That’s also what I would have said. It’s not as if Luxembourg outlawed begging - there simply is no real poverty in this exceedingly rich society. But indeed, Luxembourg city has a population of only about 100,000, so it’s out.
Where I live (Gold Coast, Australia) begging is illegal, carrying with it a penalty of 6 months in prison and a $1,000 fine (which seems a little fruitless). I have never seen a beggar or a homeless person during the 18 months I have lived here. I think there are homeless people but they stick to the many parks rather than the streets so you don’t see them. The city has a population of just over 400,000 so it falls a bit short of the revised number.
I seem to recall China cracking down on begging in Beijing during the lead up to the Beijing Olympics, I don’t know how successful it was but if they managed to clear the city it would have been an impressive feat.
I was in Hong Kong recently and saw only one beggar, on the pedestrian bridge to the ferry pier.
I’d expand that to any city in New Zealand.
I have only encountered one beggar in Singapore and I have never seen one in Dubai or Kuwait City.
I can’t seem to recall any beggars in China. But they may have become lumped together with all the “art students” wanting to sell you their drawings and other scammers.
Well, San Jose is the 10th largest city in America, and there are remarkably few beggars. Of course we do have homeless, and in certain parks you will encounter a number of them. I walk in Downtown, about 2 miles a day, and other than a crazy guy that I see once in a while who mutters 'do you have a dollar?", no one hits me up. I do see a few sleeping in doorways.
I’ve seen panhandlers in Burlington.
I spent a week in Beijing about 14 years ago, and I didn’t see any beggars. The closest was a person who sold me a map of Beijing in Tien An Men square, who presumably kept an eye out for people who looked like tourists wandering around the square. I suspect that anyone who did try begging as a living in Beijing, and not just selling things in the street, would be very quickly picked up by police, army or security people.
As other people mentioned, I have never encountered begging anywhere in Japan, with one exception: sometimes you see monks carrying a bowl that people can put food or maybe money into. But they aren’t really actively begging, just carrying a bowl.
My wife tells me that until around 30 years ago you would sometimes see injured veterans of WWII begging in the streets. But nowadays there seem to be no beggars.
Buffalo is the opposite, in a way. A few street beggars, mostly downtown and in the more active, densely-populated neighborhoods just north, with no expressway beggars or sign holders. In winter, they mostly disappear. I had a gas money beggar hit me up on the day spa and boutique filled streets of suburban Williamsville once, the only time I encountered a beggar outside of downtown or the Allentown/Elmwood Village/Delaware District area.
I’m fascinated by the demographics of beggars. In Buffalo, it’s mostly crazy old black panhandlers. In Austin, it’s grizzled white men and women who troll the freeway exists and busy intersections. In Denver, I got hit up a lot by teenagers and young adults. Boulder had begging trustifarians.
Slight hijack, but: The funny thing is that even in most American cities, there shouldn’t really be much begging at all. In theory, anyway.
For example, I live in Arlington County, right outside of DC. (Our population is in excess of 200,000, and we’re quite densely populated and urbanized, so I’d call us functionally equivalent to a small city.) And we do indeed have homeless beggars, usually clustered near Metro stations.
The thing is, Arlington’s government is really, really competent, and it takes homelessness seriously. DC’s government isn’t as good, but it also has a serious set of resources for homeless people. In the wintertime, the entire DC area has hypothermia hotlines and emergency shelters available. And even major DC shelters don’t want for food - when I volunteered, they had so many (Amtrak surplus) sandwiches that anyone who wanted them got seconds, and I left just as they were frying up chicken and baking cornbread for dinner. (Frankly, it smelled damn good - I’d have cheerfully paid for that food).
So, I normally won’t give cash to a beggar in wintertime, but I will point out that they can get a transport to a shelter, and I’ll offer to call one. I’ve never had anyone take me up on it, and I don’t think it’s just because they really wanted the money for drugs or booze. Most of the homeless folks I’ve spoken to have been sober, and offered sensible reasons for refusing a shelter transport.
