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A neighborhood public safety walk focused on Broadway and Pike this spring
Broadway and Pike is so challenged by the confluence of addiction, mental health issues, and street disorder that it is listed twice in the City Auditor’s just-released report focusing on Seattle’s worst areas of “Crime and Overdose Concentration.”
Seattle City Council president Sara Nelson says she is acting immediately to enact recommendations from the new report focused on “existing resources and evidence-based strategies that have proved effective in other jurisdictions in addressing the overlapping issues of fentanyl-driven overdoses and crime.”
The dubious distinction for Broadway and Pike was arrived at by a Seattle Police Department and Seattle Fire analysis used at the base of the auditor’s report to determine where in the city crime and dangerous drug use were most overlapping. “We found that 10 continuous street segments had a combined count of crimes against persons and overdose incidents of 100 or greater, accounting for a disproportionate amount of co-occurrence,” the report reads.
Broadway from Union to Pine and E Pike “from 9th (Harvard) to 11th” were ranked in 6th and 10th place on the list, respectively.
Officials selected a stretch of 3rd Ave from Battery to Virginia as a case study to examine specific issues and interview organizations and business active in the area.
The issues around Broadway and Pike are well known. In June, CHS reported on a public safety plan being developed for the area by a group including business representatives and District 3 representative Joy Hollingsworth hoped to include new programs, increased police presence, support for local businesses, cleaning up the neighborhood, and more resources to help with people struggling with mental health, addiction, and homelessness in the area.
“I’m embarrassed about what’s been going on in the neighborhood,” Hollingsworth said during a meeting of the group earlier this year.
The councilmember took park in a neighborhood tour this spring that gave her and officials from Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office and the East Precinct a first-hand look at the challenges neighborhood business and property owners say are the result of open drug dealing and drug use and street disorder in the area surrounding Cal Anderson Park and the Broadway and Pike QFC.
The concerns at Pike and Broadway are larger than trash and human waste. In April, a woman was hospitalized in an overnight shooting in the parking lot above the Broadway and Pike QFC. Last spring, the drug trade on Nagle turned deadly. CHS reported here on the aftermath and hopes for improvements around the park following the murder in the street of brothers Ray and TT Wilford.
Hollingsworth says her office is starting discussions around extending a similar program to the $15 million-a-year Downtown Seattle Association’s ambassador program up into Pike/Pine that would put workers onto streets to help keep sidewalks and alleys clean and deal with low level public safety issues. That program could be paid for by fees levied on nearby businesses and properties.
More could also be done to address the design of the Harvard Market shopping center, its massive upper-level surface parking lot, and how its businesses could better connect to the surrounding streetscape.
Uncertainty around the future of the corner’s QFC will not help. The two QFC groceries on Broadway are both planned to be included in a major divestiture of locations as parent company Kroger and Albertsons work toward a $25 billion merger
At Seattle City Hall, Nelson says the council will first focus on the recommendations included in the auditor report including focusing on crime and overdose hot spots like Broadway at Pike, requiring more from service provider agencies to address the safety issues in those areas, and bring in more federal involvement to identify overdose spikes and prosecute fatal overdoses.
Nelson’s City Auditor Recommendations
- Adopting the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) place-based Strategic Prevention Framework to address crime and overdose hot spots.
- Using Snohomish County’s Multi-Agency Coordination Group as a model framework for coordinating City agencies in a unified approach.
- Examining current contracts with provider agencies to ensure they are meeting the “Good Neighbor” provisions.
- Developing a coordinated City plan for using local data derived from the federal Overdose Mapping and Application Program to respond to overdose spikes.
- Accepting assistance from the Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. Attorney to help the city investigate and prosecute fatal overdoses as they do in many other jurisdictions including Los Angeles and San Diego.
- Engaging in continuous evaluation of city efforts to best ensure that the new strategies and approaches avoid unintentionally creating harm.
