More Cities Are Making It Illegal to Hand Out Food to the Homeless
npr.org
npr.org
Instead, he thinks food sharing programs should only be located near what he calls the "core areas of recovery": mental health, substance abuse and job readiness services. Otherwise, he says, homeless people may spend more time pursuing food than the services that will help them get back on their feet."
Not the argument I was expecting, but I would say I think making it illegal to feed people is the wrong.
I'm not sure if it should be illegal, but as a civilization that's probably what we should encourage.
If you want to encourage feeding the homeless in places close to where they can get other types of assistance, you should take positive steps to encourage that:
Provide assistance (financial or logistical) to organizations doing the feeding in proper locations.
Provide transportation to help the homeless get to the proper locations.
Or most simply: Ask the organizations or people what you can do to get them to start feeding the homeless in proper locations.
Also, are you completely sure that if you ban unstructured feeding, all the homeless will get fed in a structured way? Or will banning the feeding lead to some people starving?
Also, how do you know it's a net negative? Do you take the word of a politician who has incentive to move the homeless to low property value areas?
So that leaves the question of whether or not it's a net negative. Panhandling is demonstrably dangerous, and an argument for unstructured feeding is an argument for the status quo. I can definitely say that the status quo is an abject failure. As for the structured efforts, those must be measured and improved on an individual basis. They certainly have their own issues, but at least in my city those structured feeding facilities also provide access and information on medical care, job placement, and other assistance that is relevant to the homeless population.
It's not just Roma, though. There are underground networks of beggars, where the people running the network get most of the money, and so on.
1 - Continue to allow unstructured homeless feeding. Homeless continue to lose out on benefits of structured feeding.
2 - Make unstructured homeless feeding illegal. Homeless get benefits of structured feeding, but it clashes with our morals and ideas of personal liberties.
3 - Discourage unstructured homeless feeding without violating restricting anyone's rights.
In an ideal world, you would chose option #3. However, we don't have that option, at least to the best of our knowledge. If we had such option, we would see a report from some place that tried and succeeded... Therefore by rejecting option #2 you are by default promoting option #1, that is prolonging pain and suffering in the name of superior morals.
It's just not street-food that's making or keeping people homeless, and it's a gross mischaracterization to claim that street feeding is what keeps people homeless. I just can't see how that contributes any any significant way to their issues.
The homeless people I know have serious physical and/or mental health issues. People aren't exactly lining up to give them food and money. Many of them simply can't manage a budget and afford enough to eat through most of the month, so they supplement their diet however they can.
They know that there are programs out there to help them, but they don't take advantage of them now. Making it illegal to give them food isn't going to somehow force them to get help. It'll just make it worse for the homeless.
Are you sure? I'm not trying to attack your point, but what would happen if your homeless friends actually started taking advantage of these programs that are put in place to help them? Right now they don't need to because they are getting by on the kindness of others, but what if they had no other option but to go to these mental hospitals, homeless shelters, food banks, etc, where they could someday learn to take care of themselves and break the cycle?
I think what you're doing shows how much of a loving and kind-hearted person you are, but try to consider the other side of the argument. This is an enormously hard problem (dating back thousands of years). We need a way to break the cycle, and the current status quo just isn't working.
webnrrd2k's experience mirrors my past experiences, in that many homeless simply don't have the mental faculties to take care of themselves. This includes having enough sapience to seek out existing programs for help. Many will self medicate with illegal or stolen drugs, which only exasperates their situation.
It's very easy to project ourselves into these situations and think "What would I do if I were homeless?", and assume that if you were lazy enough and taken care of you would probably stay homeless. The fact that you are even able to jump these mental hurdles and consider these situations is why you are not currently homeless.
This is just my opinion, based my my limited experience. And homelessness is a big problem, so there will be a lot of different approaches. But I see it as primarily a problem of mental health. A lot of the homeless I know were abused, or came from shitty families, or had abusive parents, or any of a number of major childhood issues and their families didn't have the financial or emotional resources to do anything about it. So I tend to see "get tough on the homeless" programs as blaming the victim. I think that forcing people to go into any kind of program or shelter or whatever is just going to lead to resentment and more problems in the long run. Most shelters are pretty bad already, and that's with people who want to be there. Imagine how bad it'll be with people who really don't want to be there.
I think it's important to keep people accountable -- E.g. Insist that if they want to be in a clean, decent shelter for three months and get meals then they need to make thrir bed, do dishes, go to group meeting daily and look for work, or see a doctor or psychiatrist, etc...
What I think they really need is a long-term program for re-integrating into society, sort of like prisoners getting out, one that includes basics like a place to live for a year or two, health care, food, as well as psychological care and job training. Many will be helped by that, but not all. Hopefully, people from the local community or church or something will be involved as well. It's also important that there be a self-help group sort of like AA, but geared for the homeless, "homeless anonymous", where people could talk openly about their life and experiences and be with others who have been through similar things.
I think there are better programs, in general, for single moms and/or abused women, but I don't know much about that.
So she'd be an example of someone who took advantage of a program and was helped, but I don't think she's a good fit when people are talking about street-feeding the homeless. She was highly motivated to do something about her life. because of her kid, and didn't need much pushing to get onto a program.
It's hard to say, because it's an emotional thing, not a rational thing, but I think of it as two broad categories of resistance... I tend think of them as "structure" and "content"[1].
Some people have physical, structural problems with their brains -- they had a serious brain injury, a concussion, or stroke, or something; and they are functional enough to stay out of prison or not cause obvious problems, but their brain is shot or they just can't get themselves to focus for long enough to make any real headway with getting help on their own. I'd bet some just have ADHD, or some other organic/structural problem with their brain.
Many of seem to have had a bad childhood, or a real bad experience at some point, and it left them feeling so poorly about themselves that they just expect the world to crap on them, like there is nothing they can do about it. They might descend into depression, or addiction, or spin off into some fantasy world, or deal with it in some other destructive way. I've noticed that the earlier things went wrong then the worse the effects seem to be, but this is strongly dependent on the person and what actually happened, and their current environment that it's hard to say anything useful.
So that's how I think about it, but what I do is to try to gently push people in the direction of getting help and making their life better, sometimes hold their hands, and not worry too much about who it is or their current situation in life. Sometimes I'm better than others, and I'm better with some people than others, so I don't beat myself up if I can't really help.
[1] Just to get a little philosophical - they aren't really separate, just a useful way of thinking about what's going on. I'm a Buddhist, and the structure/content idea helps me to see how my own mind works. For example, if I drink a lot of coffee and get really cranked up -- that's more of a physical/structural explanation of why I experience the world a certain way. If I have certain thoughts ("I'll never get this damn code right", or "my life is crap") then that leads me to experience the world a certain way -- neither mean the world actually is that way.
Suppose 90% of people in Fort Lauderdale want to disallow businesses from feeding the homeless while 90% of Philadelphia wants to disallow businesses from allowing smoking inside. What principle allows us to restrict smoking on private property that wouldn't also allow us to restrict people feeding the homeless? Is there a reason one of these is more acceptable than the other?
