I’d think they would do better to not limit themselves to new and just throw out anything they got that was unusable. Particularly these days as I can’t imagine there are that many people that can afford to give away a bunch of new stuff!
That was an essentially useless cite as it applies to what I said about street corners during the day.
That was really interesting stuff - wish there had been places like that when I lived up there, tho I was in the B’ham area when I was po’ (hi flatlined!). Anyway, I would have been quite happy to work for a warm place to sleep back then.
I think it was because it was in Seattle so no one really expected it to get all that cold even during the winter. Were you living up there in, um, the late 80’s some time I forget the exact date, but it snowed like 2-3 inches downtown? That was one of the years they reported some of the homeless dying. Also, back then it seemed like most if not all of the street people were addicts and/or totally nuts and so may not have been able to make the decision to get out of the cold, or even notice it.
I wouldn’t be too sure since the state is broke and has been for quite some time. We’ve always had a severe drain on our social services even before the mortgage/unemployment disaster, and our county was actually bankrupt not that long ago.
Please note that I was responding to the question of why someone who isn’t homeless would want to stand on a street corner here and beg. So, yes, they do vanish when the sun goes down, tho I doubt it is in a puff of smoke.
I grew up in Vancouver (WA, not BC), but moved to Wenatchee in 1983. I remember, though “really cold” in Vancouver usually meant “just cold enough for the puddles to be iced over in the morning but the ice melts before noon”, and 2-3 inches of snow being a “blizzard” (though in, I think, '79 or '80 we got hit with two+ feet of snow all in one go, which was completely bizarre). Unpleasant, sure, but survivable if you have a warm coat and blanket and a place out of the wind. In Wenatchee, though, we usually get 2-3 heavy snowfalls over the course of winter, dropping anywhere from a few inches to a couple feet. But the thing here is that we can go long stretches where the temperature rarely or never gets above freezing, so that snow hits the ground and just sits there week after week. If it goes away, it’s because of sublimation, not melting. So people here are prepared for that more than somebody in Seattle would be.
What about the guy who won the lottery and carries it all around town in trash bags? I know it’s true, because, like, someone I know read it in the paper once. :rolleyes:
I’ve usually seen, “new, like-new, or ‘gently used’” - the latter meaning used but doesn’t look shabby. These sort of clothes help the homeless or poor to get jobs, help them send their kids to school without shame, that sort of thing.
Most of these people are not homeless. This is their job. In many cases they are part of an organized ring and they are being paid to stand at that intersection and collect your money.
Even if you didn’t consider yourself homeless, if you were dependent on the charity of others for shelter and their couch for sleeping then yes, you were indeed homeless.
However, as a functional human being, presumably without addiction or mental health burdens, you were able to maintain relationships with others such that they were willing to extend such help, and were also able to hold your stuff together sufficiently to attend to basic hygiene and the like. Thus, you did not fit the stereotype of “homeless” and (also presumably) were able to get back on your feet relatively quickly.
The well-dressed, clean folks you see claiming homeless may, indeed, but such people who are temporarily in a bad spot. Or they could be a scam, yes. It can be difficult to tell.
Anyone who has worked with the homeless, in soup kitchens, shelters, etc. will be able to tell you of people who were homeless yet managed to stay clean and decently attired. They also tend to be the ones who don’t stay homeless.
I’ll cut curlcoat some slack on this, as she’s in southern California, but in a lot of places sleeping outside much of the year can be fatal. Chicago in winter, for example. For that matter, I have on a couple of occasions encountered people lying in the street (well, on the sidewalk, actually) who had frozen to death during a Chicago winter. A human being has to have shelter for about six months of the year around here or there is a good chance they won’t survive the night.
There were also a couple occasions we had to shoo a bum out of the back seat of our car when we lived in Rogers Park - it seems one of the local homeless had retained the key to his Festiva when the bottom fell out his life. An old model Festiva key opened virtually all Festivas made, though often it wouldn’t start the car. So he’d climb into whatever local Festivas he could find for shelter. It was scary the first time, then became annoying. He never took anything or damaged the car, but yeah, having to knock on the window of your own car and say “buddy, get moving, I have to go to work now” was one of those weird living-in-the-big-city things that are funny only with the passage of years, not at the time they actually happen.
