News For Reasonable People

There are homeless individuals in Bellevue, just like most other cities, but you won’t find tents or encampments in public parks, on ballfields, or on sidewalks. That’s because before Bellevue police remove homeless campers from public spaces, they say they first try to find alternate housing for them. “We work our way through the process, we do the educational side first, offer the resources, but...

Civil unrest continues to take a heavy toll on businesses that are already reeling from pandemic closures. Repairing the damage done by vandals and cleaning up graffiti is costing businesses in Seattle a small fortune - even if they have insurance. The price to repair a single broken window at a business can range anywhere from $2,000 up to $12,000. Some people will say “that’s what insurance is f...

Bernard Madoff, the one-time Wall Street titan who orchestrated one of the largest frauds in history, has died in prison aged 82. Madoff, known as Bernie, was a former chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange, and was regarded for years as an investment sage. But unbeknown to his thousands of victims, he was running a Ponzi scheme that wiped out at least $17.5bn in savings. Imposing a 150-year senten...

It’s not news that bad news is what sizzles. And in the past year, nobody has gotten scorched like Seattle. From being pandemic ground zero and then riot central and then homelessness cautionary tale, the city’s image has been roughed up and made into the butt of jokes nationally — especially by the conservative press. For a while, Fox News’ Sean Hannity labeled any report on his show about Seattl...

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said Tuesday that the city is working on new methods to protect freedom of speech while holding protesters accountable for acts of vandalism committed during demonstrations. Her comments come hours after store front windows were shattered and graffiti splashed on walls during a Monday night march to protest the shooting of Daunte Wright by a police officer near Minneapol...

CNN reporter Sara Sidner was reporting live on protests over the police killing of Daunte Wright in suburban Minneapolis on Monday as tear gas billowed behind her and fireworks lit up the sky when a man in a camouflage vest interrupted her. “Y’all be twisting up the story,” he said in a video clip that has since gone viral online. For nearly two minutes of extraordinary live television, the man be...

President Joe Biden is seeking to ease a national affordable housing shortage by pushing local governments to allow apartment buildings in neighborhoods that are currently restricted to single-family homes. The $5 billion plan could inject the White House into a debate pitting older homeowners against younger workers seeking to gain a foothold in the most expensive U.S. cities, where many families...

A pair of prominent public squares in downtown Portland will remain shuttered for up to two months as the city seeks to restore the civic spaces damaged by political unrest and housing instability. Workers erected metallic fencing around the perimeters of Chapman and Lownsdale squares Friday that will not come down while crews labor to spruce them up over the next six to eight weeks, officials wit...

Police say several businesses were vandalized in downtown Seattle during marches Monday night in protest of the police shooting of Daunte Wright in Minnesota, while in Portland, police declared a riot. Wright, 20, was shot and killed during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, a city of about 30,000 people on the northwest border of Minneapolis.  Support the show 🛍️ Merch - https://Store. Reasonable...

“Another family losing their home,” the post began. “Owners have decided to move up from the Bay and we have 60 days. I know this is a long shot with how crazy everything is right now, but we are a family of four plus a kitty looking for a rental in the basin.” When Rachael Brigham posted that message to a popular Facebook group for Tahoe Truckee locals on March 24, she was desperate. Her landlord...

Business owners in Seattle's SoDo neighborhood who are upset with City Hall's handling of crime and homeless in the city’s biggest industrialized area have released a survey that paints a grim picture of conditions in the neighborhood. The group's survey found that 70 percent of those surveyed said their workers feel unsafe working in the area and three out of 10 businesses have had...

Discarded surgical masks strewn along the sidewalk aptly represent COVID-19’s lasting legacy. The federal medical bureaucracy’s response to the pandemic has resulted in a wasteland of lost economic and educational opportunities, psychologically damaged children, terminally lonely nursing home residents, and lives lost to suicide, illicit drug overdoses, and missed diagnoses. Thanks to the lockdown...

