News For Reasonable People

The City of Austin has announced two locations for proposed, city-run homeless camps. The first preliminary site is a three-acre lot at 3511 Manor Road, just east of Airport Road. The second is a larger lot in southwest Austin at 4011 Convict Hill Road, directly off MoPac. The locations are far from final. There will be a city council work session to discuss the two sites next Tuesday, July 27. Th...

The Seattle mayoral candidate who has raised the most funding from Democracy Vouchers — far more than his establishment opponents — owes over $20,000 in back rent, according to the company that manages the apartment building where he resides. With nearly $412,000 raised, housing advocate Andrew Grant Houston surprised opponents and the media with his fundraising prowess. Almost 85% of his fundrais...

Officials in San Francisco on Monday announced plans to increase police foot and bicycle patrols in areas heavily traveled by tourists to safeguard visitors who might be targeted by thieves. Mayor London N. Breed and San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott appeared at the landmark Dragon’s Gate in Chinatown to provide details on the new community policing plan and additional officer deployment. With...

Crews from the state and city of Seattle are scheduled Thursday to remove a homeless camp that overlooks the eastbound lanes of Interstate 90 and has been in place for years after two of its residents were linked to rock attacks on unsuspecting motorists. The decision was made after a recent site survey by Washington State Patrol Chief John Batiste and a captain declared the site an "imminent...

In the wake of a weekend shooting in Portland’s Entertainment District that wounded 6 and left an 18-year-old dead, the ongoing debate about police staffing in Portland has once again come into view. Makayla Maree Harris was shot and killed on SW 3rd Avenue around 2 a.m. Saturday. No one has been arrested for the shooting, and no suspect information has been released. Makayla Harris “will never gr...

Seattle is now averaging more than two cases every day with debris thrown at drivers, mostly near downtown Seattle. Washington State Patrol, working with Seattle police, have arrested 4 people in the last couple of weeks. Yet, another case of rocks thrown from an overpass happened just Friday morning near the Washington State Convention Center. Troopers say no one was hurt in this latest case. But...

Over the years, Portlander Kate Fulford has seen more than of her share of love letters. Not the romantic kind, bound up in ribbon, smelling faintly of lilac and sighs, and stashed in an attic trunk, ideally to be found one day by unsuspecting future generations. Fulford, a realtor with Think Real Estate, is talking about the kind of letters that would-be buyers write to try and sway sellers in a...

The Social Security cost-of-living adjustment for 2022 could be 6.1% due to inflation, according to a new estimate. That would be the biggest increase since 1983, according to non-partisan advocacy group The Senior Citizens League, which calculated the figure. It’s also a bump up from last month’s estimate, when the increase for next year was expected to be 5.3%. The new estimate comes as the Cons...

A mass shooting in downtown Portland, shortly before last call on Saturday morning, killed an 18-year-old woman and injured six others near a line of food carts in what police described as “an extremely chaotic scene.” Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell said the killing, along with another fatal shooting four hours later in the Parkrose neighborhood, in deep Northeast Portland, marked the city’s 5...

Last year, Greg Osuri decided he had had enough of the Bay Area. Between smoke-choked air from nearby wildfires and the coronavirus lockdown, it felt as if the walls of his apartment in San Francisco’s Twin Peaks neighborhood were closing in on him. “It was just a hellhole living here,” said Osuri, 38, founder and chief executive of a cloud-computing company called Akash Network. He decamped for h...

Sorry, kids. It’s not getting any easier to buy a home in Seattle. County property values have continued to rise and two Seattle neighborhoods including Capitol Hill led the way in 2020, according to the King County Assessor’s office. The office says median residential property values rose by 7.9% on Capitol Hill, and by 11.3% in the Ravenna/University District area in 2020. The message comes as t...

Advocates for a safe supply of drugs handed out heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine outside the Vancouver Police Department Wednesday (July 14) afternoon.  City Councillor Jean Swanson, along with members of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), distributed the free drugs outside the Vancouver Police Department. The collective action demonstrat...

