Here's What Downtown Seattle Looks Like These Days

A downtown tour of Seattle shows some real surprises! So here's the deal with Seattle: It's maybe one of the most dichotomous cities in the country. It's really pretty and new and modern and full of wealth. But this city has a really bad side too. And right now, the bad side is winning. Seattle has changed a lot but it's not ruined. Yet. However, with the direction this city is heading - it’s possible Seattle won't ever be the same again. It's corrupted and mismanaged and has lost its way. I dunno maybe some new leaders with a new sensible plan can turn it around. Maybe one day we'll sing its praises. I hope so. We need more good stories in this country. There's too many bad ones already. We don’t need to watch another great city erode. We're going to drive through downtown Seattle and see the good and the bad. We’re also going to talk about what’s going on here - with insights and reports and even speak with people who live here. The route I took was a random 20 minute drive through several areas of downtown. Here’s the map. We began up by the Space Needle and we’ll head into the worst parts of downtown where all the homeless tents are and then wind our way back up to the east side of town over where the Chaz Chop thing happened. Lots of Seattle’s really neat, but then you turn a corner and face a completely different reality. Downtown Seattle has a grunginess to it. But that’s what makes it Seattle. There are lots of new and modern buildings all over the place - lots of shining new condos and skyscrapers where tech companies make home. But Seattle is being mismanaged by people who I really do think felt their ideas were good ones but then lost interest when they realized how hard it would be to really make meaningful change. The people in charge of this city have been doing an awful job, and the residents here who want to fix things aren’t doing enough to help either. There’s a lot of complaining among Seattle residents, that’s for sure. You can understand why - It’s becoming more dangerous and ugly and scarred from a growing problem of drug use, mental illness and homelessness. As we’ll soon see, the south side of downtown is terrible and that’s the part of downtown that’s been ravaged and looted and left for the bums and vagrants. But for the most part in the heart of downtown you can walk around alone even in the dark. I found walking around at night on a weekday was pleasant, save for an occasional block or ...five. It’s pretty quiet after 9pm. Maybe that’s because people don’t want to come down here anymore. Now Seattle gets a lot of bad press because of the way the city has gone. You’ve heard it all before - the city lets homeless people do whatever they want to and allows protesters to run rampant whenever they wish. So, what happens? Bad people come in droves. Word has been out for a long time that you can come to Seattle and get a free ride - free tents, food, money and free reign to poop and pee where you want and to consume whatever drugs you please. Some call it Freeattle now. Because of this, Seattle is stained. You get all these freeloading drug addicts moving into the area and they take over. In downtown you have tents all over the place and mentally ill people wandering around. It’s estimated that 9 in 10 of these people are in this state because of drugs. Seattle just elected its first republican mayor since 1964. He vows to clean the place up and hire more cops. A lot of people in Seattle say if HE can’t fix things, or if a republican can’t fix Seattle, it might just be...eternally broken. Now I don't live here so I don’t have perspective on how things used to be. And I don’t have to see the same homeless people and tents every day, but downtown proper wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be based on what I had heard about on mainstream media. In Seattle, it’s scattered all - not just in one area of downtown. I actually found that a lot of the large homeless areas with the worst looking camps were on the fringes of downtown. A lot of people are leaving Seattle. Some move away from downtown into the confines of places like Bellevue where this is much less of a problem. Some move into cheaper places like Tacoma. Many are leaving the state entirely for good. People don’t want to get older in a worsening world. And Seattle is worsening, I’ll tell you that. #washington #moving You can buy my music here: iTunes: https://music.apple.com/us/album/state-songs-an-album/1523790725 More places to get my music: -Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/music/album/Nick_Johnson_State_Songs_An_Album?id=Byfshzyrbjldelqferxc6vijljm&hl=en_US -Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/albums/B08D3G43VR This channel is about America! The best video on this topic!