The efforts could also include more funding to support city initiatives and property and business owner efforts to improve storefronts and surrounding sidewalks by filling empty shops, and keeping the areas around buildings clear and open to customers to prevent unmonitored, garbage and rental scooter-strewn areas from forming.
The audit report will be presented at Nelson’s Governance, Accountability & Economic Development Committee meeting on Thursday at 2 PM.
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At E Pike and Broadway and elsewhere.
There’s rarely a spot to lock my bike up w/o moving rental scooters. We need to figure something out for these things.
You can report problems with bike/scooter share in the Find It Fix It app
My advice – don’t leave your bike. Mine was stolen outside the other qfc in less than 10 minutes.
Time to move. Running this neighborhood into the ground. The majority of us are not lowering our standards. We are expecting the city to do it’s job and gave the chance. Now grocery stores could be exiting. Drugstores are far and few. I don’t blame businesses for leaving. The city is catering to a small group of addicts who don’t care about anything or themselves. That’s not going to change no matter how much “help” you offer. The city proved long ago they are incompetent and flat out liars of course. Time to go taxpayers. The city already feels it and is worried. Don’t support any new taxes or monetary support of city or SPD. And don’t believe all you read on other cities. So many cities, large and small, red and blue, managing their cities and valuing their actual residents more than Seattle even comprehends. They bank on passivity. Stop it people. Fight for yourself. Seattle you are not progressive. You are not innovative. You are not diverse. You are delusional, outdated and a joke to the community.
The drugstores that “left” were shuttered because Rite-Aid bought a beloved local chain and then went bankrupt paying out an opioid settlement. The fate of the QFCs on Broadway is down to a multi-billion dollar merger that was decided far our outside of Seattle city limits. How exactly is this “catering to a small group of addicts who don’t care about anything or themselves”? I’m not holding addicts blameless, but Seattle’s public policies would have affected these corporate decisions how? The city didn’t bring the case against Rite-Aid.
For those that have trouble connecting dots, the Seattle public policies that allow for lawlessness result in higher loss of product through shoplifting, higher costs for security, and declining revenue because firmer shoppers chose to shot elsewhere to avoid the drug sh*tshow. When corporation such as RiteAid go into bankruptcy or have other challenges, they close stores that have higher costs and declining revenue (like the stores on Capitol Hill and downtown) and leave open stores that have lower costs and increasing revenue.
Bartell’s would have been bankrupt without selling by now. They weren’t in good shape.
Question: what cities, in your opinion, are doing a better job of handling the twin housing & fentanyl crises with no additional monetary support, exactly?
Boston, New York, Denver, Nashville, Houston, Boise, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Minneapolis, Austin, Dallas, Sante Fe, Charlotte, Raleigh, Oklahoma City, Istanbul, San Jose, Mexico City, Tokyo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Madrid, Montreal, Quebec City, Bogota, Lisbon, London, Hong Kong, Beijing, Berlin, Zurich, Moscow, Oslo, Santiago, Seoul, Rome, Vienna, Burlington, Buffalo, Budapest, Riga, Helsinki, Dublin, Reykjavik, Edinborough…..
Have you been away from the west coast of the United States in the last 10 years?
So glad to finally have your support for harm reduction bud 😀
“New study concludes it’s time to rethink sobriety requirements for housing and offer more harm-reduction options”
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/boston-intersection-mass-and-cass-opioid-overdose-crisis/
Yes harm reduction ideology and the gaslighting to prop it up is spreading like an std. What a shame for Boston where they have a 10th of the encampments per capita and twice the police force. Hopefully their elected leaders take a trip to Seattle to see what “harm reduction” and decriminalization looks like as implemented in the United States before they allow the toxic ideology to spread across their public spaces and destroy their city.
Boston citizens (by way of Massachusetts) have a constitutional right to housing and the state is required to house every homeless person. The conservative, pro-homelessness, pearl-clutchers would lose their minds if something like that was proposed in Washington.
