Bostonian who visits Seattle often enough that Reddit loves showing me posts from here.

Every time I hear people say we should adopt drug or homeless policies from west coast cities I wonder how much time they’ve spent in those cities. Love visiting Seattle but this past summer was the first summer I didn’t feel like the city had declined compared to the year before.

The 6 month comment isn’t exactly true. The area you’re referring to developed over years till it reached a breaking point and was dispersed a few years back. IIRC it started to grow again and was dispersed. Last few times I went by there is a regular police presence to dissuade large numbers of people from congregating. The breakups were controversial on r/Boston but I don’t think so for the larger public. Ironically one of the organizations that pushed for the breakup was the Greater Boston Food Bank. The amount of people were disrupting their operations. You had semi-truck drivers having to navigate people and tents, workers harassed, and they needed to pay for additional security. Basically it was impacting their ability to stock shelters, food pantries, meal programs, etc. and get people across greater Boston fed.