I try not to carry any money so normally I have no money to give when asked. I’ve never gotten a problem from the panhandlers when I tell them I don’t carry cash but I’ve seen them “go after” people who ignore them and don’t treat them like humans.
I don’t have any “facts” or studies to cite, but this much seems like it ought to be obvious, which nobody in this thread has mentioned yet: Dollar-for-dollar, money given to shelters, rescue missions, or similar charities, I would expect to provide much better “bang for the buck” than direct deposits with homeless people. They can take advantage of better economies of scale. A soup kitchen could buy large quantities of food, possibly at reduced rates or maybe even wholesale. They get local grocery stores to donate day-old bread, wilted vegetables, canned food with dents, things like that. They can buy 50-pound sacks of rice and barley and lentils and potatoes, and cook it all up in big vats. And possibly with large quantities of volunteer labor. This must certainly enable them to feed a lot more people with a lot fewer bucks than the extra helping of McNuggets that you bought for somebody.
ETA: And yet, for all that, and with government grants and programs and money as well, all those soup kitchens can barely make a dent in feeding the homeless or nearly-homeless-but-hungry people. Plenty still get turned away. So there is still a big market for homeless people to panhandle, to get what they can for whatever they want to spend it on. No amount of police harassment can make it stop – it can only make it move to some other city in the next county. So cities compete to see who can harass the homeless the worst.
In Thailand most of the beggars are alleged to be parts of these kinds of rings. It’s a form of human trafficking, probably perpetuated by threats or other duress, by the stronger and more cruel upon the weak.
I would think homelessness is not going to be a factor
Oh, I absolutely agree with you! It *seems *like it ought to be obvious. It seems like those benefits would work to ease the life of homeless people and reduce panhandling in the area. It also seems like the sort of thing social workers would go nuts over, and have lots and lots of studies showing why you should give them money and the government should give them money to run these programs..which is why I’m so surprised that I can’t find a study to support it (and no one else in the thread seems to have, either).
On the other hand, direct handouts have benefits that impersonal donations don’t have, too. At least part of the reason I chat with the homeless guys I give cheeseburgers to is so that I don’t get mugged or harassed in their neighborhoods. They watch out for me. The biggest part is that I genuinely like helping and talking to people, and I find it brightens my day. I don’t get the same perks from donating money to a soup kitchen (although I’ve been known to volunteer at them - again, social interaction.)
So yes, I’m with the OP. I know what the benefits are to buying a guy a cheeseburger. What I don’t know, not for sure, are the benefits of giving that $1.11 to a homeless shelter, instead. I’d like to know what the facts - not the seems - are.
Well, your hypothetical situation is not in the OP.
Calling someone’s tone bitter is making a judgement.
I have no idea. The next time I see/speak with an advocate on a topic should I now ask, “Cite?”
Nothing apart from not being beaten up when coming back without money. I’ve no example of regular panhandlers, but two somewhat similar cases (both in France) :
-deaf people from eastern Europe going around cafes to sell junk (I had always wondered if they were really deaf. It turned up they were but were also “pimped”/enslaved). It lasted for years, and there were plenty of them, but the circle has been busted some years ago and I don’t remember seeing any recently.
-gypsy kids “handled” by Rom gangs. Often beaten and even sexually abused. They are still around but many of them are “regular” beggar children (if I can say such a thing), “working” for their family as opposed to a gang.
It’s worth bearing in mind that even in cities with adequate shelter space (there aren’t many) there are lots of homeless people who won’t go to shelters. For some it’s because they don’t want to deal with the rules (no needles, and so on) and for others it’s because they are afraid of being victimized by other shelter occupants.
Thank you thank you thank you! For the outstanding response.
(disclaimer: I don’t have any reputable studies to back my opinions, I think this is a matter of common sense)
If you want to help the homeless find a charity with transparent bookkeeping and goals you identify with. Or vote for a politician with plans to help them in a meaningfull way.
Giving cash money to people on the streets is just dumb.
- You could get robbed.
- They could get robbed.
- They might be paying someone not to get robbed.
In fact you are sponsoring an illicit infrastucture of drugdealers and small-time crooks.
