Our discussion of laws gone wrong and Will’s relation of bums taking over the dollar theater veered close enough to trigger another thought from me: the intriguing problem of grifters/panhandlers/”homeless” in cities.
Colosse has what some might call a “homeless problem.” Being a southerly city, it’s warm most of the year, and so it’s easier for people to survive “on the streets” as opposed to cities where it’s snowed in for half the year or more. With the exception of northern metropolises, one rarely sees “homeless” in small-town areas crossing the country until getting below the lower half-mark of the US, and weather has a lot to do with it. By the same token, it’s no coincidence that on the list of the “meanest” cities compiled by two well-meaning but rather ass-backwards organizations, the only non-”southern” city in the top 10 is Lawrence, KS and you only find 5 more “non-southern” cities by expanding to the top 20. Anchorage, Alaska probably counts as an “outlier” since it’s the only city in Alaska that could even remotely support a “homeless” population as-such.
Colosse’s problem has been twofold. The first is panhandlers. Before the passage of a few laws in the Colosse area, it was seemingly impossible to pass a city intersection without some grimy individual trying to ask for money. Driving around with your windows down was asking for trouble, because you’d be subjected to a stream of nasty language and yelling if you (a) ignored them or (b) rolled the window up after saying no. Getting past an intersection sometimes involved waiting for the worst of them to clear out of the street, since a few got so brazen that they actually stood in front of cars and demanded money to move. These days, the same holds true except for the “no panhandling” zones surrounding the business and theater/restaurant areas of downtown. Southern Tech, being on “the edge” of one of those zones, actually gets more panhandlers these days than we did before.
The second problem is the use of public buildings. During the hot months of the day, pro-homeless organizations urge them to use “public” facilities for air conditioning. Will points out cheap dollar theaters as one option; another frequently pushed option is public libraries. A few of Colosse’s libraries became completely overrun with “homeless”, some of whom were making it impossible to reach books because they slept in the aisles; the “straw that broke the camel’s back” was when an enterprising crew of them set up shop in, and then barricaded, one of the library restrooms in a bid to stay overnight. The hygenic level of the fellows taking over the libraries was also… scary.
In a discussion of this at another forum, the following comment stands out to me:
A huge proportion of the homeless suffer from mental illness or are alcoholics/ drug addicts. I think there was a study in NY years back where something like 80% of the homeless they tested had drugs or alcohol in their system. Can you say self-medicating? We have also swung the pendulum too far in treating mental illness. After the horrors of the 70’s in which people with mental illness were locked up as prisoners and treated like shit, we swung it back the other way to make it almost impossible to force people to receive treatment without their consent. I have no problem with erring on the side of self-determination, but there has to be a better system for deciding when someone truly lacks the capability.
It may sound like a cliche, but the scenario in which a homeless person will not enter a shelter because he has to give up his knife (or whatever) is not uncommon.
Based on the panhandler types in Colosse, I can name precisely two. The first are the legitimately problematic and probably “actually homeless” types. As stated above, alcoholics/druggies or otherwise mentally incapable of dealing with society, and having big problems. They’re the ones likely to fly off at someone, jump into traffic, and cause the worst of the problems. I find myself agreeing that for many, some form of analysis on whether they are mentally competent to take care of themselves - or instead should be put under supervised care of some sort - needs to take place. If they really are mentally incompetent, and the reason they can’t hold a job or maintain a place to live is that they are incapable of staying on whatever medication they need, then society it seems has a responsibility to get them off the streets and into some form of supervised care.
The second are the outright scammers. I don’t know if 100% of them are non-homeless, but I do know that they make quite a bit of money from observing them (counting by number of suckers and presuming an average of 75 cents per handout they could be making easily on the order of $50 or more an hour). A number that I have observed either operate in “shifts” with another accomplice, or have been observed walking away from “their” spot after peak hours to some rather ritzy and well-maintained (custom paint-job wise) cars. In the case of one, the shifting signs meant to accommodate various disasters (economic collapse, hurricanes, storms, etc) make it pretty obvious that the person is scamming; one in particular that hangs around SoTech has been a former MCI employee, trailer destroyed by tornado, Hurricane refugee from three different hurricanes, “lost job due to Obama recession”, and so on.
