I was just in Seattle for the first time in about 5 years. The situation was... not good. And this from someone who has spent a lot of time in SF and always had a not totally positive take on Seattle with respect to the grunge factor compared to other PNW cities.
Compared to other PNW cities, Seattle is about average. Portland isn't much better, Vancouver is...better because it is Canada but otherwise has very similar problems. No one can decide whether the term "skid row" was coined in Vancouver, Seattle, or Portland, they all had a similar place that was muddy because logs skidding to the mills which became a home for the down trodden.
So at least as far as its peers in the PNW, Seattle isn't very much of an outlier. Well, unless we can compare to other Seattle-area cities like Bellevue, which can simply push most of the homeless problem onto Seattle.
I imagine there are nicer areas of Seattle than Downtown just as there are nicer areas of SF than Moscone/Union Square/Market Street but ick. Not really a city person except to visit anyway but the northern West Coast (and maybe the whole West Coast) has just gotten worse if that's possible.
There are several city parks outside of downtown overrun with homeless encampments. Many roadside parking strips and interstate greenspaces too. It's widespread.
The city is trying to move people into housing but there's a lot of mental health and addiction problems that make many people resist the outreach support.
All of the west coast cities have similar problems (soaring housing costs, high growth, great tech jobs, lots of homeless people). Even when we count non-coastal cities in the west (Spokane, Reno, Sacramento, Las Vegas), it doesn't look better.
Combination of weather and a political climate that makes harsh approaches to a difficult problem unpalatable. It's probably mostly not housing prices although that doesn't help.
