Panhandling and The First Amendment

Robear, I think you are still tilting at windmills here. Not all panhandlers are homeless, and not all homeless people are panhandlers. Your logic seems to imply that you believe that they are, or at least implies that anyone who disagrees with you does.

Remember, in the best case, panhandling gives a homeless person enough money to survive on the street. It is not a route out of homelessness, it maintains the status quo. Worst case, it results in giving people enough money to feed their drug habits and keeps them from seeking rehab programs. I fail to see how allowing begging helps people in these situations. When you stack the scammers and aggressive behavior that some exhibit, I am at a loss as to why you are so in favor of the practice.

Kraint wrote:

Worst case, it results in giving people enough money to feed their drug habits and keeps them from seeking rehab programs. I fail to see how allowing begging helps people in these situations.

Slight derail, but I was listening to the episode of Pete Holmes' podcast You Made It Weird where he interviewed Aisha Taylor just the other day. Early in the interview Aisha admitted that she liked to get her drink on more frequently than not. Later, she mentioned that she was going to a charity gig after the interview and that steered the conversation to the topic of giving money to panhandlers. She said that she did give panhandlers money, even knowing that it would likely go to booze or drugs. I forget her exact words, but it was something to the effect of "I'd want to get hammered if I lived in a cardboard box, too. Hell, I live in a nice house and I still like to get drunk."

It's a fair point, though. If my life was that sh*tty, I'd look for a chemically induced vacation.

OG_slinger wrote:

It's a fair point, though. If my life was that sh*tty, I'd look for a chemically induced vacation.

Exactly.

Remember, in the best case, panhandling gives a homeless person enough money to survive on the street. It is not a route out of homelessness, it maintains the status quo. Worst case, it results in giving people enough money to feed their drug habits and keeps them from seeking rehab programs. I fail to see how allowing begging helps people in these situations. When you stack the scammers and aggressive behavior that some exhibit, I am at a loss as to why you are so in favor of the practice.

Because laws preventing it have the effect of removing another possible source of support, and the intended effect of hiding the problem from us. I'd rather we don't shove this aside; we should see what our policies do to other people.

Robear wrote:

Because laws preventing it have the effect of removing another possible source of support, and the intended effect of hiding the problem from us. I'd rather we don't shove this aside; we should see what our policies do to other people.

Fair enough. I don't agree with you and think it is worse for the practitioners and society as a whole, but I can certainly understand that point of view. I don't think banning it would shove the people aside or hide them, based on my experiences in Portland and Seattle (and surrounding areas), but that may well vary by region.

Kraint wrote:
Robear wrote:

Because laws preventing it have the effect of removing another possible source of support, and the intended effect of hiding the problem from us. I'd rather we don't shove this aside; we should see what our policies do to other people.

Fair enough. I don't agree with you and think it is worse for the practitioners and society as a whole, but I can certainly understand that point of view. I don't think banning it would shove the people aside or hide them, based on my experiences in Portland and Seattle (and surrounding areas), but that may well vary by region.

It does, though... the periodic "cleanups" in Pioneer Square are a great example of this.

I'm with Robear... let's not kid ourselves. If people don't feel it's necessary to have their tax money going to certain kinds of social services, the price of that is going to be stepping over the least of these in our parks and doorways.

I'm a pragmatist, remember. No pain, no incentive to fix a problem. I'd rather see editorials discussing the terrible panhandling situation and how to get help to these people, than see a law passed that just buses them off to other cities and states (as has been done in the past in some places.)

Except the response wasn't to help the homeless. The response was to move out to the suburbs to get away from the problems of the city. Or to build new retail off a highway where you need a car, because you might not even be able to get their with public transit, let alone by foot. To turn main street into a mall where the storefronts face out onto private indoor property instead of a public outdoor sidewalk.

Pain is an incentive to fix a problem, but it's also an incentive to find a way to avoid the problem in the first place. The response to the pain of homelessness being a visible, in-your-face problem in public places hasn't been social welfare. It's been a move to turn public places into privately owned spaces, to keep the homeless out of sight by making consumerism your ticket to entry to anything 'public'.

Which I feel only makes the problem worse: the more people retreat into a life that revolves around places they own or places they shop where the time the spend in between is in a car they own from a garage they own to a parking lot that someone else privately owns, the less people feel like they're part of a community. Or at least, any community that includes the homeless.

Cheeze, you're extending this. In my lifetime, we *did* have policies to help the mentally ill, which greatly cut down on homelessness. We also had a stronger safety net, although not a more efficient one. I'm trying to suggest that since the late '70's, we've taken a bad approach. But that does not mean that we can't make other choices, because we used to in the past.

Robear wrote:

Cheeze, you're extending this. In my lifetime, we *did* have policies to help the mentally ill, which greatly cut down on homelessness. We also had a stronger safety net, although not a more efficient one. I'm trying to suggest that since the late '70's, we've taken a bad approach. But that does not mean that we can't make other choices, because we used to in the past.

I'm not disputing your suggestion. I'm disputing the pragmatism of your tactics to motivate people to adopt that suggestion. A suggestion I 100% agree with. We can disagree about the route to take while still agreeing on where we want to wind up: I'm all for that stronger safety net, I'm for doing what we did in the past--even doing more of it. I just disagree that this is the way to motivate people to do what both of us want them to do.

edit: beat'd.

Okay, that's fair.