Seattle's economic recovery is a mixed bag: This week in politics

A couple months ago, many people felt the pandemic was fading around Washington. There was talk of workers coming back to offices, and cities like Seattle recovering.

Some of that is happening.

But the delta variant has challenged that optimism, prompting another mask mandate, along with vaccine requirements. Many businesses are operating smoothly under renewed mask mandates. Others, though, are buckling under the combined weight of surging Covid cases the ongoing homeless crisis.

"There is an undercurrent of concern, no doubt, about public safety and homelessness — this sense that city government isn't doing enough," columnist and political analyst Joni Balter said on KUOW's Friday Politics segment.

Consider the beloved Uptown Espresso. It is closing its flagship location in Seattle's Uptown neighborhood; the original of six cafes.

Balter spoke with Uptown Espresso owner Paul Odom to get the details.

"The gist of it is that people experiencing homelessness are treating his front entry and parts of his business as a bathroom," Balter reports. "He called the Lower Queen Anne business district a dust bowl compared to what it was, say, 10 years ago."

Still, she argues the pandemic is not prompting a second shutdown in Seattle. That's because Seattle has one of the highest vaccination rates in the country, and "vaccinated people go out and do things."

Though, unvaccinated people apparently do, too.

KIRO 7 government reporter Essex Porter agrees.

Broadly speaking, he says Seattle's recovery is "anxiously optimistic;" some of that anxiety likely would have been mitigated by the planned return of Amazon employees to their downtown offices, which has been delayed until January 2022.

"Covid has changed both our work and shopping habits," Porter says. "We had a very busy, very prosperous downtown when people thought it was safe to go shopping and go to the office."

The keyword there is "safe."

Porter and Balter agree: The city's relative safety is not limited to the ebbs and flows of Covid-19.

It includes complex issues like visible homelessness and policing —issues that are effectively on the November General Election ballot.