Aggressive panhandling is getting worse

Hey everyone. This is my first post here. I haven’t seen a specific thread dedicated to aggressive panhandlers (or if there was, I couldn’t find one in my search), so decided to start one. Mods, I hope this is OK.

I live & work in a large urban environment, and on a regular basis (usually in a downtown area or on public transportation) aggressive panhandlers will ask me for money. I never give them any & very bluntly say “I don’t have any” or just shake my head - and in some (not all, or most) cases, they will get aggressive and ask me “why not?” or cuss me out. I have noticed that this type of thing has definitely gotten worse in the past 5-7 years.

I have also tried ignoring them completely, and that enrages them sometimes too.

Note if need be will defend myself if attacked by one of these people.

I honestly don’t know of any solution to the problem. Obviously, a good number of homeless are alcoholics, drug addicts, and mentally ill who are in many cases a danger to others & in some cases themselves. To believe these people can act reasonably is obviously too much to ask. And, obviously, there will always be people like this around.

I do believe that the homeless problem wouldn’t be as as much of an issue if people stopped giving panhandlers $ - this is just enabling them. Obviously some panhandlers live off of money they get from begging, which means they don’t see any reason to work.

One of the worst places I’ve seen re: panhandlers was in Portland, Oregon. I went there on vacation there a couple of summers ago and did notice an extremely big problem with homeless panhandlers & mentally ill drug addicts. They were EVERYWHERE. I did notice a lot of them screaming/yelling at others for no reason. I myself was verbally berated by one of them, even though I was just minding my own business. Very irritating.

I went to Seattle right after Portland, and there were also a lot of entitled panhandlers there as well. I couldn’t believe how many times these freeloaders asked me for $.

Based on what I’ve read & some research that I’ve done, both Portland/Seattle have an extremely liberal view of the homeless - i.e., they’re allowed to run rampant in many cases; and, it was obvious that they were literally taking over certain streets/street corners (I primarily noticed this in Portland).

Conversely, I was in NYC for a week last summer (vacation). I went everywhere via the train & walking (no car). And, the homeless panhandlers were never aggressive - they had signs & barely said anything to you. You could easily ignore them. Other cities need to institute whatever NYC has put in place, because whatever they’re doing re: clamping down on aggressive panhandlers - it works!

Well, it is a free country, and we do tend to allow our citizens to “run rampant” in our streets. You’ll be glad to know that Seattle does have a law that would prohibit most of the behavior you find objectionable.

It’s against the law pretty much everywhere. You may need to report these incidents to the police, perhaps with cell-phone video evidence.

This is the sort of thing that swings in pendulums, from being under-enforced to over-enforced, and back again.

(Here in San Diego, there was a brief period when panhandlers came out into the street to start washing car windows. This was brushed back, hard and fast. We don’t allow people to panhandle in the street. Also, our cars are our official state religion in California; nobody touches our cars!)

These laws are meaningless if they’re not enforced. And, I don’t think anyone should be allowed to “run rampant” by walking around screaming, threatening people, and aggressively panhandling, but that’s just me.

I noticed more issues in Portland than Seattle. The homeless in Portland were, in many cases, literally camped out on street corners.

Faux bleeding heart liberals are the ones who say they feel compassion for “the downtrodden” but at the same time definitely don’t want them living in their neighborhood and/or around their kids, etc. I bet that if all the people who claimed to be liberal re: the homeless found out that there were plans to build a homeless shelter in their residential neighborhood, they would fight the building of this tooth and nail. And if they say they wouldn’t, they’re lying. Yes - I would definitely be against this too, but at least I’m honest about my feelings here.

I believe the OP.

:confused: So, you’re claiming that there aren’t any liberals in Portland and Seattle? Who do you think actually does live in these neighborhoods where homeless people currently are “camped out”?

I, a self-identified liberal, have lived and worked within a mile of shelters for the homeless for the past 25 years or so, in a total of four or five different cities. Do you think I’m lying about that?

Great advice!

I’ve lived in Seattle and spent a lot of time in Portland, but for me, the whiniest and most persistent panhandlers were in Denver and Colorado Springs. They got worse with pot legalization, too.

My nephew in Richmond informs me that a number of his VCU classmates would, as a lark, go downtown and panhandle. Not sure why this pisses me off so much, but it does.

Duly noted and suitably impressed.

Question: In New York City and other places they have these “squeegee gangs” that will run up and try and wash your windows. How do you say no to them?

Turn your windshield wipers on as they approach. Works every time.

Are those guys back? I don’t drive much in NYC anymore, but they were gone for a long time. I think Giuliani shut them down.