On edit: For those who feel the difference is purely about outcomes, what if Roger Marbut is right and feeding the homeless in the way banned is a net harm? Would it be okay then? Also, while one can argue smoking bars are a net good, they do, at a minimum, harm those who would like to smoke. We can also construct a scenario in which a smoking restaurateur wants to serve food to his 3 smoking customers (i.e. all are harmed).
I would argue in that in the case of smoking, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that suggests the activity harms others around you. Therefore, the public has the right to regulate the negative externality that this activity creates -- needless physical harm to others. The regulation of this activity creates virtually zero new negative externalities and is therefore justified.
This is in contrast to the other behavioral regulations you mentioned such as gay marriage, feeding the homeless, or even other drugs. The supposed negative externalities these activities produce have been viewed with more skepticism by the general public in recent years.
For example, the argument that gay marriage would somehow harm the way certain children were raised, has been mostly debunked. If sufficient evidence to the contrary would arise, evidence that was comparable to the quality of the evidence for second hand smoke, then the public would be justified in reevaluating the issue.
Fortunately, from a civil rights perspective, this is not the case.
In the case of non-smokable drugs you have to consider how much harm drug use causes vs. drug prohibition. It becomes clear that the negative externalities from the latter are much larger in scope and scale. Therefore, a conversation in ending drug prohibition is justified.
So, I would argue that whether or not a regulation on feeding the homeless is justified depends on the scope and scale of the negative externalities the activity creates, vs the scope and scale of negative externalities the regulation itself may or may not create.
The problem with considering issues involved from the point of view of 'Externalities' is how you measure 'externalities'. Can you be sure that you have measured all the possible externalities?
The regulation of the behavior curtails the rights of a number of people. You don't seem to consider that a significant externality (probably because you aren't one of those people).
You also present a false dichotomy. The question is no 'to regulate or not regulate, which is worse?'.
The question is 'How do we solve this problem while protecting as the rights of the people involved as much as possible?'
There is a tendency to want to regulate away issues rather than trying to understand the needs of everyone involved and craft solutions that actauly work.
There is no universal right to smoke. Smoking harms others and provides no benefit to anyone other than people who suffer nicotine addictions.
Furthermore, smoking bans are bar none the most effective way to reduce public harm from second hand smoke. They indeed "actually work".
EDIT: And to your other response I did mean "the right to continue their addiction." Thank you for pointing that out.
>Smoking harms others and provides no benefit to anyone other than people who suffer nicotine addictions.
You might feel that way, but other people feel differently. There is a fair amount of evidence that nicotine is often used as a form of self medication for both anxiety and depression. It also has a long history of being enjoyed socially by a number of different cultures.
I regularly encourage and support my friends who are trying to quit smoking, I did so even back when I was a smoker. My biggest issue with the anti-smoking activists is that they assume that because they don't like something, nobody can like it.
> Furthermore, smoking bans are bar none the most effective way to reduce public harm from second hand smoke. They indeed "actually work".
They might be the most effective, but they are not the most fair. By your same logic, completely banning cars on public roads is the most effective way to reduce pedestrian fatalities.
Smoking bans trample on the universal right of individuals to to pursue happiness as they see fit. I think it is possible to protect this universal right while also protecting the rights of those who wish to be free of the harm caused by second hand smoke.
I think the unwillingness of anti-smoker to work to accomodate this is as callous as the unwillingness of some smokers to take the effort to avoid exposing people to their second-hand smoke.
And to bring this back to the discussion at hand: Banning something for the public good is rarely fair and often has ignored or unvalued externalities. This is especially true when the ban comes at the expense of a minority of the population (such as a ban on panhandling).
I've always thought that outright indoor smoking bans are a gross in-balance of non-smoker's rights vs. smokers and property owner's rights.
I think imposing mandatory licensing (with fees) of indoor smoking establishments that ensure proper ventilation for the protection of employees and other tenants is the reasonable solution. It can protect smokers and property owners rights while also also protecting the rights on non-smokers, employees and tenants.
In the case of feeding the homeless, I think the ability to give charity is an important right. I think it is more important than the right to have an attractive city center that encorages tourism.
However, the relative importance of these rights isn't important. The available solutions are important. If there is a solution that protects the rights of both parties, it is the proper solution to use.
This is why these cities should be using incentives and support to encourage feeding the homeless in proper locations (near support infrastructure and away from valuable retail or tourist destinations).
We should always choose to encourage proper behavior as opposed to banning improper behavior whenever possible.
I encourage you to read my post about externalities. I believe you would find the arguments from the economics perspective interesting.
> I've always thought that outright indoor smoking bans are a gross in-balance of non-smoker's rights vs. smokers and property owner's rights.
Is smoking really an autonomous behavior? It is a common behavioral symptoms associated with a nicotine addiction.
Should people with uncontrollable addictions have rights outside of the right to treatment? I'm not so sure...
Tobacco smoking might be the only drug that causes unavoidable physical harm to non users.
> I think imposing mandatory licensing (with fees) of indoor smoking establishments that ensure proper ventilation for the protection of employees and other tenants is the reasonable solution.
The WHO has suggested that solutions through engineering, such as improved ventilation, are ineffective at reducing the unsolicited harm (or social costs) that non smokers have to incur.
http://www.who.int/fctc/cop/art%208%20guidelines_english.pdf
Even if you could make that case in theory, how do you define addition in such a way that doesn't allow any disliked behavior to be classified as "addiction"?
Yes, it can be. Many nicotine users are social users, and not all of them become physically dependent.
> Should people with uncontrollable addictions have rights outside of the right to treatment? I'm not so sure...
Yes, of course they should.
I'm hoping you meant: "Should people with uncontrollable addictions have the right to continue that addiction"
To which I would answer: Yes, as long as the addiction does not lead them to violate other laws.
From your PDF: > No safe levels of exposure to second-hand smoke exist. Obviously not true, except under asinine definitions of 'safe'. By the same argument, I should be calling for a ban on cars.
We have acceptable levels of radiation exposure.
> Approaches other than 100% smoke free environments, including ventilation, air filtration and the use of designated smoking areas (whether with separate ventilation systems or not), have repeatedly been shown to be ineffective and there is conclusive evidence, scientific and otherwise, that engineering approaches do not protect against exposure to tobacco smoke.
I am 100% certain that there are engineering approaches that can limit exposure to any tobacco smoke to levels which are as safe given a reasonable definition of safe. Any claim otherwise is patently false.
Now, the degree to which these engineering approaches are economically feasible is a valid question.
That PDF, and the anti-smoking movement in general, tends to avoid any facts that don't perfectly match their message and whitewash the issue.
I am a former smoker who quit, cold turkey, on my first try. On rare occasions, I still like to visit hookah bars. 100% smoking bans, as advocated by that WHO document, violate my right to engage in that rational desire and to live my life the way I choose.
