I have a simple rule. If you are doing nothing but begging you get nothing from me. Leeching off of kindharted people is disgusting. Standing there with a cup trying to make me feel guilty for not giving you what I have earned and you have not pisses me off as well. There are those who actually choose to live this way. No, not all of them, and there isn't really a way to tell which are and which aren't. Donate to charities, soup kitchens, etc., but honestly, giving money to these people does not really help them. It enables their lifestyle. It is a really big problem in Boston. Since I couldn't find the recent article they did about it I got a similar one from Denver.
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/08/24/020301.php
Like a lot of other cities, Denver is strying to crack down on panhandling, largely because they have such a huge number of panhandlers. A substantial 61% of Denver merchants rated panhandling as the number one problem their business faced, and 72% of citizens agreed that it was one of the most serious problems in the city. As a result, the city is considering enacting harsh restrictions on vagrancy and camping, and is building over 3,000 new low income housing units for the homeless.
Of course, the main reason that there are so many panhandlers in Denver is that it's so lucrative. According to a recent survey conducted by the Downtown Denver Partnership, 42% of the population has given money to panhandlers in the past year and the average person there gives $1.84 each time he or she is approached by a panhandler, for a total of about $25 a year. This adds up to an awful lot of money - a total of over $4.6 million, divided among about a thousand panhandlers. That's an average of about $50,000 per active panhandler per year, with confidential interviews with panhandlers indicating that they make between $35,000 and $100,000 tax free per year and view panhandling as the equivalent of a job or a profession. Some even have homes and support families on their panhandling income.
One of the ironic aspects of this is that the survey shows that the most generous group to donate to the panhandlers are those who earn less than $25,000 per year, about half of what the average panhandler makes. This puts us in the strange position of having to look at street beggars as heartless exploiters of the working class, leeching off of the paltry income of hard working secretaries and bus boys.
At a cost of $174 per arrest the city has determined that it's not worth arresting panhandlers, because there are so many and if they arrested them all as often as they'd need to in order to discourage them, the cost would be so high it could never be justified. They wisely thought it made more sense to spend the money on building housing for the homeless. That's great, but it doesn't really address the panhandling issue, because professional panhandlers and those who are homeless and need inexpensive housing and a hand-up are not the same people at all. Nothing they do to reduce homelessness is going to help with the panhandling problem, because panhandlers make enough money that they don't need to be homeless unless it's a matter of lifestyle choice - which it actually is for a lot of them.
