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YOUR GOVERNMENT AT WORK
Seattle to build apartments for drunks
Offering tax-funded food, services, place to imbibe together
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Posted: October 10, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
A project by Seattle city officials to house chronic alcoholics in a 75-unit apartment building where they can drink together has been approved by the Washington state Court of Appeals.
The $8.6 million project near downtown Seattle will offer tenants meals and support services in an attempt to provide enough stability to allow them to attend treatment programs, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported.
In response, veteran Seattle commentator Ken Schram of KOMO-TV said he wished " we could take city officials to court simply for being stupid."
" If someone can explain to me how it helps to give alcoholics a cozy place to booze it up, I' d like to hear it," Schram said in an editorial.
" What' s next?" he asked, " An ' honor bar' in their rooms."
The Seattle paper said the project will be built and managed with state, county and federal funding.
Local businesses are opposing the project, contending it will drive away business and residents, noting street alcoholics are commonly regarded as detrimental to a neighborhood.
At a hearing last year, however, a city official rejected that argument.
City Hearing Examiner Meredith Getches found that behaviors of chronic alcoholics who live on the streets can change once they have a stable home, the Seattle Times reported in November.
" Formerly homeless [chronic alcoholics] can be good neighbors and do not have those serious and harmful impacts on a neighborhood," Getches wrote.
Opponents hoped Getches would ban drinking in the building, the Times said.
But Bill Hobson, executive director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center, the nonprofit agency that would manage the apartments, insists abstinence is an unrealistic demand of alcoholics fresh off the streets.
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Caution - Some posts may contain sarcasim
Yep, become and addict and you can lose your license, your job, your house.....oh, wait...guess that' s backwards.[:@]
What a crock of crap. Fifty bucks says the whole building smells like pi$$ within a year.
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I thought all writers drank to excess and beat their wives. You know one time I secretly wanted to be a writer.---C.K. Dexter Haven
I think you mean liberalism. No real libertarian would EVER sanction using government funds to build housing for alcoholics. In fact, a real libertarian wouldn' t suggest that homeless alcoholics receive ANY TAXPAYER FUNDED ASSISTANCE WHATSOEVER! A libertarian WOULD argue that the homeless drunk has every right to choose to drink themselves silly, but with the complete understanding that the drunk is solely responsible for the consequences of his actions. That includes being poor, homeless and hungry. Since being an homeless alcoholic is the culmination of many free, but poor, life choices made by the individual in question, the libertarian perspective would be that the rest of the tax-paying public has no legal responsibility, and cannot be forced by the government, to make sure they don' t starve, freeze and die on the street.
Libertarianism (NOT to be confused with government funded, consequence-free LIBERALISM), combines almost absolute personal and economic freedom, with TOTAL individual responsibility for ones actions. Therefore, while it' s perfectly acceptable for a person to imbibe in alcohol (and drugs for that matter), by doing so they must personally accept the short and long-term consequenses of that decision. Therefore, while it is wrong for the government to infringe on a persons liberty to drink, it' s also just as wrong to force others to pay for those who wreck their live through overindulgence.
You are referring to LIBERALISM, whereby people are allowed to make poor decisions without consequenses because they know the government will pay for them. This housing project reeks of liberalism (socialism) in that it provides a means for the homeless drunks to pass the responsibility of providing for their survival off on the federal, state and local taxpayers. This is a classic example of socialist transfer payments at work and is just another form of social welfare. It' s no different than government run housing projects, and is in the same boat as welfare, and food stamps.
Drunks to get there own housing in Seattle
