CBS News, December 1, 2019: “Rent is Obscene Here”: The Issues Forcing People in Seattle Onto the Street
With the days getting shorter and the temperatures colder, it’s sobering to think that on any given night more than half a million Americans are homeless. In the last three years, according to government reports, cities on the West Coast have seen a dramatic rise in the number of people who are “unsheltered.” That’s the term used to refer to anyone who’s homeless, but not sleeping in a shelter. They’re the people you see sleeping on streets or in parks, in tent encampments, or in vehicles. Why has the unsheltered population been going up at a time of economic expansion and low unemployment? One answer is rising rents in hot real estate markets. Take Seattle and surrounding King County, which are booming thanks to high-tech companies but now have the third-highest number of homeless people in the country. The Seattle area is home to Amazon and Microsoft, but also to a homeless encampment called Tent City Three.
