Seattle business flourishes and high-tech incomes rise but with home purchase beyond reach for many and rents in the greater Seattle area averaging $2500 per month families of what would be considered middle class incomes are often priced out of the market and those in lower income brackets end up on the street. Homelessness in Seattle the 16th largest metropolitan area in the US is now the third worst in the nation, behind only New York and Los Angeles, with over 11,000 people homeless on any given night. It is a vexatious problem that is constantly discuss but for which now real solutions have been proposed as developers balk at build “affordable housing” when there is so much more to be made in building to “market rate”. So families struggle to find subsidized shelters while the less fortunate sleep in approved tent cities, non-approved and often very dangerous encampments or just live on the streets. Michael Daily lived in a tent hidden near Seattle's Interbay rail yard and made his living panhandling near the Ballard Bridge. Daily, a construction tradesman by training, broke his back in two places in an accident during the construction of the new King County Court House. The subsequent disability has made him unemployable. After waiting a year for an appointment at the Seattle Housing Authority, Daily says he was denied emergency housing because he has a criminal record -- the homeless man was arrested for criminal trespass for sleeping in a shop doorway.
Seattle business flourishes and high-tech incomes rise but with home purchase beyond reach for many and rents in the greater Seattle area averaging $2500 per month families of what would be considered middle class incomes are often priced out of the market and those in lower income brackets end up on the street. Homelessness in Seattle the 16th largest metropolitan area in the US is now the third worst in the nation, behind only New York and Los Angeles, with over 11,000 people homeless on any given night. It is a vexatious problem that is constantly discuss but for which now real solutions have been proposed as developers balk at build “affordable housing” when there is so much more to be made in building to “market rate”. So families struggle to find subsidized shelters while the less fortunate sleep in approved tent cities, non-approved and often very dangerous encampments or just live on the streets.
Seattle business flourishes and high-tech incomes rise but with home purchase beyond reach for many and rents in the greater Seattle area averaging $2500 per month families of what would be considered middle class incomes are often priced out of the market and those in lower income brackets end up on the street. Homelessness in Seattle the 16th largest metropolitan area in the US is now the third worst in the nation, behind only New York and Los Angeles, with over 11,000 people homeless on any given night. It is a vexatious problem that is constantly discuss but for which now real solutions have been proposed as developers balk at build “affordable housing” when there is so much more to be made in building to “market rate”. So families struggle to find subsidized shelters while the less fortunate sleep in approved tent cities, non-approved and often very dangerous encampments or just live on the streets. Lynn Smathers, accepts some bananas at the Marysville Community Foodbank in Marysville Wa, a Seattle "exurb" where many people who can't afford to be in the city end up. If it were not for the food bank and a friend's husband who hunts wild game, Lynn Smathers, says some months she would go hungry. The food bank has a day reserved for senior citizens and disabled persons. The friend leaves her deer, elk and wild pig meat in a little cooler she keeps outside her trailer at the Mobile Manner trailer park in Marysville, Washington. A lifelong Republican, Smathers worked most of her life in accounting and banking, taking entry level jobs wherever her husband's work took her. In 34 years of marriage, the couple and their two children moved 23 times. After losing a house to foreclosure in Texas, her husband divorced her and Smathers moved to Washington and got a job in a regional bank. In 2009, she was diagnosed with colon cancer and went through surgery and months of chemotherapy. Even with health insurance, she accrued more than $15,000 in medical bills. Chemotherapy left her weak and she could not carry the heavy bank boxes full of files up and down the stairs to her second floor loan assistance office. She retired on social security and got a job in a 76 gas station to pay off her medical bills. But she broke her arm and her belly surgery scar herniated. She was forced back into the hospital and out of her 76 job. Smathers held garage sales, where she sold off her furniture and a precious collection of porcelain hummingbirds she had carried with her from house to house. She sold her gold jewelry by the ounce to someone who would melt it down and sell it again. She is constantly on EBay, trying to make something off what little she has including two cemetery plots she and her husband purchased in Philadelphia so that they could be buried with a daughter who died in infancy and was buried there. Smathers gets $51 dollars a month in food stamps. Twice a month, she goes to the local food bank. She says she makes due because she's not a big eater. She bakes meat loaf, or macaroni salad and eats it for a week straight. It irks Smathers that she spent her life working, mostly with other people's money, but here she is retired with no savings. On the TV she hears politicians talking about reducing social security, or gutting the food stamp program and it frustrates Smathers. "I think all of the senators and congressmen should have to live a year on food stamps and welfare," she says. "I don’t think they have a clue what people go through. They haven't had to know what its like to stretch a dollar into five dollars, to live on a set amount way below standard."
