Harger: Seattle’s Clean City report is out. 661,000 needles. Purple bags for encampments. Gas money for RVs. Progress.

Seattle released its Clean City report this week. And the city wants you to know it had a big year.

The city removed 5.3 million pounds of waste from Seattle streets in 2025. The report helpfully notes that’s the weight of about 530 orca whales, in case you needed a visual.

And then there’s this number.

661,000 sharps. Needles, syringes, lancets. Collected from Seattle streets, sidewalks, and public spaces in a single year. To be fair, most came from the city’s 23 sharps disposal boxes. But 1,529 were individual pickup requests. Someone called because they found needles somewhere they shouldn’t be. Those requests were up 57% from the year before. Not a supervised injection site. Not a clinic. The street. The sidewalk. The park where you walk your dog.

661,000 sharps. And the number is going up.

Seattle homeless and fentanyl crisis: Nashville wouldn’t tolerate this, Houston wouldn’t, Seattle does

This would not be tolerated in Nashville. It would not be tolerated in Houston. Most American cities looked at this problem and said: No. Not here. Not on our sidewalks. Not in our parks. Let’s get you into rehab. And if you’re not willing to do that, there will be consequences.

And then there are the cities that decided open drug use is just the price of progress. Los Angeles. Portland. San Francisco and Denver would have made this list not long ago. Seattle still fits right in.

San Francisco(!) just elected a new mayor who ran explicitly on cleaning up the streets and cracking down on open drug use. And Colorado residents gathered 200,000 signatures statewide to put a fentanyl crackdown on the November ballot. Denver’s streets have made national news for the same reasons Seattle’s have. Apparently, they had a limit. The cities that helped write the book on this problem are starting to rewrite it.

Seattle hasn’t picked up a pen yet.

Seattle fentanyl crisis: purple bags for encampments, gas money for RVs, sharps pickups up 57%

Most of the rest of the country has figured out this doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because you allow it. Because there are no consequences. Because the message sent to people using drugs in public is: we see you, here are some clean supplies, have a nice day.

Seattle has been sending that message for years. The result is 661,000 sharps collected citywide, homeless encampments in city parks, and a fentanyl crisis that cleanup crews can measure but city hall can’t seem to solve.

Here’s some of what else is buried in that report.

Seattle runs a weekly trash pickup service for 41 encampments. The city distributes purple garbage bags to encampment residents. In 2025, crews handed out 19,419 purple bags and collected 716,014 pounds of trash from those camps. Every week. At 41 locations.

To be fair, that’s a more sanitary option than simply letting people leave waste wherever they want. The public health argument for it is real. The question nobody seems to be asking is why the encampments are still there in the first place.

The city conducted 102 RV remediations last year, collecting nearly 470,000 pounds of trash from RV sites along public right-of-way. And as part of what the report calls a “vehicle support pilot,” the city also provided gas, jump-starts, and tire repairs to help RV residents relocate voluntarily. No word on how far. Maybe the block is over.

Illegally dumped material removed jumped 99% year over year. The report credits “improved data quality” for part of that increase, which is a very polished way of saying we weren’t counting it all before.

Seattle homeless encampments: North Beacon Hill, Totem Pole Park cleared. Tents back within days

Two weeks ago, I visited the parks on North Beacon Hill again. It was my fourth trip in five months. Tents. Open drug use. Human waste on walking paths. A woman in full psychosis screaming in the middle of the afternoon. The traditional Korean pavilion at Daejeon Park, a gift from Seattle’s sister city in South Korea, is being lived in. Deteriorating. A gift from another nation, left to rot.

Last Thursday, the city cleared out the camps. By Monday, the tents were already coming back.

And it’s not just North Beacon Hill. Wednesday afternoon, KIRO Newsradio’s James Lynch was reporting live from a camp sweep at Totem Pole Park. By Thursday morning, tents were back.

The city deserves credit for the cleanup work. 31,000 volunteer hours. Real effort by real people. But we’ve seen this movie before. A few years back, the MLB All-Star Game came to town. The city scrambled. The streets got cleaned. It looked great. Then the teams left and, within a week, it was back to business as usual.

FIFA World Cup 2026 Seattle: the city will look great. Then FIFA will leave

You know that house? The one with the messy living room? The company’s coming, so you spend a Saturday making it spotless. Vacuum lines on the carpet. Dishes done. Everything in its place.

By Tuesday, after they leave, the pile of laundry is back on the couch. The dishes are stacking up. The clutter found its way home. My wife would like me to clarify that this is not about us. This is a purely hypothetical house. And please don’t stop by unannounced on a Tuesday.

The World Cup visitors will see a beautiful Seattle. Clean streets. Working parks. A city that functions. They’ll go home and tell their friends what a great city this is.

Then FIFA leaves. And the mess comes back. It always does.

Seattle’s $20 million Clean City budget: 530 orca whales and counting

The Clean City program runs on a $20 million annual budget. The city measured this year’s results in orca whales. 530 of them.

Maybe next year they can measure something else, like whether the tents come back.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

Follow @https://twitter.com/kirocharlie