November: focus on homelessness

For the National City Network, November's turn toward winter weather prompts a focus on homelessness.


Photo by Lisa Scheer of a homeless woman's camp in Greensboro.

At a downtown safety forum yesterday morning, sponsored by the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership, I gave an overview of the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness. I cited data from the National City Network indicating the broad diversity of the estimated 600,000 people who are homeless in the richest country on the planet:

34 percent of homeless service users are members of homeless families
28 percent of homeless persons state that they sometimes or often do not get enough to eat
66 percent of homeless report indicators of alcohol, drug abuse and mental health problems
44 percent of homeless individuals did paid work in the last month
49 percent of homeless individuals are in their first episode of homelessness

As I always try to do, I encouraged folks at the forum to think about homelessness from the point of view of being homeless--for I myself find it really a challenge to imagine. When you don't have a home, you essentially don't have a position from which to be heard in the civic sphere, I pointed out, citing, as I have before, the philosopher David Schrader. For Aristotle, the state was made up of households (not roving individuals). The home affords privacy, which is essential to autonomy: "autonomy against the authority of society." The homeless have no defenses and few advocates.

But what people wanted to talk about was not homelessness but its near cousin, panhandling, and the blight it contributes to downtown. Can't we outlaw it even further? some asked. Legally we probably could was my reponse, but that would not make it right. Glad to see the that downtown outreach committee agrees and is choosing instead to work on education and . . . outreach.

UPDATE 11/21: Editorials in the Chapel Hill Herald and the Daily Tar Heel register concern about overregulation of panhandling.

Panhandling and community values

What to do about panhandlers? A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting of what started out as the Downtown Chapel Hill Partnership Kiosk Giving Task Force and has evolved into the Downtown Outreach Work Group. The kiosk task force had arisen in response to the offer of an anonymous donor to fund a "giving kiosk" on Franklin Street where people could deposit money that went directly to social service organizations--as an alternative to giving directly to panhandlers. After a thorough discussion at a meeting I missed, the task force decided that the kiosk would not be an effective way to address the panhandling problem. Rather, they decided, and confirmed at the Oct. 13 meeting I did participate in, that it would be more effective to engage in educational campaigns aimed at citizens (especially students) and in direct social service intervention with the panhandlers, something like the way they do in Madison, Wisconsin, which some who went on the Chamber's trip to Madison had a chance to observe. Efforts will go into an educational campaign something like the Give a Better Way campaign in Denver.

At the Oct. 13 meeting, the topic of panhandling ordinances was raised again. Effective May 1, 2003, Chapel Hill enacted a ban on panhandling in certain places and at certain times. Although the reach was broader than "aggressive panhandling" (which is why I would have opposed it, had I been on the Town Council), its purpose was to provide a more effective means of controlling aggressive panhandling. Controlling aggressive behavior of any kind, including the panhandling kind, is a valid public purpose. But there's a tendency to want to do more than that: to want to shove the panhandlers out of sight, so that they do not make others feel uncomfortable. (That's what the Atlanta and Fort Lauderdale ordinances are explicitly about.) At the Oct. 13 meeting, we took a look at Madison's ordinance. Here's how it defines "aggressive panhandling":

Behavior shall be construed as "aggressive" or "intimidating" if a reasonably prudent individual could be deterred from passing through or remaining in or near any thoroughfare, or place open to the public because of fear, concern, or apprehension.

"could be deterred . . . because of fear, concern, or apprehension." What kind of standard is that? It's a good deal looser than the sample definition offered on the League of Wisconsin Municipalities site (see ordinance #88).

106-1.1. Aggressive Panhandling.
1. DEFINITIONS. a. "Aggressive behavior" means engaging in any conduct with the intention of intimidating another person into giving away money or goods, including but not limited to, intentionally approaching, speaking to or following a person in a manner that would cause a reasonable person to fear imminent physical injury or the imminent commission of a criminal act upon the person or upon the property in the person's immediate possession; intentionally touching another person without consent; or intentionally blocking or interfering with the free passage of a person.

At the Oct. 13 meeting I discouraged the task force from going in the direction of Madison's ordinance, and others there, including UNC grad student Barbie Schalmo, understood the point. My complaint is not so much about the legal implications--in the conservative Fourth Circuit such a law might well pass constitutional scrutiny under the relevant set of questions. My complaint echoes that of moral philosopher Uma Narayan in The Ethics of Homelessness. When you begin to regulate panhandling according to people's perceptions of the panhandlers, as opposed to specifically "aggressive" behavioral characteristics, you have just about said that panhandling itself is "inherently harassing." She continues,

I believe that justifying a ban on begging on the basis of morally problematic public sensibilities, on stereotypes, prejudiced antipathies, and misplaced resentment, violates what [philosopher] Richard Mohr calls the Dreyfus Principle. The principle says "[s]tigmas that are entirely socially induced shall not play a part in our rational moral deliberation," and rules out using discriminatory sentiments held by people as a good reason for institutionalizing further discrimination.

