental Sq (maybe 8 or 9am) we were suddenly in a mass of transient/homeless peoples waking up on the cobblestone. There were dozens of people, rolling up sleeping backs, loading backpacks, congregating. This was before the food trucks and the Weyerhauser building and the tied down tables and chairs and open-air ping pong tables displaced them, and even though it was jarring it also felt humane in a weird way that there was a place, out of the way, where they could go and be undisturbed. Pioneer Square also, of course, is where most of the homeless help centers are located (clinics, food banks, shelters).

But as the city has grown denser and real estate developers continue to squeeze every ounce of oxygen out of the city, these people have nowhere to go so they are forced out of the margins and into everyone else's line of sight and that's really the problem. In NYC it's not such a big deal, because NYC is already acclimated to this density that the homeless problem there is simply ignored. The indifference I witnessed toward the homeless in NYC was crazy to me when I moved there at first from the 'burbs... people walking around a guy masturbating on the sidewalk as they hopped out of their cabs, moaning about the delays in the subway when a homeless person was killed in a subway tunnel or soiled a car in the middle of summer. If only all of the U.S. cities could just "look past" these people instead of focusing so much on what a drag it is to see someone begging for change on my way to have bottomless mimosas.

"Widely debunked" is factually inaccurate. It has not been debunked at all. It is not popular and leads to a lot of emotional responses, and there was one particular mechnical error in a single table in the original paper (Foote and Goetz); it has been addressed by the authors and did not materially affect the basic analysis or high-level conclusion.

An independent study on the lead/crime hypothesis (impact of childhood lead exposure on criminality) came to a similar conclusion.[0] (Reyes is interviewed in the podcast linked below.) Finally, they recently published a 15-years on follow-up study, which showed continued support for the hypothesis.[1]

You can read a transcript of their most recent podcast on the subject here[2], or just go direct to the source material.

[0]: https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/get_the_lead_o...

[1]: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFI_WP_201975.pd...

[2]: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/

Optics aside, it seems like the obvious solution is to give people a free supply of safe drugs and a safe place to use them.

Drug users would be better off because their supply would be safe and they wouldn't need to resort to crime to pay for it. Current supervised consumption sites have also been extremely successful at preventing overdose deaths and somewhat successful at directing users who want treatment to the available resources.

The public would be better off because of the same crime reduction, as well as the reduction of violence and disorder stemming from black markets for illegal drugs. Public use would become so much more of a hassle than the legal alternative that it would likely disappear.

The government would be better off because acquiring currently-illegal drugs legally is super cheap (most of them literally grow on trees, or at least plants), and is almost certainly vastly cheaper than the current prohibition strategy.

The obvious problems:

- No one is going to want a consumption site anywhere near their neighborhood. - Some number of people who would otherwise quit might continue to use if it were cheap and easy. - Something along the lines of "I'd love to sit around all day watching TV and drinking beer but I have bills to pay and I don't want my taxes paying for some low-life to get high."