friends for lunch at a cool Mexican restaurant right in the middle of CHOP or CHAZ or whatever the hell that supposedly smoldering ash heap is called. ;) Beautiful day, lots of people out. Shit gets blown out of proportion.

At the same time, the downtown core of Seattle has issues with cleanliness and homelessness and public drug use that they need to clean up. Again, it's a complicated problem if you really want to solve the problem. It's caused by displacement due to lack of affordable housing, mostly, and as a result it is more ubiquitous. When I first moved to Seattle in 1980, most of that was confined to certain neighborhoods around what's called Yesler Terrace or Skid Road (that name originated in Seattle I found out because the road was dirt and used to skid logs down to the waterfront with the road itself surrounded by bars and whorehouses!). Those places were older with cheap shelter and have, over the course of the years gentrified with condos for tech workers and other urban professionals.

Most cities are facing similar issues of one form or another. It will cost money to fix and also require a rethinking of housing priorities.