Now, I'm done being off topic. I continued the discussion of smoking in my previous post only to draw out my point of how outright bans for undesired are bad when there are alternative that can protect the rights of involved parties.
However, for my part, I also surmise that in both cases the outcome is undesirable, so I suppose I'm still vulnerable to the point you make in your edit.
I don't actually expect answers. I just want to reveal some of the depth of issues such as these mentioned.
I meant a philosophical, rather than a legal assessment.
And of course, silly decisions at a city or county level are less damaging than at a state or especially national level.
Principle of "you have your freedom as long as you do not restrict other's freedom". Smokers restrict freedom of those who want to breath air that is not harmful. Hobos restrict freedom of those who want healthy sanitary environment without drug addicts and asocial behavior in public space.
If you want to allow hobos to live as they live, you also have to allow anyone pull their pants and piss right near you in bus or park, allow anyone to harass anyone else for no reason, also allow your kids to communicate with asocial people that have nothing to lose whatever they would do. If you actually think hobos do nothing bad to people you have not met any hobos.
An example: consider back in the 80s - 90s where there was a charity trend in at least parts of the United States of sending clothes to Africa. Seems like a good thing, right? How could giving clothes be bad. Clothing is a basic need (in many places), just like food. But what really happened when Americans started sending clothes to Africa? People who have actually spent time in Africa can tell you that the flood of free clothes totally destroyed the local textile industries. People who were making a productive living found themselves unable to compete and out of work/income.
So we see that with free clothes there were significant unintended negative consequences. Why would we expect it would be any different with free food? I totally get the desire to empathize with another human being and genuinely want to help people who found themselves in a very difficult situation with no obvious way to break the cycle. But we need to be aware that our supposed help may actually end up causing more difficulty in the long run. In that case, one could argue that charity becomes a selfish act--the real reason the giver does it is because it makes them feel better about themselves. I'm not making this point in an attempt to justify heartless inaction. I just think that we should put serious thought into examining whether our efforts at charity really make a meaningful difference in the lives of the people we're trying to help.
I don't think anyone is advocating to let the homeless starve. We just need to realize as a society that the small act of kindness that we can provide at the micro scale (giving rides, money, food, etc) can have harsh consequences when observed from the macro scale.
Would subsidised housing for the homeless destroy rental values? Would free food destroy the restaurant business?
Isn't it more likely that a relative small spend would increase property values and restaurant footfall?
Most people don't like having to deal with beggars and if beggars disappear from an area, isn't it at least worth considering that it could become more popular with potential customers and residents?
So I thought I might be able to use these people as handyman. So I asked one of them if he would help me cleaning my car and moving furniture. I offered him $20, some used clothes and chilled beer. He shrugged saying he doesn't want my money. He told me that if he wanted work, he could get it easily and had held many jobs in past.
Being a homeless enabled him get various type of welfare from government he easily made $800 per month from government. He said he could get a job for $3000 a month but then it is not a major improvement over getting $800 for doing nothing.
US needs to rethink its welfare measure. They are winning votes but wrecking the country.
Since Orlando has weather (and an economy, look up 2008-present foreclosure rates in Central Florida for reference) that is very conducive to a large homeless population we have been dealing with the issue at a large scale for a long time, and a lot of caring, smart, experienced people all agree that there are very constructive ways of dealing with homelessness and very destructive ways of dealing with it. Time and time again, allowing the homeless to disperse geographically and survive in a "free for all" state creates enormous problems. You end up with exploitation, abuse, and harm to not only the homeless but those around them.
It's rare, but not unheard of, for stupid kids to give the homeless sandwiches laced with, say, exlax. It's rare, but not unheard of, for people to entice the homeless into essentially handyman jobs with the promise of a meal, or payment, only to "reconsider" at the last second once the job is done. It's rare, but not unheard of, for well meaning people to give out food that has gone bad, or can exacerbate terrible allergies or medical conditions.
Furthermore, encouraging the homeless to beg and subsist off of random passerby is an incredibly demeaning thing. It encourages the bad element of panhandling, begging, and lies to encourage donations. It creates an atmosphere where the most seriously poorly off end up being "out begged" by the devious looking to snag a quick meal, or beer money.
Last, but not least, it completely ruins standardized initiatives to solve the problem. The homeless are less likely to congregate in safe areas where organizations dedicated to help them are located. They're less likely to receive a steady, nutritious diet. They're less likely to be exposed to further job programs and mental health help. They're more likely to sleep in an alley somewhere instead of, at worst, gathering near a shelter, or at best, getting a bed in a shelter where they are safest and most secure. Keeping tabs on the homeless is one of the hardest things to do, but one of the most important. If you can't track progress on a community or individual scale you can't tell whether or not your efforts are working, and you can't develop the personal relationships and support groups that time and time again are proven to be, overwhelmingly, the most effective way to get people out of the vicious cycle.
It's hard to kind of shut off the automatic empathy that pops up, but you have to realize these are people just like you that ended up with a serious short stick in life. You need to treat them like that, instead of infantilizing them.
...
>The homeless are less likely to congregate in safe areas where organizations dedicated to help them are located.
or in other words, it is harder to ghetto-ize the homeless, to take them off the sight of good citizens. A good citizen just need to know that somebody is taking care of these people, and so s/he don't need to think about that problem, better should forget about it and just mind his/her own business and pay taxes.
To summarize your post as i see it - the homeless people make wrong choice between wonderful services available to them and all the horrors you described, and we need to apply force (i.e. law) to make them make the right choice and to fend off the "good-intentioned" enablers of the wrong choice.
Somehow i don't think that homeless need even more force applied to them than they are already subjected too.
In practice it's extraordinarily hard to centralize the homeless. Like, proving P=NP hard. Consider the nature of the homeless, how they've been treated their whole lives, the way society talks and acts around them, etc. etc. They are not very willing to just hang around. To "ghetto-ize" the homeless would require mass sweeps by police to essentially arrest and forcibly move the homeless population. Yes, we always are in danger of marginalizing the people we're trying to help but that's going to be an easier job for a militarized government force, not a woefully underfunded and understaffed soup kitchen.
However, to the extent that cities seek to solve the problem by making certain behaviors illegal, I am skeptical about how dedicated they are to helping the homeless.
I'd rather force the cities to find new solutions help the homeless rather than allow them to push the homeless towards areas with lower property values (or to other cities).
We should probably make it a pre-requisite for anyone who wants his/her opinion to be considered. First-hand experience is invaluable.
An argument should be able to stand by itself. Remember, when discussing something, you're discussing the points, logic and facts. Not someone's experience. Now fine, they can present their experience/observations as points/facts, and if they're true, then they become part of the argument they're making.
*Edit. Fixed bad grammar. My bad.
The nerve!
Seriously though, I think there are two kinds of arguments - logical arguments from validated facts with statistical control, and opinion arguments from some amorphous expertise.
