The outcry against building low-barrier housing by residents and business owners of the Pinehurst/View Ridge-Madison neighborhoods doesn’t make any sense to me (Friday article, “Housing plan brings anger.”)
I am a homeowner in the Riverside neighborhood. Like residents of the aforementioned areas, I’ve dealt with people littering, urinating, defecating, vomiting, using drugs/drinking, breaking and entering/stealing, panhandling, and sleeping in degraded automobiles with expired tabs in, on, or around my property. And that isn’t the exclusive province of the homeless: that type of behavior is also exhibited by some of my neighbors.
If the low-barrier housing were to be proposed for my neighborhood I’d be delighted. I think the tangible positive results only begin with a cleaner environment, much less unacceptable behavior, and an enhanced overall feeling of safety. Seventy people in low-barrier housing are 70 people not living on the street. I’ll stick my neck out and wager that wherever this housing (hopefully) gets built will benefit greatly, and be among the safest and cleanest neighborhoods in the entire city.
This is Everett. The homeless, the addicted, the mentally ill are all around us here. This isn’t Blue Ridge, Broadmoor or Yarrow Point where alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness get buried behind mountains of personal wealth, landscaped yards and the walls of multi-million dollar homes. If we can’t make this low-barrier housing happen — and try to help people get their lives together and be happy, healthy and productive — then we’ll continue to get what we’re getting now. And we’ll continue to pay for it with taxes for police/fire/medic response, the debris and unsanitary conditions associated with urban nomadic people, and worrying about our kids, our safety, and our property all across the city of Everett.
Build it in Riverside, please!
Andy Dockhorn
Everett
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