Also, Boston doesn’t have a super genius mayor and council president completely botching both the hiring of police officers and corruption/racist/sexist SPD problems, while blaming the previous council (that our council president conveniently leaves out that she as part of).
Istanbul? Not Constantinople?
Huzzah! Come on, everyone — to Oklahoma City!!!
So what you’re saying is that addicts are solely responsible for… the internet, the pandemic, opioid settlements, private equity takeovers, gradual failures of the social contract, and corporate mergers?
Umm, you do know the drugstores are closing because they are complicit in the opioid epidemic, which is also responsible for many of the people experiencing addiction right now… You’re blaming the victims and those trying to help them out after several large corporations acted as drug dealers…
I don’t understand why it takes months or years of studies, task forces and committees to do anything about the problems that are obvious to residents. Arrest the dealers, remove or arrest anyone consuming hard drugs in public, and we’ll have a pleasant and welcoming Capitol Hill again.
this is two blocks from the east precinct HQ. you think they are waiting for a study? they don’t care, even other SPD precincts know east doesn’t care. even if they did, the courts are full, the jails are full, the prosecutor’s office doesn’t have the time. the situation is not so simple or clear cut as you think.
Maybe they’re waiting for a massive grassroots movement to take over two intersections for a month, with a message of “we love cops, please police us”? “All Cops Are Great”*, “ACAG”, “1317”.
*Except for Frankie: you know what you did.
Once upon a time, Seattle’s progressive leaders and activists stood for the public good. Now they prioritize the right of drug addicts, drug dealers and criminals to privatize and destroy public spaces over the rights of everyone else. If it were saving lives, maybe they could make a case for this bizarre set of priorities, but in reality, they have exponentially increased overdose deaths and human suffering. At its core, this decade-long ideological shift and brain rot in Seattle politics represents some warped form of anarchist libertarianism with a goal of burning it all down. Well you succeed, but who wants to live in the world you created? This is a crisis of political will not a public health issue. In the last election we finally voted for change. The new council (looking at you Joy) and mayor need to step up and show that they can deliver results for Seattle and Capitol Hill by cleaning this sh*t up. We need a much stronger police presence, a camping ban, and enforcement.
I love how you’re ignoring the pandemic and a national homelessness and opioid epidemic, both of which brought on by corporate greed… Try focusing your ire on the people breaking laws that are making massive profits and your compassion towards the ones hunched over in a drug-induced paralysis trying, consciously or not, to erase their existence…
Yep this is what they’re talking about with Seattle people just defending the rights of junkies to do drugs anywhere they want and act in whatver way they want.
We made the mistake of taking our 4 year old out to lunch this past weekend in the area with the plan to then walk over to the bookstore. We encountered an completely naked man (who was quite unwell), someone passed out on the sidewalk and multiple people using Fentanyl. Not exactly the outing we had in mind with our toddler. I love Elliott Bay but I no longer feel comfortable visiting – I don’t need to surround myself with that, nor do I want to expose my kid to it.
How unfortunate, you missed the quite well naked man that takes you on a wonderful Capitol Hill adventure 😅
I’m sorry that the real world made you uncomfortable… From your comment I get the sense you contribute to a lot of suffering around the world that you are oblivious to. Now that you’re aware, what to do plan to do to actually help rather than just hide away from your neighbors?
I think you need to around more rather than spending your time being a keyboard warrior on this site. What CD Resident described above is not ‘the real world’; it’s only a small and more extreme part of it. It’s ok to want to live in a place where watching people get high on the street is NOT a several-times daly occurrence, you know.
I do get out and around, and this is the reality in several major cities in the US and around the world right now. It’s not pretty but something needs to get done about it, and it needs to be a whole of society solution. I think it’s all of these other keyboard warriors that expect the city, the police, some business, or nonprofit to completely fix the social problems that they admit they hide away from and avoid.