The former can always stand by itself. Ideally, that would be all we ever need, and we get by in hard sciences quite well with just that.
However in softer areas of human knowledge we don't have the luxury of repeatable experiments, so we have to rely on "expert" opinions. I propose we restrict this to the opinions of people with first-hand experience, because if we don't we're running risk of baseless arguments that will never converge. When two people argue from personal experience, there is always an opportunity for them to compare the direct experience of each other and resolve their differences. When people argue from someone else's experience that opportunity is gone, and all that is left is two people sticking to their believes no matter what.
You will note there aren't any facts mentioned in the GGP post (by trhway), only opinions. I think it's ok to do that, but only if it came from direct exposure to the subject matter.
He chose to sleep outside in a park most of the time because of all these things, as he preferred it to the shelters.
I would hope that these behaviors are already illegal under current laws.
>Furthermore, encouraging the homeless to beg and subsist off of random passerby is an incredibly demeaning thing. It encourages the bad element of panhandling, begging, and lies to encourage donations. It creates an atmosphere where the most seriously poorly off end up being "out begged" by the devious looking to snag a quick meal, or beer money.
I agree we shouldn't encourage this behavior. I disagree that we should make the behavior illegal.
>Last, but not least, it completely ruins standardized initiatives to solve the problem. The homeless are less likely to congregate in safe areas where organizations dedicated to help them are located. They're less likely to receive a steady, nutritious diet. They're less likely to be exposed to further job programs and mental health help. They're more likely to sleep in an alley somewhere instead of, at worst, gathering near a shelter, or at best, getting a bed in a shelter where they are safest and most secure.
I'm inclined to suggest that if not "making feeding homeless people illegal and strictly curtailing their movements" completely ruins the standardized initiatives, the standardized initiatives need a lot of work.
My big problem with forcing homeless into these safe areas by making things outside them illegal, is that you end up with "out of sight, out of mind". These programs already don't receive enough attention and support.
You even said it yourself, there's not enough money or support. So save the extra $3 you would otherwise be giving out and make a year end donation to a worthy organization. Maybe give a weekend of free time. That will go miles beyond just throwing cash out of a car window at a random intersection. Ever wondered how many homeless get hit by cars begging at intersections by the way? It's more than you'd like to know.
Mindless and even well-intentioned behavior can have as much to do with socially adverse consequences as actual malice or recklessness. The more closely you connect law and morality, the harder it becomes to accept this. But that doesn't change the reality that it's possible for lots of individually well-intentioned choices to add up badly.
Why not just say, "This is the status quo. I want to change things by --" ?
The reason this article is trending is that the status quo is broken. Instead of outlawing Good Samaritans, why not take the time and make the effort to educate them?
The educational information in your posts is quite valuable and deserves more attention than it is getting.
Part of the problem is the mentality people go into this issue with, and changing that will do wonders for the various initiatives trying to tackle this. That said, it's something I had to go through myself so I should probably be more empathetic
You sound reasonable on first blush but your words are aimed to harm and crush the weak. That you put your apologies for a regime for the policing of the poor in apparently plausible and benevolent terms simply makes your words more harmful.
I think you should be ashamed of yourself.
Edit: Your parent post is very eloquent (if deceptive imho) argument for "give up on helping your fellow human, instead trust the authorities". Are you happy with living in a world like that really?
You can't expect good communication to occur when you restrict it as you suggest. His comment wasn't anywhere near as disparaging as it can get.
There is no "solution to homelessness" while there are people made homeless. A society where many people are made homeless is going to be unpleasant. In ways, it should be unpleasant, the unsolved problem, that being the existence of homeless people, should be visible.
The solutions are the existence of jobs, affordable apartments (and mental-health care for those with serious mental disabilities, etc).
Talking about "a solution to homelessness" is essentially saying we need to make intolerable situation orderly - to turn some section of each city into something like an open-air prison. In that sense, "solving homelessness" while there are still homeless is undesirable.
I just don't think you should ban panhandling because it punishes the people who need help instead of helping them.
I also don't support the "this behavior creates problems, so ban it" mentality, as it allows people to avoid addressing the underlying issues.
It's a legitimate concern, and an obvious downside. However, things like this should be considered in their aggregate effect - there are pros and cons to both approaches, and the one that should win is not the one that sounds good, but the one that makes the most good experimentally.
Your opponent pdeuchler appears to have substantial first-hand experience with what works and what doesn't, while your retort seems a lot more theoretical. I think both of you should elucidate not just the strength of your convictions, but also basis in facts. That's how we will make progress.
edit: didn't mean to imply I don't have first hand experience, I do, but I was also mentored by people who were/are passionate about and extremely involved with this problem. My understanding of the underlying issues comes from both sources
On a relate note - I found that most startup advice is useless, because people who are giving that advise try to summarize their experience (at best) or someone else's experience (at worst), and they inevitably leave out important caveats. Add in some narrative fallacy and it gets completely ruined. If you listen long enough you will find equally convincing, but completely opposing startup advice on any subject. For that reason I only ever listen to first-hand accounts of what happened, not to any "life lessons", "lessons learned", "10 things that every startup should do" etc.
This is the intended consequence, not a side-effect.
Cities want to reduce their homeless population, because it's distasteful and discourages consumers in those areas. The place I grew up in gentrified rapidly over the course of the 90's and 00's and homeless people made the rich whites that wanted to go to the starbucks feel uncomfortable. On a large scale this would hurt the economy.
A city in this situation has two options. They can treat the underlying causes of homelessness, build more affordable housing, spend more on mental health, etc. But this is expensive and takes money out of the economy at both ends, because you can always make affordable housing unaffordable and collect more property tax and income tax from the new residents.
So, the city went with the cosmetic option: Make it extremely difficult to be homeless within the areas the city wanted homeless people gone from. This entails a number of very cheap, but very effective changes to the environment to just make it difficult for homeless people to be around:
* They installed bars on benches, so that nobody could sleep on them, and encouraged property owners to install spike strips in doorways so that homeless people couldn't sleep there.
* They installed "help the homeless" parking meters so that people could "give their change to the homeless" (really, give their money to a charity, that would have overhead, administrators to pay, etc., resulting in much less going to homeless people), and made it illegal to panhandle and to give money to pandhandlers.
* They made it illegal to serve food without a license, criminalizing Food Not Bombs (a group that collects and distributes food for free, for everyone, not just homeless people) and also giving food directly to homeless people.
* The few homeless people that remained in the area after they left were harassed by police and driven out directly.
At the same time this was going on, the city was closing shelters and selling the land to developers.
Writ large, no city has any incentive to actually address homelessness when it could just try to drive homeless people out of its borders and make it Not Their Problem. And that's what's happening here.
As an aside, it's disgustingly dehumanizing to refer to homeless people as "the homeless" or as "homeless" in the noun form. These are people. They are exactly like you. As we technologists destroy more and more jobs while simultaneously increasing the degree of inequality in society, we will be causing more and more people to become homeless, so we should be more conscious than normal about this problem and how we can fight it.
