Harassing you is illegal too. You shouldn’t have turned your back on your purse. It might have been stolen by anyone walking by. The crime was in the harassing and stealing, not the panhandling. I really don’t see how making panhanding illegal will stop someone from walking up and stealing your purse when you turn your back on it.
As has already been pointed out it is almost impossible to get a job if you do not have an address. And how are you going to shower and wash your clothes and get a hair cut so that you are presentable when you apply for the job? People don’t panhandle because they would rather beg then get a job.
I don’t care if begging remains legal; however, I would dearly love for the laws against aggressive panhandling be enforced in San Francisco. If the panhandler wants to make a living by begging, have at it. Just don’t walk up to my friend and me while we’re having a conversation and interrupt us with your request for cash.
And before anyone goes off on me for being so heartless: I do chuck some change or even some folding money into the hat (guitar case, etc.) a street peformer is using if I like the performance and stick around some to enjoy it.
We have an anti-panhandling ordinance in Anchorage which bans soliciting money from cars in the roadway. However, it is selectively enforced if you have good intentions; The Anchorage Fire Dept. collected $84,000 on Labor Day in their “Pass the Boot” drive for the MDA telethon. They claim their permit allows this, but the permit they have only allows them to operate as charitable organization, not violate local ordinaces to solicit donations. But local police declined to enforce the law, reserving the full weight of legal responsibility for the poor and indigent.
Amen. I live and work in a men’s shelter, and we get squat for donations. We’re the only shelter for men in our city, too. The Salvation Army has shut down their shelter service, so we’re the only game in town for men. Yet the Salvation Army keeps soliciting and receiving donations - those Christmas bell ringers, ya know. Women’s shelters have much better luck with obtaining financial aid.
Our shelter is privately run, and we don’t take government money. We were going to try to get in on Bush’s “faith-based charity” money, but it turns out that in exchange for accepting that money, we have to provide the government with the names of everybody we serve so that the gov’t can “track” the homeless. Forget that.
But people simply don’t seem to want to give. What, do they think the shelter itself is going to spend the money on booze? Nobody here even gets a salary! Staff members receive a small stipend - I get $40/week - for personal expenses, but that’s it.
And the non-cash donations we do get tend to be either too little or too much. This is orchard country, and so we often get orchardists who will bring us a truckload of fruit. That’s great, except that we have no way to store that much fruit all at once. In the summer, the stuff goes bad far faster than we can eat it. Put a box of peaches out on the table for people to eat, and within a couple hours it’s literally infested with fruit flies. And needless to say, we can’t pay the electric bill, the water bill, or the garbage disposal bill with fruit. The utility people prefer to be paid with money. So we’re perpetually 60-90 days behind on those bills.
But if you live in a shelter and are willing to work, it’s not that hard to find work if you have skills and experience. I’m not currently working, but I’ve had two full-time jobs and one part time job in the seven years I’ve lived here. The shelter provides showers and any personal grooming items a man needs, as well as good, free used clothing. There is also a local service that provides voice-mail boxes for people who don’t want to give out the shelter phone number.
There are still some panhandlers here, though, and some of them make me laugh. A few years ago, I spotted a guy with a sign sitting at the entryway to a supermarket parking lot. He was dressed in camoflage fatigues from the military surplus store, and holding a sign that read, “Vietnam vet. Please help”. Problem was, the guy didn’t look a day older than me, and I think I was about 8 years old when we pulled out of 'Nam.
I hope you’re being sarcastic. Last time I checked, Jesus himself was homeless.
BTW, there’s no law that says you have to give to pan-handlers. I generally don’t, as I have a personal rule NOT to pull my wallet or money out on the streets.
That doesn’t mean I won’t help a worthy cause, or what have you. Just that I’m too paranoid.
Sorry, I was in fact being sarcastic. JerseyDiamond’s comments set me off – I always find it disturbing to hear Christians talking so callously about the poor and needy, considering the teachings of Jesus. I was raised Christian, and the people who would use it only as a guide on how to feel superior to others never fail to piss me off. (They’re not the majority of Christians by any means, but they’re not incredibly rare either.) As an atheist, I feel I am a far better Christian than many of the devout churchgoers I knew growing up, which is sort of sad. IMO, Jesus would have cared a lot more about how we treat our poor and homeless than about stupid shit like opposing gay marriage.
Isabelle, most homeless folks don’t have mommies who are willing to get up at the crack of dawn to drive them to work. Also, while I don’t know where you live, in my city, jobs are pretty scarce and getting scarcer.
I’ve come close to being homeless. At one point in Hawaii, I was unemployed and battling mental illness. I was able to scrape together enough each month to keep my apartment, but there was one point when my church bailed me out. When I moved back to my home city, I lived with my parents. After the first temporary job I got ended, I remember walking through the streets between job interviews knowing there was exactly $7.00 in my bank account. The prospect of becoming homeless was one of the things scaring the snot out of me this winter.
I don’t give to panhandlers very often, although I do have a weakness for good street musicians. Part of it comes from an encounter with a woman who had more resources than she let on, and part of it comes from routinely warning Japanese tourists about some panhandlers. That said, where exactly should homeless people go? There isn’t enough shelter space, and there are some who, because of their own struggles with mental illness, won’t go to shelters. It’s extremely difficult to commit someone involuntarily, and mental illness damages one’s ability to seek help voluntarily. It is much harder to treat someone who does not want to be treated.
