Grim sight that greets visitors to two of Seattle's most iconic attractions, as woke new mayor prepares to enter office
A massive homeless encampment has popped up near two of Seattle's most famous tourist hot spots, as the city braces for a super-woke new mayor to take office.
Shocking images shared on social media showed dozens of tents surrounded by litter sitting outside the Museum of Pop Culture and the Space Needle.
'This encampment started out as two tents several months ago, and it's been allowed to grow and fester. Right around the corner from there there are more tents on a side street,' one X user wrote.
The museum and Space Needle are among the Emerald City's most popular attractions, with many locals now concerned that the influx of tent-dwelling vagrants badly sullies the area.
Advocates have sounded the alarm that policies from Seattle's newly elected democratic socialist mayor Katie Wilson, 43, could lead to an influx of homeless people, drug use and growing encampments.
The director of We Heart Seattle, a organization dedicated to clearing trash from the city's streets, Andrea Suarez told KIRO Newsradio she is concerned that more tent camps will pop up in the city's parks.
'This is going to be an inflow nightmare. What's going through my mind is what's going through the mind of the drug addict, what's going through the mind of the criminal. They are going to come to Seattle,' she said.
Wilson, who has been compared to fellow Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor-elect of New York City, campaigned on ending encampment sweeps and treating drug use as a public health crisis instead of criminal matter.
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Shocking images shared on social media showed dozens of tents surrounded by litter sitting outside the Museum of Pop Culture (pictured)
Advocates have sounded the alarm that policies from Seattle's newly elected democratic socialist mayor Katie Wilson (pictured), 43, could lead to an influx of homeless people
Early data indicated that overdose deaths due to fentanyl in Seattle and King County in 2025 are on the rise and forecast to match or exceed last year's totals, Fox 13 reported.
'This is worse than I have seen since 2020 during the middle of the pandemic,' Suarez said. 'This is not an encampment. This is a drug scene.'
Seattle has become a byword for the surge in crime, homelessness and open drug use that swept many American cities that adopted a progressive stance in the wake of George Floyd's June 2020 murder.
The city's ritzy Capitol Hill neighborhood was overtaken by anarchists that summer and nicknamed CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone), ruining homes and businesses.
But while other blue cities have sought to curb woke excesses, Wilson and her ilk appear happy to indulge them, frustrating many in a city once known as the wealthy headquarters for tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon.
Critics have called Wilson, who also campaigned on affordability, privileged and out of touch, as she regularly receives checks from her professor parents to pay for childcare.
Those critics also highlight that Wilson dropped out of Oxford University just six weeks shy of graduation, leaving the school without debt thanks to her parents.
Outgoing Mayor Bruce Harrell's reelection website featured a quote from Carolyn Riley-Payne, former Seattle King County NAACP President, saying: 'It's hard to trust a candidate running on their challenges with affordability when her family’s wealth shields her from actual consequences and financial stress.
'Wilson chose to not graduate from college, and now chooses to rely on parental subsidy to avoid financial hardship.' Wilson's new job will pay her around $230,000-a-year, meaning she'll be less reliant on her parents for money.
On her parents' dime, Wilson, studied physics and philosophy at Balliol, a constituent college of Oxford University in the UK, before quitting to drift across America on a bus.
Her father, David Wilson, is a distinguished former professor who paid for her education and has admitted he regularly helped his 43-year-old daughter pay for childcare costs.
Social media users said the homeless encampment near the museum and iconic Space Needle (pictured) started a few months ago
Wilson (pictured) campaigned on ending encampment sweeps and treating drug use as a public health crisis instead of criminal matter
David told Daily Mail that he needed some time to understand his daughter's shocking decision to leave the English university in 2004 with only a few weeks left in her last semester.
'Katie dropped out of Oxford and she decided to fall in the direction of social activism, of course they [Katie and her husband] made their own way by doing odd jobs,' he said.
David said that while touring the US, Katie and her husband decided to stay in Seattle for many reasons, particularly an open library system that would allow her to access books from the University of Washington.
'She made damn sure that she could actually continue to do what college students do,' her father said.
'What you can see from that is she never really left the whole ethos of college and academic life - scholarship, science, telling the truth. It's almost a moral system that stayed with her, that remained a part of who she is.'
He said that his daughter had an all-or-nothing mentality, meaning that to pursue her fight as an activist, she needed no safety net: 'It seemed very ill-advised at the time.'
'Why would you walk away from something like that? I kept thinking, why start from nothing? Not that you [Katie] gave us any choice,' David said.
'But now I understand. It was that whole idea of burning bridges so you don't have a Plan B.'
Critics have called Wilson, who also campaigned on affordability, privileged and out of touch, as she regularly receives checks from her professor parents (pictured with her father)
However, her father said he was not the only one skeptical of Wilson's decision; her husband Scott Myers, with whom she traveled the country after dropping out, allegedly also disapproved of her decision to leave school.
Wilson told KUOW that when she moved to Seattle in 2004, she cut herself off from her parents' money and 'worked a bunch of working-class jobs.'
'Psychologically, it really did something to me,' Wilson said.
In 2011, she founded the Transit Riders Union, a nonprofit focused on improving public transportation in Seattle and Kings County. Tax records show she earned close to $73,000 from the nonprofit in 2022 while working 55-hour weeks.
Currently, her husband does not have a paying job. That means the couple's household income is below what would be considered enough money to support themselves and their child in Seattle.
'It just speaks to how expensive and unaffordable it is, right?' she told KUOW.
'If you're lucky enough to have parents who can pitch in a little bit, that's not something to be embarrassed about.'
A spokesperson for Wilson's campaign previously told the Daily Mail: 'Families from all different kinds of economic backgrounds support each other in all different kinds of ways.'
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