News For Reasonable People

The owners of a downtown Portland food truck are closing their SW 2nd Avenue location over safety concerns. The owners of Veggie Bowl say vandalism, an upswing in Asian hate and changes to the environment have made it unsafe for them to operate downtown. Several food cart owners on SW 2nd Avenue told KOIN 6 News they also don’t feel safe at night and are frustrated with the state of downtown Portl...

Over the weekend, a bizarre roadside standoff on a major highway in Massachusetts stymied holiday traffic for nearly nine hours before ending in 11 arrests of people from a militia group called Rise of the Moors, who law enforcement said described themselves as adhering to “Moorish sovereign ideology.” A little before 2 a.m. on Saturday, a Massachusetts State Trooper noticed two cars stopped on In...

A Minneapolis judge has sided with residents who sued the city over police staffing levels, saying the mayor and City Council failed to keep the adequate number of officers required by the municipal charter. Hennepin County Judge Jamie Anderson's order to add officers to the Minneapolis Police  Department comes amid a citywide spike in violent crime and calls to defund the police after the Ma...

Violence surged in the U.S. throughout the coronavirus pandemic, but declining police morale and staffing shortages aren’t the only reason why there was an uptick. The growth of violence in the U.S. doesn’t seem to cut between party lines. Murders in Democrat-controlled cities increased 36.2% in 2020, and the homicide rate in Republican-led cities rose to 35.6% in 2020, according to data analytics...

Former President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday he was launching a class action law suit against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Sundar Pichai on behalf of victims of 'cancel culture.' He demanded the end of 'shadow banning,' and 'blacklisting' as he stood in the blazing sun, using his Bedminster golf course clubhouse as a bac...

An employee of Seattle, who has been called a "social justice warrior" and is now a progressive candidate for the King County Council threatened to blow up a school bus, then called middle school students cowards as they fled. According to court documents obtained by The Post Millennial, Ubax Gardheere boarded the Highline School District bus on Jan. 12, 2010 as it travelled on its morni...

Below is an interview of Edward Pinto, the Director of AEI’s Housing Center, with Fortune’s Shawn Tulley on the state of rapidly rising home prices across the country: In almost five decades as one of America’s top housing experts, including a stint as chief credit officer of Fannie Mae, Ed Pinto has never seen prices climb at anything like the pace he’s seeing for May. “The high end is up 25% ove...

One thing shined through pretty clearly when the Seattle mayoral candidates debated Tuesday. And no, it wasn’t who would be the best choice to try to manage our ungovernable city. It was that defunding the police is on the run. None of the six candidates who appeared at Tuesday’s forum openly endorsed cutting the police budget, let alone by 50%, as a majority of the Seattle City Council had endors...

As conversations heats up about Commissioner Dan Ryan’s plan to build six safe rest villages across the city, Portland’s protocols for sweeping homeless camps were formalized at a June 30 meeting of the City Council. The aim is to codify sweep protocols, Ryan’s office explained to WW, for the first time ever. One protocol the council cemented Wednesday: deprioritize sweeping encampments that are a...

What a difference just two years can make.  Around this time in 2019, Seattle-area home prices had dipped and price growth nationwide was slowing. Cut to 2021: Seattle has clocked another month as one of the hottest American housing markets as home prices here and nationwide climb at a record-breaking pace. Single-family home prices in the Seattle metro area were up 20.2% in April from a year earl...

A recent Redfin report found 580 homes in the Seattle area sold for at least $300,000 above asking price from the start of the year through June 16. There were only 16 such homes sold during the same period in 2020, according to the June 23 report. Seattle and Bellevue led the region in the number of homes sold at least $300,000 over the list price. Seattle sold 146 such homes this year, compared...

A judge sentenced 25-year-old Tyre Wayne Means Jr., to five years in federal prison for helping to set a Seattle Police cruiser on fire and stealing an AR-15 rifle from another police car during the May 2020 riots in Seattle. At the sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Richard A. Jones told Tyre Wayne Means Jr., "Your conduct was reckless, destructive and extremely dangerous to those who w...