Cite, please? This sounds like some cheap story you read somewhere that you believe over all other stories about the homeless just to make you feel better.
I was homeless in Seattle in the mid '80’s, and it was no picnic. The shelters were few, and all were of the type that made you stand in a long line for a chance to get in, and if you did get in they kicked you out between six and seven in the morning. Any free food you got was usually fast carb and little actual nutrition. Occasionally I would save up the money I got from giving plasma(back then you got between six and eight bucks a visit) and spend the night in a cheap dive…but that stopped the day they messed up my arm putting the fluid back in. Most days I started out on an empty stomach and no energy, which doesn’t work if you want to find work.
Also, I suspect that if they didn’t specify “new, like-new, or gently-used,” 90% of what they got would be crap that they then need to spend their very limited man-hours on sorting through and throwing out. Most non-profits/social services prefer to spend their money mostly on the actual services to help the poor/homeless, not on busywork and overhead.
Also, if you donate your sneakers because they’re so worn out they hurt your feet, odds are they will hurt the feet of whoever gets them, too. That’s not particularly helpful.
It varies by shelter. In some cases yes. In other cases, a “shelter” is just mats on the floor of an old building at night, the most basic sort of place to sleep.
Maybe you should shop at Goodwill or the Salvation Army, then.
Seriously - you can pick up some amazing deals there. I recently had someone come into the shop at work with a pair of boots they bought for $5 at the Goodwill. These boots retail for over $200! She brought them in to have the polished, shined, and weatherproofed, it was a steal - but someone donated those boots, not wanting them anymore, although they were nearly new.
We have a regular customer at work who buys shoes and boots at the thrift shops and brings them in for repairs and polishing, then turns around and sells them on eBay for profit. It’s how she makes her living.
I’m not saying all the poor folks you see wearing designer stuff got their second-hand, but it’s more common a means of doing so than you might think.
Heck, for that matter, my current winter parka was originally purchased by a former roommate for all of $10 at a Goodwill store - she used it for years, then left it behind when she moved out, and I’m still using it. It’s at least 20 years old just based on how long I’ve had it, but it’s been well cared for and is still very servicable. New, it was probably well over $100 at the time.
Yes, because some shelters are quite dangerous. It’s not unknown for robberies and rapes to occur during the night. I’ve heard that homeless women are more likely to avoid shelters due to fears of rape and violence.
Not all shelters are dens of crime, just some.
So… you judge whether or not someone is deserving of help solely based on appearances?
It’s a bad catch-22 when a homeless person who keeps themselves together enough to be clean and decently dressed is then deemed as “not needy enough” despite still being homeless!
Or they got those $100 shoes for $5 at the Goodwill store…
Because if they didn’t say that they’d be inundated with rags so foul as to be unfit to scrub floors with. Too many people use donation boxes as trash bins as it is.
Well, OK, those might be scams, sure. We all know there are scammers out there. However, just because a person is well dressed doesn’t mean they’re scamming - it is possible to be neat, clean, and decently dressed AND homeless at the same time.
Well, OK, except there’s the cost of throwing the garbage out. In my area vast parts of the county have no municipal trash pick up. You have to pay a private company to haul trash away, and you pay for every bit they haul. Or such a place would have to hire someone to drive the trash to the dump directly, and even if they got a volunteer driver there’s still the cost of gas and vehicle maintenance. In other words, it costs them money to deal with garbage, and money that goes to trash removal doesn’t go to people who need assistance.
And, as my examples above note - there ARE people who are donating new stuff! I don’t know where these people live in my area, we’ve been hard-hit by the Great Recession in my region, but they’re out there. I can only assume they’re the same people who drop gold coins in Salvation Army kettles this time of year.
Thrift stores in well-to-do areas will also see more designer wear donated, and likely newer and higher-quality items. That might also have an effect on how well dressed the poor and homeless are in such places.