To deal with these people, many cities (including Colosse) have had organized advertising campaigns urging citizens to donate, if they see the need, directly to homeless shelters and soup kitchens rather than giving change to bums. The ass-backwards organizations previously mentioned have called this “mean.” But as research shows, there are quite a few of these “homeless” who will misuse money directly given, and are outright scamming or worse.
In Estacado I became familiar with a third type that is neither crazy nor entirely scamming. In fact, they’re willing to work in a lot of cases, though once they form a relationship with you they want to be paid whether they work or not. It’s a weird combination between capitalism and charity wherein they believe their willingness to work entitles them to something.
They’re not crazy, but they are not capable of getting to the next step due to a combination of discipline and circumstance. In many cases, they’re willing to work and work quite hard… but they’re not willing (or able) to take the $20 they made and apply it towards getting the government ID they would need for a regular job and more regular income.
In some cases, I think that they prefer the ability to work (or panhandle) on their own schedule. They’d get more a week if they worked at Denny’s (if they could get a job there) than doing what they’re doing, but they’d lose some of the freedom that I think they’ve sometimes been accustomed to. But most of the time, while there is certainly an element of choice involved, one choice is infinitely easier than the other. I think this is particularly true for those that have become accustomed to not having home.
I also think that, once homeless, it can be hard to accumulate the money to get out of it. Getting robbed is a constant threat, so on some level it makes sense to spend it as soon as you get it. Again, that’s not to say that it can’t be done or that they are literally trapped there or anything like that. Just that it makes the difference in difficulty between Choice A (making do) and Choice B (working to improve things) wider.
Comment by trumwill — February 25, 2010 @ 12:15 pm
New York actually has organized beggars of a sort. There’s a bogus charity called the United Homeless Organization, which allows skells to use their publicity materials in return for a modest daily payment. A skell who pays this fee will set up a card table with the UHO’s signage and can keep any money he collects. Because he’ll have a few smearily printed pamphlets (listing various services for the homeless) on the table, if the police try to get him to move he can claim that he’s handing out charitable literature and therefore has a right to stay.
Comment by Peter — February 25, 2010 @ 12:57 pm
Lots of people panhandle; they’re not necessarily homeless. You’d think they’d damned well better be, but no. Marginal most likely, on public aid, but not homeless. It’s a way of picking up some cash for whatever they want (usually a substance of abuse, probably).
The “occasional” ones are probably more likely to approach you in a parking lot or gas station, or outside a store, starting with “Excuse me, miss …” Oh, how I’ve come to hate the phrase “Excuse me,” unless someone just stepped on my foot. More and more, it seems to be not an apology, but a demand to stop what I’m doing and deal with someone who wants something I don’t want to give them.
Comment by Sheila Tone — February 25, 2010 @ 9:22 pm
Comparatively few of the panhandlers I encounter in Soundview make any claims of homelessness. I think that there is some meterological problem in Soundview wherein everybody runs out of gas prematurely while driving through the run-down part of town. Oddly enough, sometimes they don’t even seem to have cars. I’m thinking that there might be solar flares. Or maybe El Nino.
Comment by trumwill — February 25, 2010 @ 9:36 pm
In Estacado, there seemed to be a caste system of sorts. The best ones got the freeways. By “best” I mean that they were able to force everybody else away. The ones on the Interstate were far from casual. There were a lot of fights. Those that got edged away from there would end up in parking lots. It became popular to go up and down drive-through lines. Others hung around ATMs while others would simply tell you exactly where the nearest ATM was if you said you didn’t have cash.
Some became territorial and those are the ones that I got to know. Of the three I got to know the best. Two were homeless (or really good at faking it) and one I think was a squatter.
Comment by trumwill — February 25, 2010 @ 9:43 pm