Stop Encouraging Panhandlers

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, August 12, 2021

 

It is getting crusty out there, in America.

 

Across the country, practically every gas station and convenience store, every prominent intersection and some less prominent ones, every entertainment-and-nightlife district, every bus stop, every other Starbucks, the drive-thru line at Wendy’s, and, at times, the front porches of homeowners have been converted into a 1970s-Calcutta-style gauntlet of beggars, some hungry and half-mad, many of them bombed out of their minds and dangerous, and a surprising number of them clocking $100 an hour just for putting their hands out. Partly driven by genuine economic crisis during the COVID-19 lockdowns and partly driven by professional beggars exploiting the new, more cautious mood of American police departments, begging is everywhere.

 

Welcome to the Hobopocalypse.

 

Cities across the country have reported an increase in panhandling and, especially, in aggressive panhandling. And it’s not just such usual suspects as New York City and San Francisco — it’s West Hartford and Middletown, Conn., Wauwatosa, Wis., Rockford, Ill., Montgomery, Ala., Lafayette, La., Augusta, Ga., Amarillo, Texas, and Miami Beach.

 

It’s Peoria.

 

When roadwork partially closed down I-74 in Peoria, the change in traffic patterns meant more people stopped at more lights in more intersections — prime locations for panhandling. And the increase in begging that already had been under way in the city took off and became a kind of second wave of COVID-era disruption.

 

“It’s become an epidemic,” resident Artie Fowler told a local television reporter. “It’s just, it’s all over the city.” Fowler, who was himself laid off because of the coronavirus shutdowns, noticed a couple who started showing up in his neighborhood daily. The man, driving a late-model car, would drop off the woman, who would spend the day panhandling until her ride picked her up and took her home. Fowler was so incensed by the cynicism of it that he made a panhandler’s sign of his own — reading “Scammer” — and stood across the street from the woman until she moved on to happier hunting grounds. A Florida man who tried the same thing with a panhandler found himself in an angry confrontation that eventually involved the police.

 

There is a great deal of crossover between the homeless and panhandlers, but the two are not synonymous.

 

How much panhandling is undertaken by genuinely desperate people and how much by people who have decided that it is easier and more lucrative than working is impossible to say — and it is one of those public-policy questions that go studiously unstudied. “Most panhandlers in Dallas probably make 50 bucks an hour,” says Wayne Wallace, a pastor and the executive director of OurCalling, a Dallas-based Christian ministry for the homeless. Wallace is far from unsympathetic, but he is frank. “We’ve been working with the homeless for 20 years,” he says, clarifying that he means people living outdoors, “not people in shelters.”

 

“So,” he continues, “we know lots and lots of panhandlers, and many of them are not homeless. I’m not telling people not to give money or not to ask for it — that’s between them, their conscience, and the Holy Spirit. But my conviction is that I can find more strategic ways to help people. If there are 150 panhandling in Dallas today — and there’s more than that, but call it 150 — and each one of them is making $100 a day — and some make a whole lot more — every day for a year, that’s $5.5 million. How many could have been gotten off the streets permanently for $5.5 million?”

 

Wallace says that most of the people he encounters in his homeless ministry are 55 to 65 years old, more than 75 percent are African American (three times their share of the local population), and 75 percent are male. Of the women he encounters, practically all have suffered sexual abuse or domestic violence, and many have been the victims of trafficking and other kinds of exploitation. But he rejects the commonly held notion that homelessness is primarily a mental-health problem rather than an economic one. “You experience what they experience, and you are going to have mental-health problems, too. You’re probably going to want to take a drink, too.”

 

Anti-panhandling ordinances have been common for years, but their constitutional standing was thrown into question by Justice Clarence Thomas’s decision in the often-overlooked case of Reed v. Town of Gilbert, which had to do with an ordinance in Gilbert, Ariz., that imposed stricter limitations on religious signs than on political ones. This fell afoul of the Supreme Court’s criterion of “content neutrality” regarding governmental restrictions on communications. The simple version is that government can impose many kinds of restrictions on speech, from requiring permits for rallies and parades to regulating the size and placement of billboards, but the rules have to be the same for everybody, irrespective of the content of the speech in question. Justice Thomas’s formulation of the standard for content neutrality in Reed is, in his usual style, straightforward: “Government regulation of speech is content-based if a law applies to particular speech because of the topic discussed or the idea or message expressed.”

