The council shifted hard-right last election, and Bruce Harrell (former council chairman and career politician who has blamed everyone but himself for the city's failures in years past) has a full slate supporting him.
The slate's politics seems to be pro-out-of-state-business/landlord/police, anti-density, anti-pedestrian, anti-homeless NIMBYism. Politically positioned as the common-sense solution to the insane progressive politics that have been ruining the city.
The metrics aren't exactly on their side. SPD continues to be an incredible combination of overpaid, unaccountable, incapable of hiring, useless, and actively dangerous to the public, the homeless numbers keep growing, rents and cost of living are rising, and the council is doing everything it can to stonewall the state's efforts to solving the housing crisis in the city.
> Why do you think things are so bad in the PNW compared to other places, if not the governance?
It might have something to do with the hundreds of thousands of highly paid people moving into an area which didn't build enough housing units to support them, thus displacing tens of thousands of people out of the margins and onto the street.
It probably didn't have as much to do with (a loud) minority of progressives that were on the council as we've been told.
I've only got a child's grasp of free market economics (and of musical chairs), but this seems to be the most predictable outcome of that sort of thing. When the number of people in an area exceeds the number of beds, some of those people will eventually be sleeping in tents.
