Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

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I learned a fairly valuable lesson from a local homeless guy I'd seen for years one day. He always hung out a few blocks up the road from where I lived, walked with a fairly extreme limp and always seemed like he had some pretty bad health problems. Was a pretty nice dude, never hassled anybody or anything.

Then one day I was up the road near where he hangs out, I watched him limp and stumble down to the end of the block, someone was even nice enough to give him a hand as he stumbled, then he got down to the crosswalk and started limping across the street, hit about halfway across, then straightened up, put on a big grin and strided triumphantly the rest of the way across, met up with his buddy i'd seen him with sometimes who hung out across the street, high five and disappear around the corner together. He still hangs out there begging, pretending to be crippled as far as I know.

Some people don't want to stop being 'homeless', for them it makes a pretty.good career

I really dislike it when some antecdote of an (apparently) fake homeless scammer is taken as a substantial point in these discussions on homelessness.

No doubt some small portion of scammers have an effective scam around homelessness. Other scammers do better on other things. My guess is that most people become homeless through lack of skill and knowing the best scams is likely one more skill that most homeless people don't have. Obviously, income stream available for people to "make a career" out of fake homelessness is so small that only a small number of people can be doing it. And, of course, that a given person might be lying in a way that seems like they imagine will get them money doesn't mean they get much more or that they aren't on the streets through general dysfunction (homeless people aren't angels, people in general aren't angels but people face the demand to be angels much more strongly when homeless).

When I lived in the Bay Area is that 90s, honestly, the scamming skills were far higher than they are now and as naive student, I'd have people scam me for a few bucks, which I generally could afford to lose, (with the worse thing being a person invited over who stole from my roommates). The beggars of today lack such skills (just pick pocketing has faded, etc).

The lessen for an average here is, imo, is give to homeless people but don't give more on a sob story, don't give only to a sob story. Just giving money to portion of people really more efficient than giving to agency X. If you're not selecting for scammers, it should work well.

> The lessen for an average here is, imo, is give to homeless people but don't give more on a sob story, don't give only to a sob story.

My solution has become to give food if I want to give something.

Unless they are honestly trying to sell something legally or perform music or something (I really have a soft spot for anyone actually trying to work):

- If someone plays music I might once in a while give something along the lines of $5-10 if it isn't too bad. It actually brightens my day to walk by someone playing.

- Recently I also bought a magazine from a friendly old chap. I don't know how common this is elsewhere but in Oslo severely disadvantaged people can apply for jobs as salespeople for "=Oslo" which is a monthly magazine that is only sold by people like them. Based on my first impression (this months edition) I might very well buy again. The price is 100NOK which translates to just above $10 and for that price I got some actual journalism and I get to support a person who is in a rough spot but actually want to work.

My solution has become to give food if I want to give something.

Being on the streets can mess-up a person's digestion. A lot of homeless people won't take random food because they don't know if they can keep that food down - and, here in the US, you don't know if someone who hates the homeless might be trying to poison you.

In Chicago USA there’s a magazine called StreetWise that homeless can apply to sell for $2 a copy. StreetWise has been sold in this manner for as long as I’ve lived here (20 years).

Whats sad to me is, if we knew that homeless people could get help and be taken care of, we'd know not to give things to people like this. But since society has decided to not put resources towards it, we can't make assumptions like that.

Yeah, I don't like it and I don't like that experience (and others) guiding my judgement when it comes to helping people like that, because not everyone who gets stuck on the streets is like that, but people like that take resources and help from people that do really need it and make it harder for people to care. Which altogether just kinda sucks and there really isn't an easy solution to these problems.

The fallacy is that a direct personal experience of one person's dishonest behaviour trumps a financial and economic system which relies on similar actions on an industrial scale.

One dude pretending to be crippled is much less socially destructive than an asset-stripping hedge fund which loads up multiple viable businesses with debt and then kills them.

The difference is the former is still relatively powerless, while the latter can be responsible for multiple instances of homelessness.

So it's not a question of "help" - it's about making sure that homelessness is an absolutely exceptional situation, not the systemic default for anyone who finds themselves on the wrong end of the value creation process. As well as the mentally ill.

