The CHOP has killed Seattle. That city will not survive this.
First, there is this news:
Due to Seattle’s unrest, billion-dollar investment firm moving to Phoenix
Coronavirus pandemic or not, an investment advisory company is leaving the cultural unrest in Seattle and moving its headquarters to Phoenix’s Camelback Corridor.
” … The unrest that has taken place in the city of Seattle … there is really is not a downtown business community today,” Smead Capital Management, President and CEO Cole Smead told KTAR News 92.3 FM.
“We’re hearing rumors of 40-story buildings that will be only 20-percent occupied by October,” Smead said.
“My biggest concern for Seattle was what the business community is going to come back to, and what kind of businesses are going to come back for customers.”
This is going to be the first of what will be many large corporate exoduses.
Then there is this news:
Seattle CHOP zone prompts lawsuit from businesses, residents: reports
Numerous Seattle businesses – including an auto repair shop, a tattoo parlor and a property management company – sued the city Wednesday, alleging city officials were complicit in allowing an “occupied protest” that has made them feel unsafe in their neighborhood, according to reports.
“(T)his lawsuit is about the constitutional and other legal rights of plaintiffs – businesses, employees and residents in and around CHOP – which have been overrun by the city of Seattle’s unprecedented decision to abandon and close off an entire city neighborhood, leaving it unchecked by the police, unserved by fire and emergency health services and inaccessible to the public at large,” the lawsuit says, Q13 FOX reported.
The plaintiffs allege that city leaders provided the demonstrators with barriers, public restrooms and medical supplies – in effect supporting the occupation of the neighborhood and hindering the efforts of local businesspeople, employees and residents to reach their buildings, receive deliveries and provide services, the Seattle Times reported.
“The result of the City’s actions has been lawlessness,” Calfo Eakes LLP, the law firm representing the plaintiffs, told the Times in a statement. “There is no public safety presence. Police officers will not enter the area unless it is a life-or-death situation, and even in those situations, the response is delayed and muted, if it comes at all.”
Small business owners are leaving too.
One local business owner, Joey Rodolfo of Buki clothing, told “Fox & Friends” this week that he plans to move out of state because of what he described as Seattle’s lack of governmental leadership.
“Since we have no leadership and we have a city council that’s so socialist, there really is very, very little support for businesses,” Rodolfo said. “As far as the city reaching out to small businesses like ourselves, or any business, there has been zero.”
The Mayor of Seattle announced that she would have the CHOP removed.
That did not go well.
Protesters in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) zone confronted construction workers as they attempted to remove roadblocks on Friday morning.
Employees from the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) arrived around 6.00am with trucks and heavy machinery to haul away the concrete and wooden barriers in an effort to reduce CHOP’s size.
Video taken by Converge Media showed Sam Zimbabwe, head of SDOT, and a representative from Mayor Jenny Durkan speaking to demonstrators, with the representative assuring that no protesters would be removed.
Several marchers stood in front of a bulldozer while others lay down n the middle of the street. Others sat on top of the wooden barricades.
At around 7.30am, SDOT began driving its construction vehicles out of the area without having removed any of the barricades. Police were also briefly on site but had dispersed by 8.30am.
You can watch a video of that attempted dismantling here:
This is what happens when you can’t use force at all, the protesters win.
The police can’t arrest them or use force to disperse them.
DOT can’t run over them, so one asshole lying in the street will stop an entire DOT crew is stopped and turned away.
CHOP is driving businesses away and is prompting what I can only imagine being a billion-dollar lawsuit against the city, and the city can’t muster up the testicular fortitude to do more than ask the CHOP to go away, nicely.
A city cannot exist like this.
Seattle is dead, it’s just going to take a while for the corpse to rot away into nothing.
Basically the next Detroit.
It was on its last legs anyway. One year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw
KOMO’s Eric Johnson explores the impact the drug and homelessness problem is having on our city and possible solutions in “Seattle is Dying.”
Sodom on the Sound, living down to its name.
Resurrected from the past “Will the last person leaving Seattle, please turn out the lights.” Different reason same slogan.
I see a future event when a small group of disgusted people finally exercises extreme vigilante justice on an area like CHOP.
The law and order void due to the incompetence and dereliction of duty of the government will be filled by something. It might not be pretty.
That…or we will see Detroit on the Pacific in the next few years. There is not enough money printed to pay me to live in LITERAL shit-holes like SF, LA, Portland, or Seattle.
That “protester” laying in front of the front end loader…
My mind keeps alternating between “Soylent Green” and “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”…
With a side order of Rachel Corrie pancakes.
Just like the 1968 LA riots. Set back the black community decades. Heck, I don’t think it has recovered to where it would have been by now, 52 years later.
I used to travel to Seattle and other west coast cities for my job. Back then it was a really nice city to visit. But likes so many of the west coast cities their has been a steady decline. Their liberal policies have lead to their demise. They are no long attractive places to live, let alone raise a family.