It's an interesting distinction.
Many of them are, that's the problem!
Unfortunately, this is not a field for experimentation. People whose job is to take care of others can suggest this line of thinking, but to me, the problem is not to justify and pay those helping but to solve the underline problem. It is easy to say one thing and mean another. What are you fighting for? Your job, your career, your research, or do you really care <bold> beyong your own interest <bold> for the well being of all those people who are really suffering?
I feel like Doc Cochran, in Deadwood
Al Swearengen: What the fuck are we talking about?
Doc Cochran: A man being cared for and made comfortable 'til he expires. Girls you put to the task, deduct your time from my pay.
Al Swearengen: I get the bag of shit. Doc Cochran: You get to care for a human being in his last extremity.
Al Swearengen: A human being in his last extremity IS a bag of shit.
Doc Cochran: Aw, FUCK YOU AL!
Any way, with that said, homelessness _is_ a difficult problem, and, yes, some of the homeless _are_ bags of shit. But a lot of them aren't, and it isn't fair to treat all the homeless the same way.
I certainly don't have all the answers. But I have to believe that America, with it's wealth and power, can do a lot better.
However, I did say that I think it's deeply wrong to make it illegal to outlaw street feeding of the homeless. For one thing, it's not going to help. For another I feel deeply that I have the right to help people, and sometimes that means giving them food.
Street-feeding isn't a major factor in any of the homeless people I know, and I know a lot of homeless people. I interact with the homeless several times a week, and have for several years. I volunteer at soup kitchens, talk to them, give them rides, take them to doctors, buy them meals, and loan them money on a regular basis. Some of them are close personal friends.
As far as I can tell you want to see it made illegal to feed the homeless -- fair enough. However, there is nothing stopping the homeless from going to shelters or the city/county/state to get help right now. But without more resources for those programs there is very little that will change long-term.
If you are worried about exposing the homeless to programs I think it would be better for the police to have more mental health training, or a social worked they could call, or something similar. As far as I know, most of the soup kitchens around here already have a social worker on staff, but maybe they could have more available. The point is that I'm sure it could be improved, but making it illegal to street feed the homeless just isn't the answer you seem to think it is.
As far as a solution to homelessness goes -- I don't think there will ever be anything like a complete solution. However, I think putting a lot more money into social services and human development programs will help, as will directly funding shelters and government programs will be a tremendous help. But the best thing, the thing homeless people really need? People who actually care about them and try to directly help them. It's about human contact. It's about getting out and talking to them. Maybe I can't solve their problems, but I can make it better for a little while. And sometimes that's enough.
I didn't actually want 2 pizzas. On my walk home, I passed a homeless guy that has been in the neighborhood for nearly two years. And he's a really homeless guy. The kind of guy that doesn't have a sign, doesn't ask for anything, and is out there when its 20 degrees in february under a bunch of blankets. He also happens to be nice, I haven't had a conversation with him but he'll say good morning sometimes.
So when I passed by, I gave him the free pizza. He thanked me for it. I felt good about it.
Is it solving the problem that he is homeless? Absolutely not. Neither of thought 1 pizza would do that. But you know what, it was a friday night, someone did something nice for me, I decided to pass it along.
Should that be illegal? How can that be illegal? Imagine if a cop saw me do that and he gave me a ticket. He doesn't know that I can tell the difference between this guy that is on the corner every night for 2 years, and the other guy that is totally faking it and shows up on Saturdays only (when the weather is nice) and loudly asks for change, and I doubt is actually suffering from any of the things listed on the sign.
And how are the police going to tell the difference between me giving a pizza to a homeless guy I don't know, and me giving the pizza to a friend of mine that I texted "hey I got a free pizza, meet at the corner and I'll give it to you". The answer to that is plain old discrimination based on appearance, but no one will say that.
You are 100% right that random acts of kindness will not solve homelessness, but I simply can not see how making this illegal is workable or helpful. It just seems like a great way or nice people to have run-ins with police, and a law that basically can only work with discriminatory enforcement.
It's hard to kind of shut off the automatic empathy that pops up, but you have to realize these are people just like you that ended up with a serious short stick in life. You need to treat them like that, instead of infantilizing them.
Oh, these are people like you, that's why you can't help them. Just let that sink in...
I guess the conclusion of the parent is that everyone who has any needs must be herded and controlled by professionals and that all human solidarity just makes people lazy, greedy and out-of-control. That is the story of the modern neo-liberal order right?
-from a liberal who agrees with the meat of your opinion 100% but questions the polarized political content
What the GP is talking about seems more neo-liberal than neo-conservative (which are different, overlapping, right-of-center, "conservative" in the sense usually used in politics, movements.)
Many homeless I've spoken with on the subject consider homeless shelters unsafe places (more than once someone has told me that they are worse than being in prison).
Shelters don't provide adequate mental health services and due to curfews and wait times are not useable by people looking for employment. That eliminates them as useful services for the two largest homeless populations: those homeless due to mental illness, and those homeless due to being poor. Zero-tolerance drug policies eliminate shelters as an option for alcohol and drug addicts.
What's most telling is that the homeless by choice (train hoppers, gutter punks) won't go anywhere near shelters.
What does work are long-term mental health facilities, wet houses, and free abortions. The idiotic conservative rhetoric in the United States will keep these solutions from being implemented: "taxes!" "bunks for drunks!" "fetuses are people!"
My first reaction to such laws was that it was mainly upper middle class and above folks who would be the only ones supporting such bans. A NIMBY mentality gone too far. Clearly my first reaction was wrong. There are other reasons, as you elucidated, to be in favor of this ban.
My experience volunteering with them says that it's a mix of mental illness/behavioral issues and bad luck. While the precise mix varies by individual, so there may be 100% bad luck cases, I've found some mix to be more common.
I do agree that they need support. The local shelter was just telling us one of their success stories, where a formerly-homeless person had become a manager at a local Amazon warehouse with support from them.
I'm sure you're well-intentioned, and I'm sure the "smart, experienced people" you speak of are as well. But you have to understand what this thing you're advocating is doing. You're making it illegal for ad-hoc, spontaneous communities to fix their own problems. Essentially, saying that only "parental-figure" government can fix it, via only the approved means. Because, "smart, experienced people" have agreed that this is the best way to do it. You're breeding dependence on the state, and you're commoditizing guilt/empathy/whatever you want to call the thing that is driving free-people to help their fellow man. So then, people can "buy" this feel-good fix by throwing money at the state that promises to take care of the poor, whether it ends up working or not. Instead of actually getting their "fix" by doing the work themselves, or giving it to an organization they feel is doing it the best way.
Politicians use it as a selling point, people feel good giving their money away and getting a fix from it, and social-workers get a salary and probably their own little fix as well. Hint, have a look at this (first search-hit, there were others) if you don't believe the obviously catastrophic failure of the state attempting to help these poor individuals: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/09/the-war-on-...