Mayor Jenny A. Durkan and downtown Seattle community leaders today announced the Road to Downtown Recovery plan, which includes new efforts and investments to bring workers, small businesses, and visitors back downtown.  Using Seattle Rescue Plan investments and other federal funds, the City will invest more than $9 million in downtown recovery projects, including efforts to address empty storefro...

After a year of protests sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the city of Portland, Oregon, is grappling with an increasingly disgruntled police force amid an uptick in violent crime and continued calls to defund law enforcement agencies. City leaders have scrambled to address both staffing shortages within the police department and reform demands by activists, walking a tightrope...

This fall, two Seattle City councilmembers will propose doing away with the term: “single family zoning.” The city’s planning commission has repeatedly asked for the change since 2018. Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda says if Seattle wants to be an equitable and just city, then it must apply that same lens to its zoning code in an effort to end the use of the term she says has been used to further ex...

Thirty-three King County Superior Court judges and four court commissioners on Friday signed a letter to Seattle Parks and Recreation Superintendent Jesús Aguirre, requesting that he shut down City Hall Park and relocate residents of a sprawling encampment immediately south of the downtown county courthouse. “We are writing out of deep concern for the safety of jurors, Courthouse employees, the ge...

The fearsome message is echoed in ads featuring radio hosts Kim Komando and Dana Loesch, as well as presidential lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who declares: “When your life is in chaos, your home is your safe haven. Imagine losing your home to some online scammer. In an instant your home is no longer yours. Is this even possible? Yes.” Home Title Lock offers a “free title sc...

As a homeowner, you're no doubt aware that the cost of owning property extends well beyond your monthly mortgage payment. You'll have to cover your homeowners insurance, maintenance, repairs, and, of course, property taxes. Your property taxes are calculated by taking your local tax rate and multiplying it by your home's assessed value. The average property tax bill in the U.S. was...

John McAfee, the controversial antivirus software magnate who'd had multiple recent run-ins with the US law, has died at 75. McAfee was awaiting extradition in a Spanish prison after being charged with tax evasion in the United States last year. McAfee was found dead in his cell in a prison near Barcelona on Wednesday around 1 p.m. ET and a medical examiner went to the scene, a spokeswoman fo...

Three Seattle City Council bills related to rental housing will become law without Mayor Jenny Durkan’s signature. Durkan declined to sign the bills last week, citing concerns about their legality. She also declined to veto the bills, predicting the council would override any vetoes. Passed by the council earlier this month, the bills will provide a defense against most school-year evictions of st...

California is paying off residents' past due rent that was accrued during the COVID-19 pandemic, giving renters a clean slate, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced recently. The state's $5.2 billion in funds from Congressionally-approved aid packages is enough to pay off overdue rent, according to Newsom's senior counselor on housing and homelessness, Jason Elliott, the Associated Press repo...

State and local lawmakers are creating a problem that they do not — or perhaps refuse to — understand, and that is the erosion of the single-family rental-house supply. In my more than 10 years of experience, never have I seen so many people searching for a new rental house because the one they live in now is being sold. The reality is not that the owners of these rental houses necessarily want to...

The mayor of a small town in Colorado has banned his Board of Trustees and guests from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at public meetings because of what he called 'direct threats' in his community.     Shane Fuhrman, the mayor of the 550-person mountain town Silverton, made the announcement at a board meeting on June 14, which is Flag Day.   But the entire room of attendees, and two b...

The fatal stabbing of 31-year-old Bradley Arabie last week at Seattle’s City Hall Park, located immediately south of the King County Courthouse, was the final straw for Metropolitan King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn: On Tuesday, he introduced legislation to condemn the city-owned park, which is the site of a large homeless encampment, as a public safety hazard or nuisance property. Under Dunn’...

Questions are being raised about the man who admitted to police that he had killed another homeless man at an encampment located in the park next to the King County Courthouse. Michael Sedejo had been accused of assaulting another man at City Hall Park in April but was released from jail after a bail reform group paid his bail. According to court documents, Sedejo admitted to police after his arre...