Homeless In Seattle
Article CAIRCO note:
The impact of mass immigration in Seattle
Article publisher:
Unz Review
Article date:
11 October 2019
Article category:
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body:
From Homeless In Seattle, Part 1: High-Tech & the Homeless, by Ilana Mercer, Unz Review, October 1, 2019:
... Big Tech must be quite pleased to see homelessness attributed exclusively, by the usual cast on TV, to addiction and mental illness—when, in fact, homelessness is driven, primarily, by the systematic and permanent eviction from the housing market of vulnerable, working-class people.
In truth, our country is consigning its economically weakest members to the homeless encampment, through the never-ending importation of a high-rolling, high-tech elite, which, in turn, artificially inflates the price of housing. In perpetuity....
“We must no longer allow politicians, policy influencers and the media to get away with the laziness of conflating substance abuse and homelessness,” inveighs Lola E. Peters....
while implicating the tech-driven population explosion in our state’s housing crisis, Ms. Peters frames the unrelenting influx from China and India as an organic, natural, made-in-America population explosion.
It isn’t! Seventy-one percent of Washington State’s population growth is attributed to net migration!
In guarded language, the Washington State Office of Financial Management divulges that, “Migration continues to be the primary driver behind Washington [State’s] population growth. From 2017 to 2018, net migration (people moving in versus people moving out) to Washington totaled 83,700, … … The state has grown by an average of 87,900 persons per year this decade, exceeding that of 83,000 in the previous decade.
King County, where the “global beasts with vast balance sheets” live, is the main contributor, with a total growth of 259,000 persons over eight years, compared to 194,200 persons between 2000 and 2010.”
Fueled in large part by the technology industry, an average of 236 people is moving to the Seattle area each day,” seconds Geekwire.com, a Seattle-based website that covers tech news....
From Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks the Soul Out of the City, by Ilana Mercer, Unz Review, October 10, 2019:
“Buoyed by the city’s thriving technology industry, Seattle has consistently been the hottest housing market in the nation.” Commensurate with the explosion in the number of Seattle neighborhoods in which homes cost $1 million has been an explosion in the region’s homeless population....
“[S]waths of America have seen local housing fundamentally altered by an influx of new immigrant groups. There are now about 42 million immigrants from just about every country in the world living in the U.S., making up about 13 percent of the overall population, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.”
“Immigrants are a big driving force for housing markets across the nation,” says Kusum Mundra, an economics professor at Rutgers University, Newark. “Most want the American dream, which is to own a home.”...
With The World clamoring for the American Dream, the average home in the U.S. will soon cost half a million dollars. “Rents are rising much faster than income, while the median home price in some 200 cities is $1 million.”...
The World is the American multinational’s labor marker. The housing market in the U.S. reflects that reality. Unburdened by brains, pundits and politicos remain incurious as to why supply and demand in housing can never be brought into a semblance of a balance in such a perversely global labor market....