Perhaps not in the city, but most assuredly in that neighborhood.
God bless Wikipedia.
That report was challenged, in part due to the questionable reliability of the people polled.
In another study
(That link doesn’t want to load for me though, so make of it what you will.)
I think that this is something hard to study, and that The Answer will vary person to person and place to place.
If it can’t be evaluated on a GQ level, it can’t be true.
That’s incorrect. Cities have plenty of shelter space - there are very few cities that don’t have enough (this doesn’t count emergency weather situations). Most cities have policies in place that they do not support the creation of more shelters/beds, since it is a far better strategy to put resources into the creation/rehabilitation of existing housing and work towards transitional/permanent housing programs rather than the bandaid that shelters serve as.
Absolutely correct. As I’ve posted before, they tend to go in monthly themes. One month will be small girls with puppies. The next will be ladies with babies. A transvestite was actually arrested in Pattaya for renting “her” neighbors baby to go beg with. Many if not most of the beggars are brought in from Cambodia, and from time to time the authorities will round them up and send them home. One time they actually flew them to Phnom Penh, their first plane ride ever. I think the publicity on that backfired in the form of angry taxpayers, because I’ve not heard of that happening again.
But you have to wonder how did that quadruple amputee get positioned into the middle of the pedestrian street crossover anyway? That’s if they really are an amputee. One supposed double amputee who regularly sits near MBK Center is not very skilled in concealing his arms behind his back. And when we lived in that same neighborhood for a couple of years, there was one lady who set up in a spot with the same fake leg wound every day. We were on a nodding acquaintance. If any legitimate beggars ever showed up in Bangkok, they’d be given the bum’s rush pronto by the beggar mafia.
There are other rules that don’t have the same “sorry, you can’t do drugs here” feeling. Many shelters don’t let you leave the grounds for the first two (or more) weeks, and require that you take certain life skills classes.
I’m currently trying to convince a friend of mine to go to one, because after the two weeks are up, he’ll be in a much better situation than he is right now. He’s having a hard time seeing it that way, because he is looking at the short term “lock up”.
-D/a
Some reasons people have shared with me that they won’t go to shelters:
They won’t let me bring my dog - I’d have to take her to the pound and they’ll kill her.
They won’t let me bring my husband.
They won’t let me bring my kids.
They’ll make me get rid of my car before I can stay there; the car is “assets”.
They won’t let me bring my prescription painkillers in; if I bring them anyway, some druggy will steal them.
They let crazy people in; last time I was attacked by a guy with a knife.
The locker is too small for my stuff; if I leave my stuff out here, it will be stolen.
They don’t have lockers at all, and if I take my stuff there, it will be stolen.
They have bedbugs.
The CIA has bugged the place.
Those places are for crazy people. I’m not crazy, I’m just homeless.
Those places are for homeless people. I’m not homeless, I’m just unemployed.
Those places don’t help me because they’re not trained to deal with mental illness; when my PTSD gets bad, they kick me out.
If my employer finds out I’m living there, I’ll lose my job.
The aliens run the shelter, and they put this implant in my head, and if I go there again, they’ll blow my head up because 9-11 was really the aliens working with Monsanto and I heard them talking about it while I was in the operating room getting this implant so they want to kill me now but the implant will only blow up if I go to the shelter because the electromagnetic rays can’t reach this far.
I mean, they’re not all *good *reasons. But they are reasons, valid reasons in that person’s head.
I saw that in Rome, Italy. I walked out of the airport and was approached by the sorriest looking kid I had ever seen. In broken english he told me about being an orphan, living on the streets and hadn’t eaten in 2 days. I held out a few 1000 lire notes (about 60 cents each) He asked me for an american dollar! I gave him one and stopped to make a phone call. I saw him run over to a well dressed guy on a Vespa and hand him money. If that was NOT his “pimp” I don’t know who he was!
Here is another look at homeless shelters, and reasons why one might avoid them:
Shelters are for Someone Else, Part 1
Shelters are for Someone Else, Part 2
Part of a larger collection of pages entitled Survival Guide to Homelessness
This isn’t directly on point, but I do cite most of the literature that I was able to locate here: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2255/how-much-money-do-beggars-make