Calling it a noble effort is just a curtain over the real issue. The state making yet another market illegal and establishing itself as the "approved" monopoly.
Second, you've developed one heck of a straw man. I don't know where people think this law says you "can't feed/help the homeless". It never says that. It makes it illegal to reward destructive behavior patterns. If you want to help or feed the homeless you may do so! Just donate a couple dollars to your local shelter, or spend a night doling out mac n' cheese. Of course, now you can no longer do these things on your own terms, but then again this isn't about you (as in the royal "you"). This is about helping the people that get no help otherwise.
We're trying to encourage the use of the existing community solutions here, not ban them. This "ad-hoc" method of random gift giving that you seem to approve of is actively harmful to both the community and those it aims to help.
And actually (insert meme here), this removes state action from the equation, believe it or not. Police everywhere spend ridiculous amounts of time dealing with unscrupulous panhandlers, jerks who want to mess with the homeless, etc. etc. Now this law is probably just as unenforceable as "don't feed homeless people poison on purpose", but hopefully it creates a culture shift where people are pre-disposed towards more beneficial methods of activism, and the police don't have to worry about ne'er do wells messing with defenseless people, or people taking advantage of other's generosity. Nobody is throwing money at the state, nobody is getting a "fix". In fact, this places more burden upon people to take it upon themselves to support their local organizations, and places a heavier burden on those organizations (because now they have more people to feed! which is an excellent problem to have, because now we have people seeking real help, instead of just trying to make it through the day!).
I appreciate your gracious hints, but I highly recommend you see the problem for yourself instead of relying on knee jerk reactions and the top google result.
The distinction is not between state-owned solutions vs. private solutions, the disctinction is between organized and structured solutions, vs. random hand-outs on the street.
The areas where organizations dedicated to help the homeless are located are almost never, to even a first approximation, "safe areas". They are quite often in nearly the worst parts of the city they are in to start with, and often made less safe by the congregation of the homeless there.
> They're more likely to sleep in an alley somewhere instead of, at worst, gathering near a shelter, or at best, getting a bed in a shelter where they are safest and most secure.
Many homeless avoid shelters because their experience is that crimes against their person and meagre property are more common in shelters than otherwise. Its probably reasonable to say that in shelters there is less danger from the elements, but it is far less clear that they are "safest and most secure" considering the totality of the circumstances.
1) Guarantee all people access to cheap, government provided dormitory style living, with a door that locks, a kitchen and basic food staples, and security screening of fellow residents. There would be different forms of permanent living for the mentally ill, drug addicts, recovering addicts, or able body people who have fallen on hard times. It would seem reasonable to require the sane and able bodied to do 20 hours of very basic work (picking up trash, watching security cameras, etc.) in return for the living. [this line has been edited, see footnote]
2) Re-enact and enforce vagrancy laws. No sleeping in the street, no panhandling, no begging, no telling manipulative sob stories on the subway.
3) Make the support for 1) the responsibility of the community they are from. The problem right now is any community that wishes to be generous to the homeless becomes a homeless magnet. This creates an incentive for cities not to be charitable, and to not take care of their own. The cities that are generous then get mocked for their homeless problem. Instead, if San Francisco police arrest a vagrant, they should make an effort to find out where his closest family from, or where his last established residency or hometown is, and then give him a one-way bus ticket back to that town.
Unfortunately, liberals are generally against #2, conservatives are against #1, no one even talks about #3 and so nothing gets done and the problem, which could be so easily solved given our resources, persists on and on.
(a) Edit/footnote: obviously many homeless people have drug and mental health problems that would make dorm living and performing a government job infeasible. There also needs to be funded supportive housing and programs for those cases. Also, there needs to be different levels of dorm living so those trying to escape drug addiction are not around those who are still using. The dorm living would need rules and management to prevent the problems that plague homeless shelter.
2) Make being homeless illegal.
3) Eliminate freedom of travel for the homeless.
I think I prefer the status quo to your version of a solution.
IANAE, but I don't think that's how slavery worked.
What? You are being spitefully obtuse. With slavery, the entire problem is you cannot leave your job, you are owned, and at the mercy of your owner. With my first bullet point, I am simply creating an option that does not currently exist.
#2 is the more controversial point. My gut and personal preferences say that the long-term utility gain to the general public plus the homeless person of moving them into dorm living exceeds the short-term utility loss to the homeless person of not being allowed to sleep on the street, and being forced to move into the dorm living (provided the dorm living is actually clean and maintained, and is not like awful shelter living).
What harm does homelessness cause the general public? Does it negatively impact their everyday life?
>>Guarantee all people access to cheap, government provided dormitory style living, with a kitchen and basic food staples, in return for 20 hours of very basic work (picking up trash, watching security cameras, etc.).
This is what slavery is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
They're not equal at all.
Now, there is another factor that perhaps you could have been clearer about that would help support your case. You could argue that there are dynamics in society that drive people into #1 without having any real choice. That's a different problem, but still not at the level of what slavery was.
e.g., the criminal system becomes easier and easier to fall into everyday and extremely hard to get out of.
You could argue that suggestions 2) and 3) are an intentional plan to restrict people to a single choice.
Under the proposed homeless people have two choices: 1) Live in the provided housing and work 20hrs a week for no pay. 2) Go to jail and possibly be forced to work anyway.
1) + 2)
edit: shkkmo and VBprogrammer are right. 1) = dormitories w/mandatory unpaid labor; 2) = illegal to be homeless; 3) = restrictions on migration.
What was that person thinking, offering me a voluntary position I can leave when I wish. The nerve of some people.
In his version, you get arrested for begging, shipped back to your home town, perhaps the desolate place you left in hope of finding a job before falling on hard times, or perhaps back to a place where your abusive father or partner can find you again.
And you get to pick up litter off the street or whatever menial job is available, not in exchange for money like a normal person, but in exchange for a room and basic food. Until you can somehow find a way to move into an approved place of living.
Not to mention that even in the nice comfortable version of reality he pretends could possibly exist the problems of those homeless people won't simply disappear. Drug addiction, alcohol problems and mental issues will still be rife. The utopian clean and well maintained dorms will soon be more akin to prisons with guards trying to limit the contraband taken in. Obviously that will fail, if the modern prison system is anything to go by.
The issue with the homeless isn't that the jobs don't pay enough to keep them off the streets, it's that they lack the mental faculties to hold onto even the most basic of jobs. Alternatively they're just exploiting suckers for easy money- a reality that many feel-good white evangelists like to pretend isn't a significant reality.
There's a reason why ex-military are disproportionately homeless. These aren't lazy people or people who don't know the meaning of hard work. These are people who have sometimes serious mental health issues (e.g. PTSD, depression, alcohol addiction, etc) which make holding a job difficult or impossible.
