Why are there so few homeless people in Western Europe?

Comparisons of United States and European politics and social welfare are weighted with natural American aversion to Bolshie big guvmint — plus, no one has ever been convinced by arguments from the other side, no matter how overwhelming the statistics.

For every plain fact that ours is the only rich country in which it is possible to go bankrupt over a medical bill, there comes the return volley that a million Britons are on the National Health waiting list for some non-emergency procedure.

It’s really not worth going there.

So, I will.

No, I won’t be making the case for single-payer here.

I will instead just try to figure out the reasons for the fact — not conjecture, not on the one hand this, on the other hand that — that in Western Europe, there are essentially no homeless people.

Whereas in Southern California alone, there are tens of thousands of homeless people living on the streets.

I spent five weeks traveling this summer — Dublin, the Scottish countryside, Glasgow, Edinburgh, three provinces in northern Spain, Toledo, Madrid. I was staying in the hearts of

the big downtowns, where as we know all too well from the blue tarps flapping everywhere in our lives, people without homes live, after a fashion.

In over a month, I saw just three apparently homeless people in the biggest cities in Ireland, Scotland and Spain. Fewer than the makeshift community you would find under a single freeway overpass in Los Angeles. I saw precisely zero homeless encampments.

I recall one panhandler in Ireland, another in supposedly “gritty” Glasgow and one person daytime-sleeping on the ground on a walking street in the Spanish capital.

That’s it.

So what’s up with that, other than another example of American exceptionalism, this time on the downside? Well, each country is different, EU or no EU.

There actually are some overarching principles in the European Union that make roofs over people’s heads a right. But not all the countries have adopted those.

Post-Brexit, Scotland is not in the European Union. And I am told that the reason I saw no people living rough there is that when Scots find themselves unhoused for any reason, they report this to the local governing council, which is required by law to put you up — stat. Usually it’s in a hostel-type room, often run by the Salvation Army, which is reimbursed by the government. You then apply to the council for an apartment, usually found within a year. So long as you show that you are looking for work, taxpayers pay your rent, indefinitely.

In Ireland, there has been an affordable housing problem ever since the financial crash of 2008. According to the Borgen Project, there are over 8,000 homeless people there, in a country with half the population of Los Angeles County. I would assume that most would be in the only big city, Dublin; perhaps they were kept hidden by the government when I was there to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday and the publication of “Ulysses” in June. Like the Irish equivalent of an L.A. Olympics homeless sweep. There is no “right” to housing there, and Dublin rents are expensive — but, again, the one panhandler seen, in five days.

I think it’s like Italy — your family takes you in, no matter what a slouch you are, or your society takes you in if you have no one. Americans don’t like to hear it, but we need to be more like Europe if we truly want to end homelessness.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.