Wage are not the major reason for the high cost of housing in Seattle. The major problem is there's no place to build affordable new housing which Seattle needs desperately. Seattle is hemmed in by Lake Washington on east, Puget Sound on West and other cites to the north and South. The average cost of a 1 bedroom apartment in downtown Seattle is nearly $3,000/mo.That's a good theory but it doesn't match the facts. Most of Seattle's homeless comes from Seattle and surrounding areas. If you know anything about the homeless, you would understand this.That is not what it's about. As it says in the article and in the TV programs, why aren't we doing more to prevent crime, solve the homeless problem, and deal with drug abuse. These are major issues with liberals. These are homegrown problems and are not the result of migration.
I've lived in Seattle for years and what I have seen is a gross misallocation of resources, 3.3 billion dollars for a tunnel in the downtown section and one sports stadium after another and years of procrastination on the decision to expand light rail which will cost the city hundreds millions of dollars. There is nothing wrong with these projects but the city needs to make crime, drugs, and homelessness a priority.
When you offer disproportionately high wages for low/no skill workers, you encourage those low/no skill types to migrate in. They are not the sharpest tool in the sheds to begin with or they wouldn't be low/no skill types so with them comes crime, drugs and homelessness. People who wing it in life are the right amount of idiot to think "Well I will go there and figure something out once I get there".
Any type of relocation is a big problem for the homeless. When you loose your job, your home, and you're broke you don't take off across the country seeking a pot of goal. You go to friends and family who can help you, not to a strange city on the otherside of the country.
Unlike the pictures in the video of drug addicted derelicts sleeping and peeing in streets in the downtown section, about half of Seattle's homeless have jobs. Some may live in homeless camps but many pay someone a few dollars to sleep in a garage, porch, spare room, or pitch a tent in the yard.
Inflating the cost of housing with inflated wages will have that effect.
Like other major cities, people that work in the downtown section are either making 6 digit salaries or they they live miles away from the heart of the city. Even if you live 5 or 10 miles outside of the city, you're likely to pay about $2000 for a 2 bedroom apartment. Yet people are still coming, more than 1,000 a week.