I call them drive-by people because that’s what I do. I drive by them, unsure of how to help or even if I should at the individual level.

They stand at all the freeway off-ramps in my neighborhood with cardboard signs. They haven’t always been there, but they are now. Evidence, I assume, of the growing humanitarian crisis in Seattle and King County: the Homelessness Epidemic.

One man sits all day at the exit from the Starbucks parking lot. He has a large backpack and a few plastic bags; I don’t know where he goes at night. I’ve seen him decanting cans of Coors Light into a Nalgene bottle. I’ve seen him asleep in the planter bed next to the sidewalk. Yes, I admit, I am made nervous by his presence. If that was me in the situation he’s in, I would want people to see me as more than homeless…