It's time to stop obsessively Clorox-ing every surface and object, U.S. health officials announced Monday.   An army of sanitizing robots, round-the-clock cleaning staffs and UV lamp-wielding workers is being called off by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has deemed the risk of contracting COVID-19 by touching surfaces 'low.'  Schools, businesses, and hous...

In the year since the coronavirus pandemic first took hold, the Seattle-area housing market has not just rebounded. The market is “on steroids,” said Seattle-area broker Raché Boston. Prices are up. Inventory is flying off the market. Home showings draw lines of potential buyers down the driveway, and multiple all-cash offers. List prices can feel like a mere suggestion.  “I knew it was going to b...

Portland City Council approved a $6 million proposal Wednesday to try to slow a sharp increase in gun violence that has the city on pace to shatter the previous one-year homicide record set over three decades ago. The last-minute agreement is a compromise between the mayor and the council’s three newest commissioners, who pushed the mayor to find an answer to the skyrocketing number of shootings t...

In his latest comments on Portland, HBO’s Bill Maher touched on the topic of police, and referred to the departure of Portland police officers as “a cautionary tale,” warning, “We do not want to live in a world without police. Then it’s ‘The Purge’ every night.” During the most recent episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the host said he was heartened to see members of law enforcement testify i...

Oregon's largest newspaper, The Oregonian, has published a mea culpa over their previous endorsement of defunding the police, after 266 shootings and 25 homicides in the first quarter of 2021. In fact, in a Monday article from the paper's editorial board, they heaped praise on the city's gun violence reduction team and defended the mayor's recent proposal to restart the 'c...

It’s no secret that much of San Francisco’s trash — especially so in neighborhoods like the Mission, Tenderloin and Mission Dolores — ends up on the sidewalks. Christine, a property owner who lives on 21st Street near Mission Street, was outside her home picking up small pieces of detritus with a pincer-armed grabbing tool one morning. “In an ideal world, people would have somewhere to put their t...

Ghianna Creer smiled as she ambled around a Safeway parking lot in Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood on a recent drizzly Friday evening. She and some of her team members chatted as they blasted music and handed out plates of hot wings and hamburgers. It seemed like a laid-back night, but the group couldn’t have been more alert. Creer, 21, was recently hired by the Boys & Girls Club of King...

Seattle students will begin a return to in-classroom learning in April, but parents were left shocked after learning that homeless encampments, located on the grounds of two schools welcoming kids back, will likely remain even after the schools reopen. “As students at Seattle Public Schools start to return for in-person learning following the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, the district continues to...

Portland officials say it may take the city two years to clean up the piles of trash and debris generated by homeless encampments during the coronavirus pandemic. The city’s Homeless and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program estimates it will need 18 to 24 months to bring the growing waste problem under control once it resumes regular camp removals, budget documents show. City officials don’t hav...

A proposal to hire more park rangers to help stem Portland’s dramatic rise of shootings and gun deaths over the last year stunned one of Portland’s longest-serving park rangers. Dave Barrios, who has worked as a ranger for 15 years after 30 years as a police officer, said he knew nothing about the proposal by three commissioners. They didn’t come to him, he said, but if they had, he would have tol...

When Seattle stopped enforcing its 72-hour parking limit in March 2020, it meant Neal Lampi could stay put for a little while. He still occasionally moves the RV in which he lives, but nothing like the “musical chairs” of before. His current parking spot, on Third Avenue South, has been home for the past two months. Mayor Jenny Durkan said last month that the 72-hour limit would return on April 1,...

On March 26, a sheriff’s deputy walked up to a one-story brick home in a suburb of North Tulsa, Oklahoma, and told the woman inside it was time to leave. She called Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma in a panic. Eric Hallett, the attorney on the phone, instructed her to grab important documents and medicine. There was a chance she wouldn’t be allowed to return. The woman and her partner — who lived in...

After hearing about the homeless encampments that have taken over fields in Ballard and are preventing local Little League teams from being able to play, others have spoken up about similar problems in different neighborhoods of Seattle. A listener named Erick contacted KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show and shared photos from Miller Playfield, near Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Dori had previou...