London, Paris can figure out homelessness, so why not Seattle?

I saw zero tents on the streets in Europe last week. Zero.

I was looking for them. It’s one of the things I do in the back of my mind when I travel. How does the city I’m visiting compare with the city I live in.

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I’m assuming that there are homeless people in two of the most prominent cities in the world, but they are not camping in the streets. At least as far as I could tell.

When you walk over Tower Bridge in London, there are no people living under it. When you stroll down the Champs-Elysées in Paris, there are no tiny home villages offering services.

London has a population of a little over 8.1 million people, just slightly smaller than New York City. I counted about a half dozen people sleeping in doorways, some of them were clearly just drunks sleeping it off. I say this because they had no other possessions on them, and appeared to be in “going out” clothes. I saw a few people sleeping in subway tunnels when we were changing trains, but only a few.

Paris is smaller, only 2.2 million people. But that’s still three times bigger than Seattle’s 724,000 residents. I was all over that city for 48 hours by foot, train, boat, and bus. I did not see one tent, and I’m racking my brain to remember if I saw even one person sleeping in a doorway when I was up in the morning searching for fresh coffee and eclairs. Not one tent, and there were plenty of spots that our local homeless would consider prime real estate.

Obviously, my little observational experiment on this trip isn’t scientific. Surely these giant international hubs struggle with many of the same issues that we do.

But neither of these great cities allow for unimpeded camping on the streets. Neither London nor Paris politicians stand by handwringing while people just pop a tent on any sidewalk or in any park. No sooner than I stepped off the Sounder Light Rail at Westlake Center to catch my bus home did I see our homeless problem front and center. It’s hard to miss.

So this is my semi-regular reminder to everyone here in the Pacific Northwest: this is not normal. This is not standard issue. This is not how the rest of the civilized world deals with homeless people. We should not just shrug our shoulders and say, “I guess this is just how it’s going to be.”

We can and should do better. Other big cities do things differently. Other liberal places do it better than we do.

The way we deal with the homeless here is failing. Let’s keep the pressure on local officials to change. Let’s not give up.

This is not normal.

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