Overdose deaths soared to a record 93,000 last year in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government reported Wednesday. That estimate far eclipses the high of about 72,000 drug overdose deaths reached the previous year and amounts to a 29% increase. “This is a staggering loss of human life,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University public health researcher who tracks overdose trends. T...

It’s been less than two weeks since the state of Oregon fully reopened and bars are happy to have the business back but now they’re dealing with a whole new set of problems that many didn’t have before. “We’ve had to hire a door person we have to have security here now which we never had to have before,” Brian Gardes, owner of The Pharmacy in northwest Portland, said. Dardes and the co-owner of Di...

Noah Braley received the text that would upend his plans for the next year a little over a week ago, on July 1 — your rent will be going up by a lot, his property manager wrote, but don’t freak out. “I’m like, ‘Excuse me, don’t freak out?’” said Braley, who has lived in the building since 2013, when he was still an urban planning student at Western Washington University. “How much is it?” The answ...

Despite the Federal Reserve’s assurance that current inflation pressures won’t last, consumers see things differently, according to a survey Monday from the central bank’s New York district. The June Survey of Consumer Expectations showed that median inflation expectations over the next 12 months jumped to 4.8%, a 0.8 percentage point rise from May and the highest reading in history for a series t...

After more than a year on the run, the man accused of fatally shooting 19-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson inside the six-block area that last summer was known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone was arrested Monday in Des Moines. Seattle police identified Marcel Long as the man suspected of killing Anderson within a day of the June 20, 2020, shooting at 10th Avenue and East Pine Street and...

On July 12, Texas House Democrats packed their bags and headed for the nation’s capital in a high-profile effort to block passage of GOP-backed voting restrictions. Democrats hoped their exodus would break what’s called a quorum — the minimum number of lawmakers needed to conduct business — so Republicans couldn’t pass legislation that could ban drive-thru and 24-hour voting, among other sweeping...

Coordinated crime sprees in major cities in California, New York and elsewhere are forcing retailers to close stores and limit operating hours, as packs of shoplifters regularly make off with hundreds of dollars-worth in merchandise to be resold online, at street markets or returned for gift cards.   Amid a crime wave sweeping San Francisco, five Target store locations are reducing operating hours...

Seattle is working overtime to bring its downtown back. The loss of tourists and office workers the past year and a half left the area struggling. The city is pouring $9 million into the revitalization of downtown, which includes the retail core as well as Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square. Some city leaders, including Mayor Jenny Durkan, say recovery of the area is vital as it accounts for the...

Seattle is working overtime to bring its downtown back. The loss of tourists and office workers the past year and a half left the area struggling. The city is pouring $9 million into the revitalization of downtown, which includes the retail core as well as Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square. Some city leaders, including Mayor Jenny Durkan, say recovery of the area is vital as it accounts for the...

If you don’t like the explosion of violent crime, you’re a racist. That’s the message sent by a top aide to the San Francisco district attorney to a self-described “Democrat” who had said on Twitter that the jump in crime had made people afraid for their lives and dubious about the city’s future. The Democrat tweeted that “every single one of my friends right now is considering leaving” San Franci...

Housing affordability is a growing issue in America, and there’s a battle over how to fix it happening on blocks across the country. Zoning—the rules that govern how cities use their land—is on the front line. Between 1986 and 2017, the median price of single-family housing in the U.S. rose from 370 percent of the median U.S. household’s yearly income to 410 percent, according to the Harvard Joint...

Politics is the only area of American life in which “spinning” the news – attempting to control public opinion by giving a biased (and sometimes outright false) account of events – is not only accepted but celebrated.  Many of us in this business love spin, particularly when it pushes a narrative that supports our own worldview.  One recent example came from White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki,...

The public records officers who blew the whistle about Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s missing text messages earlier this year have filed claims against the city, alleging they felt compelled to resign after being subjected to hostile conditions and retaliation in the mayor’s office. The claims by Stacy Irwin and Kimberly Ferreiro each seek $5 million in damages. Under state law, claims must be filed...