Look, I’m not completely unsympathetic. There was a homeless man who I’d regularly buy the Sunday paper from who once followed me back to the laundry line behind my apartment and kept talking to me while I was hanging out my laundry and would not leave me alone. I wound up giving up on hanging my laundry up to dry and shutting the door of my apartment in his face. The thing is, among other things, to call for the banning of the very people Christ ministered to, would be, well, un-Christian.
By the way, Jersey Diamond, of the three times I’ve been exposed to the “I need money for transportation” scam, twice the woman pulling it asked me if I was a Christian and assured me I could trust her because she was a Christian. The first time I suspected it was a scam when she wouldn’t take busfare and insisted I give her taxi fare (I didn’t have that much on me). The second time, about a month later, I knew it was a scam because it was the same woman! And people wonder why I believe that just because a person claims to be Christian, it’s no indication that they are a good and moral person. :rolleyes:
When people say that panhandling makes them uncomfortable, it’s because they feel guilty. The simple way to avoid that guilt is to make a regular charitable contribution to a charity that you trust. If you are genrously supporting your local homeless shelter, then you can feel comfortable in saying “No” to a panhandler. That way you can give money knowing the money will be going towards something you support (i.e., food, shelter, job training, whatever) and not something you don’t.
On a side note, just because there are minimum-wage jobs available in your commmunity, it does not mean that your panhandler could necessarily get work there or revlieve themselves of homelessness even if they did. I recently read a book called “Nickel & Dimed” that was really fascinating - the author went “undercover” and worked as a minimum-wage worker in a variety of crappy jobs (Merry Maids, Wal-Mart) to test to see if you could work at minimum wage and still afford housing and transportation. Basically, you can’t.
Panhandling doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable because I feel guilty. They make me feel uncomfortable because they follow me and try to strike up a conversation with me.
Happens in w6th (Warehouse, club) district all the time in Cleveland. Thank goodness they aren’t as plentiful when cold weather comes around.
I may sound like a jerk, but I don’t care anymore. I used to give money to panhandlers all the time but I’m just sick of it.
It was on the local news Sat that in Georgia (downtown) in order to help keep panhandlers off the street they have installed meters on the street. These meters are identical to parking meters and allows people to pump change into them to help the homeless and needy. They only installed 4 of them so far but they want to see how they work.
The way I interpreted it was that there were enough shelters and organizations downtown to help these people but they needed more funding. So if people wanted to give they could pump money in the meter. The news didn’t state if the police would remove the panhandlers.
Sorry, Isabelle, I know that was a bit harsh, but so is reality at times. My family was emotionally abusive, and I pray they never join these boards where I admit that because that knowledge would hurt them. There are families who will not help their children, and there are children who will not accept help from their families.
There used to be woman in my city who would play on people’s sympathies, including mine, by keeping a cat on a leash with her while she begged for money. She was, I was told, from a quite wealthy family, who were willing to help her, but she could not or would not accept their help. When I found out she had resources available to her, I stopped giving her money.
There was a point in my life a little less than 11 years ago when I was spinning downward, almost completely out of control. It was a while before my family found out just how bad things were, and they were 3,000 miles away and unable to help, in part because I was unwilling, at that point, to accept their help.
Parents do disown their children, and children who disown their families. I know people who will have no contact with their families because of the abuse they suffered. None of these people are homeless, but if circumstances go against such a person, that’s one less thread they have available. As a purely hypothetical situation, what should a person whose faced with getting beaten up or raped by her father or brother or walking out do?
I try to be an idealist and a Pollyanna, but I know there is a dark side to things, and I try to do what little I can to alleviate that darkness. Pushing people back into it simply doesn’t work, even if it does make them harder to see.
Really? Because mostly I feel disgusted. I don’t know why they’re homeless and I don’t care. I’m sure they all have a story and it’s all very sad.
Panhandlers and derelicts have a broken window effect on the neighborhoods they inhabit. They scare off regular folk and make the neighborhoods look like crap. I don’t want to worry about my girlfriend having to walk past some crazy guy with one sock walking in circles muttering to himself. I don’t want to have to watch for homeless people shadowing people into my building and lurking in the stairwells. I don’t want the ‘peace and quiet’ of my commute interupted by some guys “'scuse me ladies and gentlemen” speech. If you allow them to hang around, pretty soon the only people who occupy your trainstations, parks and plazas will be panhandlers and street people.
I am not interested in giving my hard earned money to some crack-head so he can buy a fix.
Homeless people who are too ‘proud’ to go to a shelter or accept help from a family? You live on the street in a refrifgerator box. How much pride can you possibly have?
And as Chris Rock says “if you have a clever sign, yo ass ain’t been homeless long enough.”
I’m not completely heartless. There should be programs to help those who want to get back on their feet. I don’t mind my tax dollars going to help keep the mentally ill off the street. But that doesn’t mean that we have to let our neighborhoods become a den for panhandlers.
Ouf! Lucky thing since I really thought you were heartless up to when you said you were not!
Of course, there are definitive solutions to the panhandling problems but they do not include just banning them and/or waiting for the good old government to do something about it.
If you feel so strongly about it, may I suggest you lobby your government hard to:
get people with mental problems off the street and into proper healthcare
and/or
provide care to drug addicts so that they may recover
and/or
fight poverty
and/or
provide appropriate street to work programs
Concurrent to this lobbying, you can ask people NOT to give to panhandlers but to recognized charities instead. By eliminating their source of income, you’ll also eliminate their ‘jobs’.
But please note that doing so without any kind of alternative for them could lead those people to something worse then panhandling…
After all this, presto, no more unsightly homeless and panhandlers to disturb you! If you don’t do something, who’s going to?