To the OP: I’m a bleeding heart liberal, maybe a faux one, I don’t know, but I don’t want panhandlers in my neighborhood. I think support for the downtrodden would be giving them support so they don’t need to panhandle – housing and food support, job training, mental health support, drug addiction programs.

I don’t see more aggressive panhandlers here in NYC, so maybe it’s a regional thing. Or, maybe it’s confirmation bias – you think there are more so you notice the aggressive ones more. Can you cite any studies that show that panhandlers have become more aggressive lately?

Aren’t the squeegee gangs a thing of the past now? I haven’t encountered them in years.

I raise my hand, I live in Gillman Park directly next to the campers and I have been here for 15 years. Lets be realistic, homelessness is a crisis here and much of it it is directly caused by poor choices in zoning laws.

Seattle chose to protect single family home zoned areas during a period of high growth, this has lead to almost all lower income housing areas to be rebuilt with high priced homes dramatically reducing the number of available affordable housing areas and most of our newer homeless are actually local residents.

I live near one of the few remaining large U-haul rental areas, and at least once every month or so I actually run into someone who was evicted for new construction, the people tried to keep their belongings in the truck while looking for housing, ran out of money and had to dump all of their belongings onto the street to prevent being arrested due to being charged with auto theft. This typically means that they lose all of their possessions and yet still have no place to live. Often these are people who have been getting along on a fixed income, and they don’t have a support structure to move another place.

It is an actual real crisis and there is no housing that they could afford, there are not enough shelters for them. The NIMBY effect of the west coast is a huge part of the problem.

To the OP, please read this as not being judgemental but trying to be helpful in reducing what you find as an uncomfortable situation. The problem is most likely escalating because you are looking at them with disgust, contempt and treating them as sub-human. If when asked you give them a polite and compassionate no the number of “aggressive panhandling” incidents will reduce significantly. While I may be wrong and miss-reading the tone of our original post, most people will be more aggressive when someone dehumanizes them.

I didn’t know that.

Here in Kansas city, I don’t go downtown much but there were always a few but they don’t seem to be too much trouble and if they do a call to the cops and they will be cleared out.

I wanted to add a bit more,

Basic aspects of living are much harder when you are homeless, and in fact many homeless who do abuse drugs did not do so before they became homeless. But when you have zero options for comfort sometimes getting high is the only escape available to you.

While panhandlers almost exclusively ask for money I have a close friend who carries around bundles of new socks as he also wants to avoid enabling behavior. I have never seen so much gratitude or appreciation from a gift of money like I have seen from his gift of new socks.

People panhandle for change because that is what people will give, but if you are willing try just sharing some compassion and humanity. You would be surprised how the simplest kind gestures will result in tears of gratitude. Almost no one wants to be homeless, and if they knew how to change their situation they would almost certainly take steps to make it happen.

If you are in the Seattle area try joining the Rotary if you can, some specialize in helping the working poor move forward. I doubt that many of us who are not homeless realize how common it is for people in this situation to be forced into choices that are almost impossible to win. In the Seattle area the cost of transportation is so high that the choice is often between paying for a bus ticket to get to work or buying food.

That wasn’t very sportsmanlike.

In Chicago I had a panhandler start shining my shoes. I was just standing and waiting for the light, felt something and looked down and there he was squirting something on my shoe (presumably shoe polish but probably not and I do not want to know) and started “polishing” it with a nasty cloth.

That was a new one on me and thankfully I have not seen it since that one time.

Last Friday a panhandler posed as a valet. I walked out of the restaurant and he was standing at the valet stand and waving in a taxi (I guess the actual valet was on break or getting a car or something). It wasn’t till I started to go for the taxi door that he stood in my way and asked for money. That was a new one for me.

They disappeared long ago under Giuliani then Bloomberg. Perhaps DeBlasio might tolerate their return, but it hasn’t actually happened yet. OP’s observation is accurate regarding NY: aggressive panhandlers are rare. It’s not anything like some of the West Coast cities.

Part of the issue is numbers. Where the weather is good, and/or other public policies are inclined toward it, there’s bigger panhandler presence. That itself might embolden them, perhaps even creates more competition among them that results in more aggressive tactics. It’s probably a bigger picture than just the cops telling them to knock it off. But if the cops are told not to do that, and must be in some the West Coast places, that probably contributes to it.

I don’t see how it helps anyone including the truly disadvantaged to allow panhandlers (who aren’t always those truly disadvantaged) to make public spaces more unpleasant than is necessary. Some people seem to have the idea it’s some kind of useful ‘penance’ for better off people, make them rethink their ‘privilege’ or something. But people avoid such things, and that avoidance has a lot of knock on consequences which are bad for cities and bad for the disadvantaged people in them.