SAVE THE HILL!

YOU GO AMY JENNIGES! Thanks for writing all this! I hope Mayor Nickels
will realize that we really need help on the Hill.

People pee and shit on the streets; every entrance to a store is
occupied by aggressive panhandlers; [the neighborhood has] vandalism,
no parking, useless transit, and cardboard buildings where you can
hear your neighbor snore; and the flight path is right above all this
to complete the misery. I mean, this is where most of Seattle's
workforce lives. How disrespectful of the city and the mayor to offer
[these] conditions to us. I am beginning to think they want all the
decent people to move out of the area and turn it into some human
dump, sort of a Pioneer Square extension.

Each big city must have an area for these people, of course, and in
Seattle it was Pioneer Square. By pushing them out of there it
infested the whole city. Vancouver, BC's secret of being so decent is
that its ugliness is concentrated in one area, the Downtown Eastside.
Drug addicts have no reason to go to other neighborhoods, because
they've got all the services (like the safe injection site) on the
spot. The Downtown Eastside is NOT a residential area. It is mostly
short-term housing. Capitol Hill is different, and a treatment
facility on it will attract the wrong crowd. [These] services must be
in Pioneer Square! And we have to let go of Pioneer Square, just like
Vancouver let go of its Downtown Eastside, in order to save the rest
of the city.

Mikhail