First and foremost - the shelters aren’t great places. Crowded buildings full of homeless people have a powerful funk to them, and the folks I’ve spoken with say that theft is a very common problem. So, a lot of people prefer to avoid them. There also is, apparently, a limit to the capacity of the emergency-shelter system on very cold nights - one guy I spoke to said he’d already tried to get in, but the shelter transport driver said they were at capacity, and just offered him another blanket.
The result is that a fair number of homeless men and women end up either staying on the streets, or paying to room in low-end boarding houses - one guy I spoke with said he paid $25 a day for his. Which doesn’t sound like much, perhaps, but is difficult to scrounge up when you can’t get a job.
My conclusion is that, at least in the DC area, eliminating street begging would require some expansion of the shelter system - but more importantly, we’d need to improve the quality and safety of the shelters.
Well, you make some good points, but having worked with the homeless, you also have to understand that a good number of them are that way by choice. They like the freedom. They don’t like the shelters sometimes for the good reasons you mention, however, they cheerfully live in homeless encampments where the funk and theft are even more of a problem. Some homeless refuse to take to a shelter (unless the weather is very bad) because of the restrictions- no drug, no smoking, no booze, some restrictions on filth and no pets. I will support them on that last one, i can understand not giving up your pet, but I think we also can understand why shelters can’t take in pets.
Even if the shelters were 100% safe and clean, they still wouldn’t allow those behaviours (and in fact, the better the shelter is, the more they restrict those behaviours) and thus those who wanted to drink, use drugs or smoke would still be kept out.
More or less, we have three types (and I am over-generalizing of course) of homeless:
Those homeless due to drug or mental problems.
Those homeless due to choice (and there’s a degree of mental or drug issues here too, fairly often)
Those homeless due to economic conditions- those who were one paycheck away from being homeless and that paycheck didn’t come. Many of those don’t live on the street or beg- they live in their car, on someones couch, or even in a shelter. But yes, we need to help those people. A few of them may be scared off from a shelter due to cleanliness or theft issues, true.
Downtown, there aren’t a lot, but there are enough in other areas. I live right near the sleeping area of several homeless folks, and nearly every day see someone begging at the stoplight. (This is in Eastside).
I’ve seen beggars in Dubai, Muscat, Manama and Seeb. Never locals, though. All were South Asian expat workers. None were homeless, either. They were just hungry, or trying to get home.
I highly doubt that anyone would survive more than a few months in the southern portion of the Arabian peninsula without shelter.
Good points here - thanks for your post, DrDeth.
The point about homeless folks being deterred from going to shelters by prohibitions on drug use is an interesting one, and one I’ve heard before. It strikes me as an interesting argument for moving to a harm-reduction model for these sorts of shelters. If they permitted drug use, provided it was done with clean needles (which they’d supply), it would bring people into contact with the social services system who would otherwise avoid it. That could be something worth doing.
But then, we’d have dudes on drugs in a shelter where other people with families may need to stay. And drug users can get violent or otherwise dangerous to others. Meth is the current drug of choice.
So what’s heroin, chopped liver?
More seriously - you’re right, of course. But there’s no reason (in principle) that we couldn’t have some shelters designated as no-drug, family-friendly shelters and others as “harm-reduction” shelters designed to keep junkies from freezing to death and giving them a chance to grab clean needles or sign up for treatment programs.
Of course, this would all cost money. And we prefer to invest our money in sending folks to prison.
Meth is the drug of choice among broke white people. I don’t think there are a lot of Hispanic or Latino meth users.
Heh. Thanks for backing me up, I just got slammed for saying the exact same thing in another thread.
There were a few beggars in my Chinese city- we had a man who was horribly burned, a man missing his legs, a child acrobat who would perform heartbreaking routines, a crazy old woman and a couple of blind and deaf people. Now and then a group of minority women would come down from the hills to beg in town. I guess looking back there was a fair among of begging, but it was all true hard-luck cases and I don’t think many of them were actually homeless.