At the Dec. 15 Eureka City Council meeting, City Manager Greg Sparks presented research on an idea from Albuquerque, New Mexico: employing panhandlers to participate in city beautification projects. In 2015, Albuquerque put $50,000 toward providing panhandlers with transportation to and from work and a midday meal before then connecting them with services such as food, shelter and counseling. The program is administered through a third-party nonprofit, which relieves the city from obligations such as workman’s compensation and drug testing.
Does Eureka need a program like this? Several city councilmembers said yes. Kim Bergel said some days you can’t drive down Henderson Street “without seeing seven people or more [panhandling].” Bergel said the idea was a “long time coming.” Other city council members cited CostCo and Eureka Natural Foods as hotspots for people flying signs, and Councilmember Natalie Arroyo said business owners are rightfully troubled by people panhandling at the entrances to their stores. (Arroyo does not think an Albuquerque-style program is a solution.) Aren’t people panhandling at intersections a safety hazard? Police Chief Andy Mills said it certainly could be, although he couldn’t recall any specific cases.
Some cities have banned the act of handing pedestrians things from car windows, but Sparks said this was an ineffective measure. Eureka currently has an ordinance banning “aggressive panhandling,” but because several other cities’ anti-panhandling ordinances were struck down as civil rights violations, the city was “leery” about enacting one banning the act altogether unless officials were sure it would stick. Albuquerque says it has connected 2,200 people with services since the program began in September. The problem in Eureka falls to finances, education and implementation.
“Albuquerque is the most populous city in the state of New Mexico. Utah is, well Utah is a state, working with a state budget.” said Arroyo, referring to Utah’s housing-first initiative that dramatically reduced its homeless population. “I think it’s a wonderful idea, but I don’t think it’s going to be our silver bullet. I don’t think we can put very much money toward it.”
Bergel countered that the money could be covered by grants, but acknowledged enforcement of a stricter panhandling ordinance could be difficult, putting more strain on an already busy police force.
“I don’t think that the punitive approach we’ve been taking is working,” she added. She also cited Auburn, Oregon’s recent anti-panhandling campaign, in which city officials and business owners handed out anti-panhandling information to people who were shopping. Sparks cited the need for a public awareness campaign, perhaps shown to Rotary clubs or others, that would show people where their money “really” went. According to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice, most panhandlers spend their money on “alcohol, drugs, and tobacco.” The report adds that the majority of homeless people do not panhandle, and the majority of panhandlers are not homeless.
Sparks concluded discussion by saying that it appeared the counsel had reached some level of consensus that public education should be a priority, that the punitive aspect of an ordinance should be investigated, and that he would continue to work with third party entities such as The Betty Kwan Chinn Center, which currently does help people find employment. The subject will be revisited at a later meeting.
This article appears in Creature Comforts.
some panhandlers are elderly and/or mentally ill or injured so they can’t partake in “city beautification projects” and besides able bodied need a future vision not just some job no one else wants to do so if the projects are accompanied with housing and access to opportunities for job training and education then it might be OK.
The UK found that giving people 3k$ rather than tiny little handouts (including just food stamps which don’t help people with housing or jobs or transportation) led to a significantly higher success rate long term.
Wow, Moriah. Where in the world did the UK get the study that one large lump some of $3K leads to higher success rate, long term? If that was true, why not $6k or $10K lump sum? Study must have been funded by drug dealers.
Where did this 3k thing come from? Look there are so many jobs the city and county could give to the poor to do. but there are also so many barriers to success. Saint Vincent De Paul has been helping people and feeding them lunch for 30 years. If the community would come together and help them fix their building they could do alot more to help the poor get work.This community is clueless how big this problem really is. How many people are just a breath away from homelessness.
The so-called “aggressive panhandling” law in Arcata was struck down as unconstitutional (except in very limited circumstances like at ATM machines) and the City of Arcata also tried to say that panhandling interfered with traffic- NOPE!
First Amendment rights are not about pleasing business owners or politicians or about keeping tourists happy. It’s ‘too bad’ some people don’t like panhandling. I don’t like a lot of things people say, I don’t like lots of signs I see, and I don’t agree with the the way many people use their money, and I can tell them that, work to shut them up, educate them, or pressure them to use their money differently but… the Constitution prohibits government from interfering with what people say, what signs they hold, with the way they use their money. That prohibition means the government cannot interfere with people PANHANDLING.
The real problem is POVERTY, not poor people begging for survival. POVERTY is what the government should be trying to eliminate.
Down and Out in Paris and London, excerpt from Chapter 31
by George Orwell, 1933
It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary “working” men. They are a race apart–outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men “work,” beggars do not “work”; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not “earn” his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic “earns” his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.
Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc.
It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course–but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout–in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.
Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?–for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except “Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it”? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honor; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.
The powers that be have been doing everything they can since The Eighties to turn the USA into a Third World Country and have done a pretty good job of it. You have to be a millionaire to get welfare now. If you don’t have skills or connections, with the high rents and few jobs in Humboldt County it is hard to survive. Give a beggar a buck, you know the government won’t. Does watching poor people suffer make you feel more powerful?