I organize a community cleanup group that has a primary goal of connecting people from all backgrounds in the neighborhood and giving them something positive to do in the area while also getting a real picture of the state of it. Through this and just in my own free time walking around with my head not in my phone I interact with all sorts of neighbors experiencing homelessness and/or addiction issues. Rather than run scared to the nearest keyboard to demonize them, I try to talk to them and get to know them, offer any sort of assistance or connection I can, and try to befriend folks if I can. I’ve learned to set up some personal boundaries (like being cautious with giving out my personal number) but I would rather risk my comfort (and yes, possibly my safety or life, but I try to avoid extreme situations and call crisis lines in those cases) than ignore it or watch passively.
I don’t think you actually do. What other cities around the world allow open air drug markets right in the center of the city and in core neighborhood business and residential districts? I have never seen anything like the Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, and LA drug sh*tshow in a big city anywhere else in the world. The only place that comes close is Vancouver on Hastings St near the Insite “harm reduction” site. In Lisbon when a group of addicts started shooting up by the train station, locals chased them away quickly and the police showed up and removed them from the area. Same thing in Switzerland by the way. This crap isn’t tolerated in the countries you claim as the model for the disastrous, west-coast-style drug policy. Those places offer diversion treatment programs, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes. Far from it. There are lots of police and laws are enforced.
You clearly don’t spend much time outside of tourist areas and/or are so dense and so concerned about some stupid pissing contest about who can present the nicest looking city to tourists…
I’m not saying I’m okay with the situation (I don’t think anyone is, and you would have to be dense to have that interpretation of the dialogue), but giving that it’s happening, and not just in these cities you seem to think are the problem ones, what do we actually do about it? The solution you seem most hellbent on (policing and prison) is the most costly and treating issues at the very end of the line. Prison is housing at the end of the day, but it’s much more costly to taxpayers and creates much more generational and community trauma than trying to address the underlying issues. These problems have existed in Seattle and many major cities, but just not in the neighborhoods that you and other people with political will lived in and therefore it wasn’t as big of a problem to them/you before. Not to mention our police department is so incompetent that they have trouble policing themselves and end up costing taxpayers even more money defending them against our fellow neighbors in court.
We need a radical change in our system, and the latter councils saw that… whether they enacted the best set of legislation is debatable. The current council acting like doubling down on the past failures and systems that have benefited those at the top that got us to this point is just asking for history to repeat itself.
So, what exactly do you do for the people you’re connecting with? What is the positive thing you give them to do?
Aside from just talking with people and treating them like humans, unlike most people I see… I try to carry spare snacks, water, and in the winter socks and hand warmers as sort of immediate needs. I try to stay up to date on orgs that work in the area and have helped folks call or give them contact information. I’ve gone to a store, restaurant, or coffee shop to get items and have a chat many times. I’ve been helping one friend trying to get an ID for a while, but it’s a long process. I’ve stored things for a few days, but I have very little space in my apartment so that’s another personal boundary that I’ve drawn.
I’m not saying I’ve made some major impact, but I’m not sitting back expecting the city or someone else to actually fix things, I’m trying to actually dig in, learn, and add some positivity to a neighborhood that you all just seem to want to shit on despite constantly spending your time on a blog about it.
Such virtue. You must be a favorite at the DSA committee meetings.
Don’t you have more people killed by reckless drivers to blame?
I’ve never been to a DSA meeting and while I see myself as more socialist than any other major political ideology, I think we still can and should be trying to find something better
Sorry, but ask some of your female friends what their experience walking around the city is like these days. I grew up on Capitol Hill and used to be able to walk home late at night without fear. Now I can’t even walk to the dentist without homeless dudes lunging at me, sexually harassing me, even grabbing my boob. My experience here has become very different from that of my husband. It does not surprise me at all that most of the comments like yours are from men.
I totally understand that my experience on the street is different, it is part of why I feel okay going out and talking to folks. As I said before, I’m not okay with much of what is going on and when I see the type of behavior you’ve described I try to intervene and/or report it. I’m also not saying that is what most people are doing.
