Camped

A small homeless encampment on a sidewalk in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood.

Everyone has an opinion about the fairly large population of homeless people who live in the greater Seattle area. Whether they're viewed as slackers, victims of corporate greed or threats to public safety and health, no one wants to do the one thing that would actually help the situation; increase the amount of local housing stock to the point that prices come down. The Puget Sound region, like a lot of urban areas populated by the well-educated and reasonably affluent, has significant regulatory restrictions on where housing can be built. In this case, the goal was preserve open spaces and rural communities. But the side effect was to keep the housing supply from growing with the demand. And that mismatch has made a number of people quite "house rich," as they like to say. Lowering home prices is a direct threat to their property values, and thus, home equity. And so people complain about tents in the street, secure in the knowledge that they won't be asked to lose a dime to remove them. And no lawmaker is going to create the circumstances that removes them at the cost of billions of dollars of paper wealth being erased. People would rather scowl all the way to the bank.