In recent months, the local news media have rediscovered crime in Belltown. This happens every year or two. By year’s end, they’ll surely cycle back to ranting about exurban meth labs and copper-wire thieves at construction sites.

The situation here will remain.

For decades, the City’s unofficially moved drug dealers and streetwalkers (whose industries cannot be eradicated) along to wherever they’d seem less visible—from Chinatown to lower Pike Street, then to upper Pike/Pine, then to Second and Bell.

As long as this was a sparsely populated commercial district, unsightly forms of commerce could occur in relative discretion.

But Belltown is now a high-rising abode for the affluent.

It’s also a nightlife zone, where the legal drug of alcohol is sold and consumed in quantity.

This brings a lot of people here. At night.

Some of them get noisy and rude, especially after closing time. Some of them also consume non-legal drugs. (Remember, illicut-drug buyers are often rowdier than illicut-drug sellers.)

So what can be done?

A consistently stronger police presence can help deal with the 2:15 a.m. fights, and could drive illicit-drug marketing further into the shadows. But the underlying situation would remain.

Our little half-square-mile will still have drinkers and druggers and street people and frat boys and little-black-dress girls and corporate executives and people who belong to two or more of these categories.

It’ll be a piece of work to get all these folks to coexist more peacefully.

And that would really be a news story.