At the end of the day, I’m fed up with people like CD Resident whom seems to think pointing out someone experiencing one of the lowest points of their lives in a public comment (even taking the time to note in parentheses that they were unwell) and then their takeaway was that their trip to the store was ruined and they seemed to pay no real consideration to the person that may have been dying at their feet…
You sound awful. Don’t hurt yourself reaching around to pat yourself on the back.
Who hurt you that you always assume the worst of people Everyone’s allowed to talk about their experiences without having to be criticized for it and being shamed for no good reason. I applaud your efforts to connect with people but that doesn’t give you the right to be on that high horse of yours.
It’s a big mess out there, that much has to be obvious. And really not safe for anyone. I too would like to not having to avoid certain corners because they’re besieged by drug addicts doing their business. I don’t want to have my home or car broken into all the time, be yelled at and threatened, etc – the list is long. I think that’s not unreasonable. I have no idea how to fix any of this (except I don’t want to spend any more money on policies that don’t work), but I’m really not surprised people are fed up with the situation and the apparent (or presumed) ignorance of the powers that be.
If you’re trying to make normal people despise Seattle “progressives”, you are doing an excellent job.
Whoops, I replied to the wrong comment, sorry.
This comment is for Matt.
Matt, if you are trying to make normal people despise “Seattle Progressives”, then you are doing an excellent job.
It’s almost as if allowing unfettered public drug usage and little intervention for those experiencing mental illnesses leads to more street crime. 🧐 Wow, who could have predicted that..
The government tells us things we already know and the police ask us for help finding suspects for crimes they can’t prevent. I don’t think we can consider these institutions capable of solving any of these issues. In many ways the decisions the government makes creates the circumstances that generate poverty, drug use and violent crime, namely gun crime. Doesn’t seem like any of these things will be getting any better any time soon.
In the mean time if more people would leave Seattle it would definitely help make it more affordable. Please move if you can.
Broadway and Pike, or as I refer to it, “the head of the zit”
Studies data and revelations but never any action as the city blows their mismanaged funds elsewhere
The QFC corner (SW Broadway & Pike) has been noticeably clear of addicts recently, so that is at least a bit of progress. But as others comment here, much more needs to be done.
Yeah, it looks like QFC security has been keeping the corner clear. The addicts moved across the street to the streetcar stop in front of the tea place.
I’m shopping in Bellevue from now on.
The only post merger qfc that will be left is u village, and maybe Wallingford. It’s an ideal opportunity to dump stores with low profit and high security issues. Notice that the village bartells remains.
Supporting the defacto headquarters of the folks that helped to tank the brick and morter industries is an odd flex here man…
Bellevue? De facto HQ of what?
De facto HQ of everything an aging Capitol Hill hipster could ever hate.
Some of these peoples comments read like the lyrics to Flagpole Sitta IRL
You know, the city that Amazon said they were moving much of their PNW operations to… The folks that faked new grocery tech and tilts their online market in their favor against artists, entrepreneurs, and small businesses…
The place that builds malls for national chains and not actual communities for things like small businesses and the people that live there.
I dunno, but this seems like a map of where the SPD should increase foot patrols; round thew clock.
What? SPD doesn’t have cops out walking a beat?
Seattle has an extremely low ratio of officers to square mileage… and the force has been shrinking not expanding. They don’t even have the manpower actually respond to much other than the most pressing calls, much less to do foot patrols. Even when they were better staffed they were reliant on their cars because of the large amount of territory each officer has to patrol..
They used to. Unsure when that stopped, but I’d wager somewhere around the 2020 Mostly Peaceful Protests season definitely put a stop to whatever remnants were left.
Or it could have to do with the corruption, racism, sexism, homophobia and whatever rottenness has festered in the SPD for decades. The SPD Wikipedia article has pages of controversies since 2010.
Would you want to work for an employer with those problems?
“We Never Defunded!” — every Progressive liar that helped run cops off so we must hire more just to break even.