HOME, AGAIN

Last week, property manager Brian E. Robinson responded to Janice Harper’s open letter “Dear Landlord” with his own tale of a tenant facing homelessness, but with a very different conclusion (“Dear Tenant,” April 1, 2015). “A system that relies on tenants begging for disparate charity from landlords is not working for anybody,” Robinson argued.

It sounds like you went above and beyond

for your tenant . . . and you have a good point. A landlord is not a social worker, physician, 
psychiatrist, etc. Clearly, there were issues in these people’s lives that need addressing beyond their housing plight, but agencies providing medical, mental health, and social services are clearly as overburdened as the subsidized housing system.

Nicola

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A well-reasoned, nuanced and civil discussion on gentrification/housing prices/homelessness? It must be April Fools Day.

Hutch84

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In the end, homelessness is an extremely personal issue that few suffering it will want anyone to know about. It is embarrassing and debilitating in every way imaginable on a personal level. To those that have witnessed the extremes such as suicide, it is not your fault. You didn’t create the situation and you will never solve it.

Gary Gibbons

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People who can’t plan ahead, whatever the reason, almost always end up on the streets, institutionalized, or in the slammer. If anyone has a “constitutional” solution that doesn’t involve giving them a month’s worth equivalent of “living wage” every month, I would like to read your solution. Maybe Seattle Weekly could make it into an ongoing discussion.

bill wald,

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AUDITOR, AUDIT THYSELF

Rick Anderson added to the recent drama surrounding State Auditor Troy Kelley by revealing that feds are looking into his failure to pay taxes on $3.8 million (“Paying the Piper,” March 30, 2015). He also explored the public official’s questionable past, filled with accusations of lies and fraudulent behavior.

This is the most thorough take on this story that I’ve read. It makes you wonder what else we don’t know about Kelley. It’s an old political question—if he’s got nothing to hide, why is he hiding?

Kermit

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There seems to be a lot we don’t know about the auditor’s past—he was a federal prosecutor who went after people who do things like he did? In reading this, I can see now why he didn’t want the details of this case revealed. You can audit but you can’t hide.

Pearlmann

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Something about his picture just screams shady liar, the type of person you wouldn’t want to accept a free gift from. Then I read the story and see. Lawyer and former federal prosecutor for white-collar crimes? Ah, now I gotcha. It wasn’t that he didn’t have good answers because he was dumb, he didn’t have good answers because he was smart.

Thebriang

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“Something is rotten in the State of Denmark.”

John Gray

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SMOKE SCREEN

Last week, Daniel Person suggested several reasons that 18 percent of Americans continue to suck down cigarettes (“Why Do We Still Smoke?,” April 1, 2015). “Here’s the thing,” Person wrote. “Smoking has a gravity-defying ability to remain a red-flag indicator of antiauthoritarianism.”

Sucking on that little phallic substitute in public is just about as pathetic as you can get. For what? A sad, cheap, little high? If anyone sprayed cancer-causing chemicals in public they would be arrested or assaulted—why are tobacco addicts still given a free pass?

Unrepentantcapitalist

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Cancer-causing chemicals have been sprayed in public for years. It’s called car exhaust.

eyemale,

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“Journalist” my rear end. For six decades, the United States government has been lying in our faces, and you fake “journalists” have been jamming it down our throats. The anti-smokers commit flagrant scientific fraud by falsely blaming smoking for diseases that are really caused by infection . . . For the government to commit fraud to deprive us of our liberties is automatically a violation of our Constitutional rights.

CarolAST

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Comments have been edited for length and clarity.