Narayan thus argues, and I agree, that a concern that the presence of panhandlers in a downtown district discourages foot-traffic and therefore undermines the economic health of downtown is not a morally valid reason for the further regulation of panhandling.

On the other hand, the impulse behind the idea of the giving kiosk had much to recommend itself. I think it represented a genuine wish to be helpful, to reach out as a community to help those in need. The trouble is that we don't have natural connections with panhandlers; they appear to us as strangers, one at a time, seemingly cut off from the community. We really don't know what a pandhandler will do with the dollar we give him, and we have reason to fear the worst. The initiatives that the Downtown Outreach Work Group is about to embark on are potentially good ones--as long as they include a recognition that in the end we cannot control the lives or wills of others, that not every panhandler is dishonest or deceitful, that there is genuine need staring us in the face. (The Denver program's home page is pretty harsh: a picture of an upturned palm, inscribed, "Please help. Don't give.")

Edwin Lanier, for example, son of a former mayor of Chapel Hill, is a recovering alcoholic and a panhandler who is homeless--by his own choice.

Being poor or homeless is not a crime.

The Town Council has gotten a spate of letters lately complaining about panhandlers downtown. One in today's mail implores, "Please enforce the laws against panhandling, so decent people are not subjected to intimidation and unpleasantness on our main street."

Our town is not unusual. There are more homeless people lately. Some of them turn to panhandling. And for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Billie Guthrie a housing coordinator for OPC Area Program, calls our attention to a new report by the National Coalition for the Homeless, "A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities." It begins,

The housing and homelessness crisis in the United States has worsened in 2005, with many cities reporting an increase in demands for emergency shelter. In 2005, 71 percent of the 24 cities surveyed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported a 6 percent increase in requests for emergency shelter. Even while the requests for emergency shelter have increased, cities do not have adequate shelter space to meet the need. In the 24 cities surveyed in the U.S. Conference of Mayors Hunger and Homelessness Homelessness Survey for 2005, an average of 14 percent of overall emergency shelter requests went unmet, with 32 percent of shelter requests by homeless families unmet. The lack of available shelter space – a situation made worse by the Gulf Coast hurricanes - leaves many homeless persons with no choice but to struggle to survive on the streets of our cities.

Too often, the response to this crisis is to criminalize the homeless. Atlanta's draconian anti-panhandling ordinance is one example. In some cities you can even get into trouble for feeding the homeless:

Cities have been further targeting homeless persons by penalizing those offering outdoor feedings for homeless individuals. These city restrictions are frequently aimed at preventing providers from serving food in parks and other public spaces.
In Dallas, beginning in September 2005, a new ordinance penalizes charities, churches, and other organizations that serve food to the needy outside of designated areas of the city. Anyone who violates this ordinance can be fined up to $2000.

Recently Dallas has refined this ordinance with designated official feeding sites. The idea is to cut down on litter. Also, volunteers have to register and take food-handling classes.

The panhandlers are virtually regulated out of sight and yet if you feed them you have to be certified? Something doesn't add up.

Dallas is one of the top 20 meanest cities for 2005. The criteria are "the number of anti-homeless laws in the city, the enforcement of those laws and severities of penalties, the general political climate toward homeless people in the city, local advocate support for the meanest designation, the city’s history of criminalization measures, and the existence of pending or recently enacted criminalization legislation in the city." These are cities in which "punitive practices . . . impede true progress in solving the problem."

I'm not proud of our nighttime panhandling ban and would not have voted for it. It was supposed to solve the problem of aggressive panhandling. But it hasn't. Instead, it's just made the situation confusing. How is a person on Franklin Street at night supposed to know that it's against the law for him to ask out loud for money (but that it would be OK if he put it on a placard)? It's not working here any better than it has turned out in Fort Lauderdale.

I am proud of our Community Initiative to End Homelessness for its recent receipt of a HUD grant of more than $270,000 to fund housing and basic services for the homeless.

The Community Initiative is associated with, but is not the same thing as, the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness (which needs a better web site). The Partnership is in the data-gathering stage, and focus groups are being organized. I think one of the first steps on the way to getting those nagging panhandlers off the street has to involve thinking seriously about why they are there, about real ways to tackle their problems. Surely there's at least some small relationship between the homeless and the excessively homed.