“Asset stripping hedge fund”?

purchasing a corporation with the intention to liquidate it's assets for profit, often found seated next to "leveraged buy out" & "pharmaceuticals price hike" in the American Lexicon Association.

Hedge funds don't typically do leveraged buy outs.

Yep, in Finland its customary to nearly look down on those begging on the street, as most likely this is related to human trafficking or black market crime. We can do this because we know that a normal citizen would never need to do something like this.

> its customary to nearly look down on those begging on the street, as most likely this is related to human trafficking

> we know that a normal citizen would never

That took a dark turn quickly.

It's poorly phrased such that it sounds disconnected from the GP (about the lack of care in the US leading to both the needy and scammers on the street), but your quote leaves off the key word:

> we know that a normal citizen would never need

In other words, when you can trust your society to take care of its residents, you can be almost certain the beggars are scam artists.

Finland is a country with a pretty dang good social safety net. They even have things like Government Subsidized recording studios.

The stipulations for receiving aid are fairly light, so I think the viewpoint may be that if you aren't receiving assistance, you aren't willing to play by the simple rules they have.

Of course, this is someone from the US speaking, and basing this on my conversations with people from Finland from 10-20 years ago...

As in enabling human trafficking, not an innocent victim of it. Sorry for the tone :D

I've lived in a neighborhood with a high homeless population for 7 years, and I've never been asked for change in my own neighbourhood. I'm frequently asked if I can spare a smoke, but never money.

The panhandlers who beg in areas where there are more middle class people around are almost all phony.

When I worked in "the loop" of downtown Chicago I'd walk a mile or so from where I parked my motorcycle to the office @ 1 N. State.

Every day I walked past the same people pan-handling on the same corners. Many had signs with invented stories to try garner pity from suckers, stuff that was obviously fictional to anyone who had been walking past these people every business day for years, like "Stranded traveler, need money for bus fare" kind of stuff.

One day it became clear why some stuck with the stranded traveler story; it enabled them to wear normal, even classy high-end clothing, and not even have to be dirty-looking. On that day as I walked past a woman doing this I noticed she was wearing a new pair of some exceptionally fancy shoes, and the price tag sticker was still visible on the sole: $499.

On another occasion, I recognized one of these people but off-duty, crouched against the exterior wall of Sears trying to light a cigarette with a match, with their wheeled suitcase parked between themself and the wall. It was windy (Chicago) and I had a lighter, so I went over to help them with a light and as I got close enough to reach their cigarette I saw inside their "stranded traveler" prop suitcase they had left open: it appeared to be full of cash. Another pro for the stranded traveler gimmick: it gives you reason to have a suitcase to hide the sizable stash.

These folks probably weren't homeless, they just earned an easy living by acting like they were in a relatable bind of a situation to fellow tourists in a busy city.

I got to know someone who lived homelessly for a few years on the streets of Chicago, and he said real homeless people in Chicago are easily identified by their clothes and possessions being bleach-stained. Apparently the municipal crews would spray down the encampments on lower wacker where they'd stay warm through winter, without warning. So people who slept down there would have all their possessions/clothing ruined by the bleach. This was decades ago, I don't know if it's still applicable.

>Apparently the municipal crews would spray down the encampments on lower wacker where they'd stay warm through winter, without warning

The craziest part about this is that the people doing the spraying were probably way fewer emergencies away from being homeless than the people deciding to spray bleach in that area.

I wonder what it would have been like to be one of those city workers - Did they just see it as trying to make a living? I mean, they definitely know where saying "no" might get them...

My favorite was a “nun” in NY Penn Station collecting alot of cash in a bucket at the bottom of an escalator.

I later saw “her” pull off the nun garb, pull out his Mets hat, buy a beer and get on the Amtrak to head upstate.

Just because a homeless person uses some trickery to enhance their chances at $5, doesn't imply that they want to be homeless or that they enjoy it.

The real answer to the OP's point is that a homeless person who is assertive in terms of asking for money may find himself on the wrong side of someone with some kind of authority. Also, certain verbiage works better than others for panhandling.

The anecdote implies the person may not even be homeless, they just appear homeless and crippled as a means of earning income, it's literally their career.

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