Finally, one more example:
One of my current coworkers is, in fact, homeless. She fled her home state to evade an ex-boyfriend turned abusive (he beat her into a coma. When she recovered sufficiently to leave the hospital she left the state and wound up in our area.) She currently sleeps at a shelter of some sort, but she is required to be up at 7:30 and leave the premises during the day. She lost everything. She share a room at night with two other people. She has no means to secure anything of any value at all at the shelter, so she must carrying anything she cares about (including spare clothing) with her. The clothes she wears were donated by a local church. There is some issue with her qualifying for foodstamps I’m not clear about, and in any case, the only kitchen facilities she has access to are the fridge and microwave at work. The boss buys her lunch every day she is at work.
Nonetheless, she comes to work on time every day, despite being without a car. She is always clean and presentable. Her clothes are neat and look good. No one would ever imagine she’s homeless, or destitute, and dependent on others for even the clothes on her back. She is trying to get an apartment, but it’s very hard with nothing saved, low wages, no bank account to keep her money in, and no local references. She’s afraid to give references from back where she used to live, for fear her ex-boyfriend might somehow track her down.
Meanwhile, her shelter keeps yanking her around. Today she has to be at a meeting a 1 pm. They don’t care that she is scheduled to work at that time - despite all their clamoring about how important employment is. They want her to save money, yet won’t even put lockboxes in the shelter for people to keep their valuables/money in until they have sufficient for the minimum to open a bank account. It’s a mess. At this point, social services do as much to hold her down as to help her out.
So yeah, at one of my company’s store locations the nice, well-dressed, well-groomed. middle-aged woman at the front counter running the cash register and greeting customers and answering the phone is a homeless person. The wealthy customers (she’s in the store in the “rich” town) haven’t a clue, which is just as well, because quite a few of them would be horrified at the notion they are interacting with the homeless and destitute.
There are probably not going to be any studies that are going to satisfy this. I shared upthread an anecdotal story that I witnessed, and there are usually a handful of local news stories every year where they gotcha ya panhandlers going home/getting picked up/etc.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to try to get our local homeless continuum to add panhandling information to the annual homeless count survey, and see how many of the highway intersection locations turn up. I know that the shelter I volunteer with (that serves predominantly chronically homeless that are more likely to panhandle) don’t venture out to the highway locations (again - anecdotal).
Yeah, when I was a kid, we had one around here. He’d hang out in front of Wal-Mart with a cup full of pencils. You’d give him a donation; he’d give you a pencil. He had this big sob story about being a veteran and homeless, the whole thing. He was only around during the warm months. He had stories to tell, and even though he was homeless, he gave half of what he collected to some veterans charity.
After the local paper started doing some research, turned out he had a nice home locally, a second one in Florida where he wintered, and not a dime of what he collected went to any charity, just him. No cite and not since this was over 20 years ago, not going to try to go through microfiche archives to find proof, but it does happen.
Meh, I only noticed your “cite please” as Munch’s quote/response and so was just giving another anecdote to show that while it does happen, there won’t be a lot of data about it one way or the other.
Well, why should she? 50$ won’t go far, it certainly won’t get her off the street and in a couple of days she’ll have no money* and *no backpack to keep her stuff in.
At my former church, we’d allow homeless people to use the shower in the basement when they wished, and also had a clothes closet available to them, to provide them with all sorts of attire.
I realize that the homeless problem in our country is vast, but a lot of the panhandling and begging that occurs at major intersections and highway offramps, with people holding a “will work for food” sign are scammers playing upon the sympathies and generosity of people.
My main job when working at our local Loaves and Fishes was in the women’s dispensary and shower room. Many homeless women held down jobs. They would show up bright and early each morning and sign up for shower time. They got free soap, shampoo, conditioner, etc., though many brought their own. We had blow dryers and stuff they could use as well. Most of them walked out afterward looking like your everyday “normal” non-homeless person.
You would be amazed that even in this climate what people give away for clothes, shoes, purses, etc. Much of it is new with tags, but most is very gently used. Just like our own clothes are after we’ve had them for 6 mos or a year. I remember one time we got a brand new-looking Coach purse as a donation. It had to be worth a couple hundred bucks. We also got stuff from corporations like when Converse (I think it was) donated a ton of dufflebags. Dufflebags you would pay $30 for at Sportsmart.
Just because people have expensive looking stuff (which might also be fake) doesn’t mean the aren’t legitimately poor or homeless.