 

As many critics of panhandling bans see it, that standard means that if it is legal to pass out campaign literature on the town square or to evangelize on the street corner, then it must also be legal to ask for money there. A 2016 article in the Columbia Law Review argued that, under Reed, “panhandling regulations exist in a state of extreme vulnerability”: “Already, courts have held that under Reed, panhandling regulations discriminate on the basis of content. . . . Aggressive-panhan­dling bans, which determine legality on the basis of how the speech is said, are especially vulnerable to being held content based. Location and blanket bans might have a better chance of being content neutral, but as they require examination of the expression in question, they are likely content-based under Reed as well. . . . Panhandling regulation in America looks increasingly moribund.”

 

And that moribundity did, in fact, come to pass. After Reed, cities such as Columbus, Ohio, and Des Moines, Iowa, either repealed their panhandling laws or simply stopped enforcing them. Des Moines has tried to achieve the same end by prohibiting people from standing in the medians at some 200 intersections in the city and stepping up jaywalking arrests, to mixed results. A statewide ban in Massachusetts was thrown out in December after police arrested two Fall River men 43 times on panhandling charges. An effort in Fresno to ban giving money or food to panhandlers fizzled. Augusta is considering expanding its panhandling ordinance after downtown merchants complained that they were losing customers who didn’t want to be hassled by beggars; the goal is to direct those in need of social services to the right providers, but there may be legal difficulties.

 

Even in many progressive-leaning cities that take a more tolerant view of panhandling, the issue is on local radars because it has a direct impact on the one thing dearest to municipal leaders’ hearts: tax revenue. Panhandling contributes to a general atmosphere of chaos and insecurity that is very hard on urban nightlife districts, which are enormous revenue centers in many cities. Washington, D.C., for example, was taking in about $500 million a year in straight tax revenue from its bar-and-nightlife scene, which accounted for more than $7 billion a year in economic activity, pre-COVID. Minneapolis, Portland (Ore.), Austin — all are in the same boat. That is one of the reasons why so much of the anti-panhandling action isn’t in Republican-leaning jurisdictions but in left-leaning places such as Madison, Wis., and in nearby Wauwatosa. The nice urban progressives in these cities are not eager to talk about their efforts to chase crusty bums out of the public square — Melissa Weiss, director of administrative services in Wauwatosa, declined to comment on that city’s new ordinance except to say that it was based on Madison’s.

 

(The city’s press office declined to elaborate. These must be busy times, indeed, in Wauwatosa!)

 

In tourism-dependent Miami Beach, where local advocates accuse the police of using the courts to force homeless addicts into treatment against their will, the city issued a temporary, COVID-related ban on panhandling within 50 feet of a business’s door or windows; some would like to see a permanent version of that, but a similar law up the road in Fort Lauderdale was put on ice by a federal judge in June. That law prohibited panhandling near ATMs, outside sidewalk cafés, in parks, and in some other places. The judge proceeded on Reed grounds, skeptical that the city could justify a prohibition on soliciting money in places where religious recruitment, political petitions, and the like are permitted.

 

There isn’t a single fix for any of this, but there might be 135 of them. Wayne Wallace, the Dallas pastor, says his organization has about that many different “exit strategies” for the people it serves, and his ministry takes a high-tech approach to managing them. “We built some software using machine learning to evaluate people, agencies, and opportunities — we play Match.com with your profile, matching your needs and challenges to agencies and opportunities across the country that connect people with the resources they need.” And, perhaps as important, screening out those that don’t deliver results. “Of the people we’ve gotten off the streets, some are in long-term Christian recovery programs, some are in nursing homes, some are in group homes, some are in traditional housing. Sometimes the answer is family reconciliation. Some­times, it’s roommates.”

 

None of those social-service agencies is to be found in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. Some people are feeding themselves with that panhandling profit, and some people are wrecking their lives with it — and the people doling out cash in dribs and drabs, mostly for the sake of their own consciences, are not well positioned to know which are which. And some are just con artists exploiting the sympathy people naturally feel for the genuinely down-and-out. None of that is good for our cities: If the campers at a campground feed the bears, what do they get? More bears. There is much that can and should be done to help struggling people on the streets, but whatever the exit strategy is, it probably isn’t a finsky passed through the window of a Chevy Tahoe at the corner of 74th and Manatee in Bradenton, Fla.