20 hours of work might be difficult for many. Also who is going to live in a dorm with addicts, people with other assorted mental health issues, and people with various criminal records? There's a reason a lot of homeless people avoid "shelters," those places are sometimes MORE dangerous than prison (wanna get stabbed? Because going to a homeless shelter is a good way to get stabbed).
Honestly there isn't a "one size fits all" solution to homelessness. All homeless people are homeless for different reasons. All we as a society can do is start dealing with SOME of those problems one at a time.
If you do want to do the dorm thing then security has to be priority number one. For homeless people the streets can actually be safer than living with some of their peers.
While perfectly healthy people choosing eking out a meager living of booze or drugs by panhandling on the subway is irritating, the real issue is that many homeless are not homeless by choice, but because they have mental illness that inhibits their ability to work or associate with people.
Any solution aimed at punishing the voluntary homeless while ignoring the mentally ill is missing the point.
Young, wealthy, privileged people like the majority of the audience of this site have no concept of how easy it is to fall through the cracks and lose everything.
And the problem of poverty and homelessness is only going to grow. The majority of Generation X has NO Savings for retirement [1] and what do you think will happen to them?
And in fact one of the cities having an epic and fairly invisible homelessness problem is San Francisco [2].
There may be a very small minority of people who choose to be unhoused; but they are generally not the problem.
1. http://rall.com/2014/10/13/syndicated-column-millions-of-gen...
Source: http://www.sfgov3.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=4...
3) How do you propose to enforce that they use the one-way bus ticket? How do you keep them from coming back?
I think this problem may be a bit harder to solve than you think.
Well, given my druthers I'd ban those too.
Cities are very dense and, in the scheme of human existence, unnatural places. It takes effort and rules to make tens of thousands of humans occupy the same space and stay sane. That is why cities have the ability to pass ordinances to restrict all sorts of activity in public spaces. There is a right to freedom of assembly, but that does not mean you can assemble a crowd in the streets or sidewalks at any time, you need a permit. There is freedom of speech, but there are ordinances against playing blaring music or disturbing the peace. There are laws against unsolicited phone calls and spamming. There are ordinances banning neon signs on some streets, to prevent a race to the bottom where stores compete for the most obnoxious store frontage. Etc. etc. I view any form of asking of money to strangers on city streets to be a form of spamming. It is perfectly within the rights of a city to ban it.
I think that this kind of statement must be qualified very carefully. I believe (though I don't know) that cities are unnatural in the sense that they don't arise in nature among other animals than humans; but I'd be reluctant to call them unnatural for humans, in the sense that it seems to me that a large part of what makes us human is the ability to live together and function (well or poorly!) in large groups.
Depends on what you consider a city. Ants, bees, termites, naked mole rats all live in densely populated 'buildings', with specialized division of labor between their inhabitants. Also, bat, bird or seal colonies can get incredibly dense.
I think that there is no better way to learn interesting facts than to make confident assertions on the Internet. :-)
But the current mainstream thinking of relativism, where values are inverted, also thinks learning is bad (which is why we don't do it in schools and universities anymore), and so earnest discussions are discouraged and deemed offensive (but 5 minute shout matches on the news are still fair game).
Sorry if that seemed rude or anything.
EDIT: example of this at work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8514048
edit: https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/73/Sao_Paulo_A_City_Witho...
I would have no problems with, and likely endorse, a private city banning many forms of public solicitation. It gets a lot more complicated when we are talking about public land.
But only if we don't implement 2) and 3) because those will force people to have to choose to participate in 1) and not everybody can.
1) Universal basic income. You get paid like $10,000 no matter what.
2) Eliminate minimum wage. Anyone is free to earn extra if they so desire.
3) Outlaw rent control. Now you have more abundant housing.
That wouldn't take care of all of it, but it would sure help.
There's multiple interactions implicit there. That's fine, just noting it - I agree that would be a consequence.
Also without rent control, you will suddenly find cities suddenly very empty of people able to do things like get you your coffee. And shipping them in every day from 100 miles away is a dystopian nightmare.
Luxury apartments are lucrative, sure, but if you can fit more rooms into a given space you can often make even more money. For example if you could have 1 apartment and charge $3000, or 2 apartments and charge $1700, the 2 apartments are a better deal.
Citing Hong Kong struck me as odd. It's probably better being homeless in certain states. I think most people have seen the following, or similar, set of pictures about Hong Kong micro-apartments:
http://inhabitat.com/exhibit-on-the-micro-apartments-of-hong...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cage_home
Real urban planning has low income housing distributed throughout the city. If not, the wage slaves have to be shipped in. Some form of rent control/social housing incentives have to be in place. Otherwise you get situations in the states where welfare mothers have to bus 3 hours each way to get to their minimum wage job.
One issue: how do you disburse the income? What happens if someone blows it all on drugs, and then is out? We're sort of back where we started. Could we then just let the person starve or whatever, and say, "well you had your chance."? Push comes to shove, I don't think I could.
My solution: Government provided withdrawal systems (ATMs or something like that), that provide $27/day (to use your number). Most people who unwisely spent their $27 could manage to wait another day and then get food.
Problem: How do you pay for all this?
Solution: A low-percentage wealth (aka capital) tax. It's a redistribution of wealth, but if you outearn/outinvest the rate, then you can accumulate wealth. Could then do away with estate taxes. Ideally I'd cap the Basic Income Guarantee as a percentage of this wealth tax, evenly distributed, and not a fixed number. As the society gets richer/poorer so does the distribution.
Then, just add in single payer health insurance, and remove minimum wage, social security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, and all sorts of other systems and we have my socialist/libertarian paradise. : )
However, I don't think your first solution solves your first problem. I don't have a good solution for it either, though.
I like your second solution, but I would prefer a progressive capital gains tax + a carbon tax. Basically you only get taxed on your wealth if you earn about a certain yearly amount.
If someone is persistently unable to meet their needs with access to a basic income, they need a different kind of help. Hopefully we could provide that help. We're not back where we started - we've learned things, and we've helped the others, and can now focus on solving this different problem.
The biggest problem preventing more housing being built now isn't rent control, it's zoning usage and density laws. Most of the time low-density zoning is enforced for the benefit of existing house owners to artificially inflate the value of their properties. This (and Proposition 13, a law that's supposed to provide relief for property tax rate increases but ended up being a huge disincentive to sell real estate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%2819...) are the major factors keeping housing supply from increasing to meet market demand in California. Rent control is wrong, but it's not the biggest problem.
As a prelude, remember that your proposed system basically exists. Project housing isn't a novel idea. The homeless are by and large the folks that can't or don't want to get themselves into project housing.
In a rather odd turn of events, when I was 19, I ended up staying in a homeless shelter for a week. It was an incredibly interesting experience. For most of a week I stayed there, ate in soup kitchens and had a rather interesting look from the inside.
For the most part, in the shelter I was in, I saw two big categories of folks that were there:
- Folks that were crazy. This included long term drug and alcohol addicts. They were probably a slight majority. The type and severity of crazy varied, but you got the sense that the goal with those types of folks was helping them to the extent possible, but in most cases, they were often going to need assistance for the remainder of their lives.
