Want a rent free appt. in a nice area of a major city?Follow

All you have to do is prove you are the biggest drunk in the city, and they'll pay your rent!

Seriously, someone explain this **** to me. I live in this state and I still don't get it. I think its time I take up drinking.

http://komonews.com/news/story.asp?ID=40781

75 Of City's Worst Drunks Will Get New Digs

December 15, 2005

By Bryan Johnson


Video : KOMO 4 NEWS
City, county and federal officials helped officially dedicate a most unusual Seattle apartment building and social experiment Thursday.

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SEATTLE - City, county and federal officials helped officially dedicate a most unusual Seattle apartment building and social experiment Thursday.

The 75-unit apartment house on Fairview Avenue is reserved for 75 of the city's most expensive street alcoholics. Hospitals, detox facilities, sobering centers, social workers and others are being asked to identify the 100 most costly (to the taxpayers) street alcoholics.

The apartment center will allow consumption of alcohol on the premise, and the experiment will be tracked by the University of Washington.

There will be nurses and other staff on duty, but the residents will be allowed to come and go.

They will sign pledges of appropriate behavior and the management, and Seattle's Downtown Emergency Services has the ability to terminate the rental agreement in the case of violations.

The facility is expected to open in January.

"This is a group of people that, for the most part, are never going to get sober," said Bill Hobson of Downtown Emergency Services. "And the way we are dealing with them now, leaving on the street is a very expensive form of benign neglect."

Many may think Bill Hobson for trying to sign up 75 chronic alcoholics who cost the city tens of thousands of dollars each year, rather than selecting people with a greater chance of going sober.

They'll live in 49 apartments and management will tell them yes, you can drink here. There are 26 smaller units for those with severe medical problems.

But why do this?

Hobson says: "They are dying on the streets. They are dying in greater numbers than any other subset of people in the homeless population in Seattle and King County."

Hobson is a social worker. But, neighbors -- the owners of the Metropolitan Towers and Northwest Trophy -- don't share his philosophy. Robb Anderson put it this way: "It's not that we are against helping the people, it's the effect it's going to have on a small family run business that's been in the city for 68 years."

Anderson says the value of his property has dropped 50 percent as a result of uncertainty caused by the project.

They lost the court battle. So, the apartment house was dedicated.

Cody Davis worries too; he has a music studio next door: "Just the number of drunks and drug addicts you have to chase off your steps on a daily basis. I see the way places like that have affected the area I guess."

But Hobson says behavior will be closely monitored, and if there are incidents his staff will respond and take appropriate action. Police have also told the merchants and others call 911, and they will patrol the area.

And, Hobson says, there are practical reasons to support the project: "They are consuming extraordinary amounts of police time, of court time, and it is an irrational waste of taxpayer dollars."

Some of the chronic street alcoholics make 30 trips a year to Harborview Medical Center. The cost of visits to jails, hospitals, and dry outs $100,000 a year per person.

Ed Dwyer-O'Connell, the manager of psychiatric emergency services at Harborview, adds: "Living on the streets of Seattle, it's not a way for us to treat our fellow man to just leave them in the gutter... they have a disease."

Eventually, 75 alcoholics will live in the building. The first four signed up Thursday, they'll move in about Jan. 1.

OK so now the 75 people will have free rent but still be able to get ********* and cause trouble until they finally get booted from the program? Having a home does not resolve their alcohalism, especially if they are allowed to drink there. I think its a naive approach to the problem. These people will just get trashed and still end up in jail. And still cost the taxpayers more money.


And how much is the apartment complex costing the taxpayers to operate with dedicated medical staff, and still no guarantees they won't end up going to jail, or the intensive care unit when they get trashed.

Maybe they will be having live webcast drunk fights in the basement as a PPV event to help fund this.

I dont think drinking alot is a disease. The only disease is them on the American tax payers.

Why the hell is this guy upset? Everyone knows that drunks make the best musicians!

All joking aside, this has to be one of the most ridiculous ideas ever spun.

First off,


Which was preceded by this lovely jewel of knowledge:


Hey dipsh[/b]it. How many incidents a night do you think are going to occur? Dumba[b]ss.

See, I keep trying to play by the rules and I get screwed.

I'ma become a full time drunk!

Would it be violating their rights if they chose to live there, knowing that tabs would be kept on them?

I can see why they are doing this, trying to kill two birds with one stone, by getting people off the streets and attempt to clean them up as well. It is a good effort yes, but it won't work out like they want it to.

That's a right? Who knew?

Um. Yes it is:

According to the 4th ammendment of the US constitution:



This means that the US government cannot arbitrarily take your property away from you. While we don't today usually apply the 4th ammendment to issue of taxation, it's still a basis point. Taxation is a "seizure of property" and is allowed only on the assumption that it's for a better purpose and the money taken is approved by Congress for those purposes.


This concept is expounded on in the 14th ammendment:



Relevant section bolded. Here again, we have a reaffirmation, but not just on a national level. The 14th applies that same "you can't have your stuff taken away arbitrarily" to the state level as well.

"Due process" in the case of taxes is assumed (by act of Congress), but again relies on the argument that the purposes to which my tax dollars go is something that is for the common good (and presumably agreeable to most people).


So yeah. There certainly is a "right" not to have your property taken and used in ways you don't agree with. Or at least you have a right to complain about it, and the government is under the onus of providing a rationale for using your property for any specific purpose it puts it to. And frankly, this isn't something I think is a valid use of my tax dollars (Of course, that's dependant on where the money came from for this, so I may not have any say in it at all, but can complain by proxy for those Washington taxpayers who are).

I agree with that completely Joph. I was simply showing that there *is* a set of constitutional rights that I posses with regards to how my property is used by the government. And certainly, "due process" in this case is a legistlative body allocating funds. I'm not saying it's not legal. I'm saying that I have specific rights that give me a degree of say over that (via voting at the very least).

I was constrasting my rights to my own property (taxes in this case) to that of someone getting a free place to live because they are a drunk. Can we agree that I've got a bit more "right" to complain about this use of public funds then the drunk has to use them in this way? Even the most open interpretation of the constitution wont reveal even the most vague right to have the government provide drunks with a free home...

You're looking at it a bit skewed I think (or I'm not communicating what I mean clearly enough).

I *do* have a right not to have my property taken away. Period. However, the government has the power to do so under specific situations. What that means is that I start with the absolute right to my property. But then we decided that the government can violate that right under certain conditions (immenent domain, taxation, seizures due to debt, etc...).


My point is that there is an underlying right to not have your property taken away. There is *no* underlying right to have a government agency give you property (a place to live in this case). I was not trying to express some absolute in this particular case, but to make the point about the argument I was responding to, which specifically was trying to argue that these drunks had some sort of "right" to a place to live on the government dime.



I know you're going to argue "slippery slope" here, but it's exactly the kind of thinking you'r showing (that once we've decided that the government "can" take property away from citizens that any use of the property is equally valid) that leads to things like that imminent domain ruling where they justified taking people's homes away, not because of a traditionally acceptable government need (like building a freeway for example), but purely to give that property to another private citizen. It's the same kind of thinking IMO. Once you step away from the traditional purposes of government and start getting into more broad services and programs, you start seeing actions like this crop up more and more often.