Panhandling. What to make of it. I don't know, the issue strikes very close to home, or should I say homelessness. It is difficult for me to write about it here, but once upon a time in the mid 1990s I had an in-your-face experience with panhandling and homelessness. Not me, but a close relative decided to drop out from main stream society and take up panhandling as a living. This lead to a transient life in shelters and street corners, and tragically to an early grave.
I'll call her X. X never saw the age of thirty and got her start by panhandling in Pulaski Park and on Main Street in downtown Northampton. Asking for spare change and accepting handouts came easy for X and eventually she took a bed at a local cot shelter and began to eat in soup kitchens. "Wow," she once said to me, "this is easy." X saw nothing wrong with her behavior and acted this way despite the fact that she came from a family of some means. The well-meaning staff at the social service facilities had no idea that X had other options as they didn't ask X such questions when she came to the door. Even if they did X probably would have fibbed. "I have no place to go," she would say. "Come on in," was their reply. What they offered her was food and shelter without preconditions. When the weather turned cold X took to hitch-hiking, which carried her across the country to a warmer climate. The lifestyle is so much easier when you're young and vibrant. Sleeping under the stars isn't so bad when you have your health and the back seat of a car or a tent to sprawl out in. There is no rent to pay or job to attend to and for some it is a lifestyle choice. For X it was.
Living this way turned tragic for X however and I along with other members of my family were thrust into a postion of deciding whether someone else should live or die. We chose life and X survived, barely. During this time I visited her friends at their homeless enclave. Spending some time with a group of homeless persons that lived in old cars in a junkyard opened my eyes to the world of panhandling and homelessness, at least as it was for this group. To be clear though, I make no claim that their circumstance is representative of all homeless people. As I spoke with these folks I learned that only one of them was truly down and out. The rest were white and came from middle class families like X. In fact when I entered the reformulated school bus of someone I'll call Y I observed imported beer and a basket of fresh fruit hanging alongside some homegrown pot along the back wall. When I inquired as to Y's background, I learned that Y was the child of two doctors that practiced in a northern mid western state in the Great Lakes region. Y said that he didn't like the pressures of society or the pressure from his parents to succeed and follow in their footsteps, so he dropped out and took to the open road. When things got a little rough he called home and asked for money and usually got it. Evidently he was the child that the good doctors did not speak of and he also had a trust fund that he could tap into while hanging out in the junkyard. Intermittently X, Y and the others bounced from shelter to shelter and lived lives free from responsibilities to anyone but themselves. They panhandled when it suited them. For the most part they only interacted with ordinary people when they made trips to the store to replenish their supplies of domestic sundries or were soliciting. About once a week X and Y would visit the relatives of a friend to take a shower and otherwise touch base with civilization as it is. They wore dreadlocks, all of them, natural ones.
It was all working pretty well until X was injured in a careless accident while living in a van that she called home. She was left permanently disabled and unable to walk. Suddenly the government that she criticized and spurned became her lifeblood as the Social Security Administration began picking up the tab for her menial existence. X was given a modest dwelling and a monthly check to help her get by. She no longer had to solicit for money as it was sent to her mailbox. I estimate that the federal government initially spent about a half million dollars keeping X alive, though she never really paid into the system. She lived out her days disabled and truly poor before her life ended prematurely due to complications from her injuries. I'll say no more on this but suffice it to say that not all panhandlers are poor and not all poor people panhandle. But panhandling is often related to homelessness.
Should the city of Northampton crack down on panhandlers in general? I will offer that I don't think enacting strict regulations regarding panhandlers constitutes the most thoughtful solution as this treats the symptom rather than the cause. Aside from the civil rights argument this equates to punishing those in need along with those who abuse the system. Unfortunately, downtown business owners may legitimately feel that there is no other recourse at this point. The fact is, the presence of panhandlers may indeed result in a loss of business for merchants who pay taxes and provide jobs and, as we all know, for every action, in this case panhandling, there is a reaction, regulation. So, should people who have other means be on the streets asking for money? Should they be taking up space at shelters and soup kitchens when there are the truly needy out there that get turned away at the door? Do panhandlers have the capacity to police themselves? Should panhandling be looked at as an occupation? If so, should panhandlers unionize? Should the city issue permits for panhandling? Who would adminster such a program? Does the police department have the capacity to deal with new regulations when it claims to not have the capacity to deal with a noise ordinance or speeding drivers? What authority would officials of the proposed Business Improvement District have over panhandling? The questions go on and on.
The issue of panhandling when defined as a social problem is too complex for me to offer up flip solutions for, thus I offer no ideas for sweeping reforms here. The community conversation under way in Northampton is worth having though, because some people are truly out of a job or out of a home and need help. Weeding out from those the people who are merely making a lifestyle choice adds to the complexity of the challenge, but it should not be ignored. Here is a link to All Roads Lead Home (PDF), the Pioneer Valley's Plan to End Homelessness in ten years. It is an ambitious undertaking. While I only skimmed the 49 page report, the one thing that I could not find reference to was panhandling, whether fraudulent or legitimate. (I might have missed it though.) This seems to be an oversight when the two are intertwined such as they are. Why do we attempt to address one without attempting to address the other?
Below is a video regarding panhandling in the city of Chicago.
