"But the investment that Williams, Boyle, and other business leaders have put into this project have given some homeless advocates pause for being an ingenuous marketing tool, one that could put public services into the hands of private developers."

Translation: Homeless "advocates" are concerned their grift of public funds without actually solving the problem will come to an end now that private developers are actually doing something to address the problem.

How unbelievable that there could be "concern" of this nature over a project that will add a large number of shelter beds and additional services, kind of gives the game away even more than when the "advocates" argued vociferously against using Wapato as a shelter. Anything that doesn't funnel money directly through their control and into their projects, well, that is simply "concerning" and "not the right solution"...

Thanks for keeping Merc readers up to date.

The Merc has a role to play continuing to report in depth on this project.

Readers may want to know how the project will measure itself, how it self corrects, measurement of street campers (decreasing?), police interaction data referring clients to the center, mental health referrals from the center, and the experience of the homeless-customers.

So the question for journalists is "what are your going to measure? How are your going to measure it?"

Almost always, the press wants to generate negative outrage, feeding advertising pageviews. But perhaps the Merc could be helpful in guiding continuous improvement based on measurements and adaptation for this project.

Flavio, once again you're a fool. This assertion that you and other clods have been making lately is a disgraceful and unsupported smear against the exact people who have been doing the heavy lifting on this issue for years. You don't care. You just call them names and peddle your idiotic conspiracy theories, and for what? To persuade this community to cut off funding for the people who have a proven track record? To put public dollars into millionaire pet projects, because THEY have such a great track record? (They don't.)

How about from now on, when you know nothing about a topic, you spare us your "hot takes"? They aren't helping.

Euphonius, what, pray tell, is this "proven track record" you speak of? The homeless population has only gotten bigger. The meth and opiod epidemics have only gotten worse. We are one of the worst cities in the entire country when it comes to the percentage of our population that remains unhoused.

If that's "success" based on the current crop of advocates/experts, I'd say it's time for some new advocates/experts.

And you're always free to skip right over my comments if you don't want to read them, dumbo.