- Folks that were pretty darn normal, but had two things go particularly bad in their lives at once. This group was pretty surprising for someone from a middle class background. These people seemed totally normal to me. There was one combination of events that was so common that I saw it several times -- people who'd lost their jobs and their wives (it was a men's shelter) had kicked them out at the same time. Some of these people had graduate degrees, reasonably respectable middle class careers, and so on ... but for one reason or another all at once they had no money and nowhere to live.
Neither of those cases would be especially well addressed by your proposal. I'm skeptical that it would do anything other than make rich people feel better about complaining about the homeless, but really, that sounds like what it's designed for.
Really, wouldn't option #1 help the normal, hard-luck people quite a bit? It would give you a permanent bed, and address to get mail, etc. while you applied for jobs and got back on your feet? It seems like an immensely superior option to the status quo.
As for the crazy people, I agree, which is why I edited my answer to make it clear that there should be government provided permanent living arrangements that are supportive for the types of problems people have. The normal hard luck people should not have to live in dorms with crazy people and drug addicts.
"... But getting back to low-cost housing, I think I might have solved this problem. I know just the place to build housing for the homeless: golf courses. It’s perfect. Plenty of good land in nice neighborhoods; land that is currently being squandered on a mindless activity engaged in by white, well-to-do business criminals who use the game to get together so they can make deals to carve this country up a little finer among themselves..."
[1]: http://www.georgecarlinrip.com/2014/01/golf-courses-for-home...
Happens often here. Grab a chair.
What exactly, in this economy, should I tell a homeless person who is hungry? "Get a job"?
To address your actual point, something helpful might be to direct them to a local shelter. (And yup, they're shitty places to be, and that's another problem that needs solving.)
[0] And possibly other places, but I'm not familiar enough to say.
Say I am untrained in any rescue or medical procedures. I witness a car collision, and a rider was ejected from a vehicle and lying next to it. I proceed to move them due to perceived fire hazard, however they in fact have a broken neck and die due to my moving them before stabilizing the neck. If it could be reasonably argued [0] that the person would have lived with proper intervention had I not intervened, why should I not be liable for that?
In fact, without a Good Samaritan law in effect, I am potentially liable for the rider's death. I can be successfully sued by the survivors. The whole point of Good Samaritan laws is to reduce or eliminate this liability to me in exactly these scenarios.
Now, if I do nothing, I am likely to only be liable if there is a duty to rescue [1].
[0] As in, well enough to win a criminal or civil case.
Saying this doesn't invalidate some of the reasons why it might be a bad idea (although many of those reasons seem like...a stretch), but then again the first amendment allows you to say (and, I claim do) some stupid stuff.
I think giving money to panhandlers is dumb but I do it. It's clear to me that when I pull out a couple of bucks I'm expressing my concern for that person, for the social issues that may have helped them end up there (or they may simply have had their own problems, or own bad luck) and my feelings about myself as a person, which may be noble, base or guilty.
I also, when I think of it, donate to charities that help the homeless (it's a problem here in Palo Alto, though less than it used to be now the city council fell prey to the real estate lobby and shoved all the homeless shelters aside). I know a wholesale approach is generally more sensible. But sometimes a little "retail therapy" of this sort is valuable too.
"that law has me, and plenty others in the greater Houston area, really ticked off. There were several very active (although small and not well funded) charities that were recently shut down due to this nonsense. Church groups that would fix food in their kitchens and take it to the homeless were stopped because they didn't have a commercial kitchen and all the permits that came with it; other groups would get together in their homes and cook meals, and got shut down for the same reasons. It's absolutely ridiculous to turn good samaritans in to criminals, but that's exactly what we do every time a new law is created as a knee jerk reaction to some recent event. How about we LEAVE PEOPLE ALONE? sorry /endrant"
We weren't the only "housing challenged" residents of this motel. By the late night activity in the hallway and the parking lot, most seemed to have some kind of severe addiction problem, though there were a couple illegal immigrants who had secured a room through a friend while they worked for remittance money. On more than one occasion, drunk/high people tried to force entry into our room later at night. My father slept by the door with a hammer after the second time.
Despite this, I'm not an authority on homelessness, but I know it sucks. For people like us, without severe mental, substance or family problems, wanting the make the sucking part stop is what kept us working on getting out of the situation. So I understand the ideas behind some of these notions around "not encouraging" people to be homeless. Having lived in those kinds of conditions before and not minded them terribly, to be perfectly honest, I've had moments where I've thought "if I could have a room and food, without working at all, I wouldn't bother looking for a job". So I fundamentally get where that's coming from.
However, I also have several people in my family with severe psychological and addiction issues, and recognizing these same issues in the homeless I see out on the street every day, I understand that "getting out of the suckiness of homelessness" is not a major driver for them. Their hierarchy of needs is often screwed up and insomuch as they are able to satisfy that hierarchy, getting shelter (and even food) is often not a major priority for them. So no amount of having food kitchens or not having them is going to be a major decision point for them to suddenly come off their additions, become sane, and become productive members of society. However, I do think that people should be able to eat a safe meal if they need it.
Now that I'm long out of that situation, educated and affluent, I also suffer from NIMBYism. I worked very hard and have spent significant amounts of time and money to live in an area where I don't really have to worry about the kinds of negative environmental factors and activities that come with handling large homeless populations. I don't want a food kitchen anywhere near where I live. Not because I don't believe in feeding the homeless, people need to eat today not after a six month job training program, but because for people who aren't working their way out of homelessness, there are large numbers of negative issues that homeless people bring along with them and it contributes to an environment I don't want to be in.
So this is a very tough issue. However, just offering services isn't really a good answer either. When I spent some time in Portland, I was struck by the number and permanence of the homeless population there. It's not a particularly great outdoor environment, but the large number of free services in the downtown area have created a more or less stable population of self-supporting homeless. The principle complaint residents I've spoken to have is that it's great these services exist, but once they've been served, what's next?
I've observed poor coordination among homeless service organizations. You go here for food, here for the shelter, here for blankets, here for a job, if you're extremely lucky you might be getting medical/psychological/addiction care on a sporadic basis.
But what really needs to happen is a centralized "get off the streets" center. If a homeless person wants any services, they have to check in there and they must participate in all of the appropriate services proscribed to them. I'm also an advocate that they should immediately be working in return for the services. Every city has loads of work that needs doing, picking up litter, emptying public trash bins, park beautification, cleaning up graffiti, repainting bridges, filling in potholes, etc. In exchange a person who's "in the program" should get 3 hot meals a day, a small dorm room with a door they can lock, free psych/rehab/basic medical clinic treatment. They should be scored on participation, and if they do well, move on to more advanced programs like finding rent-controlled/shared housing, real jobs that pay money, mass-transit subsidies etc.
A friend of mine had a horrible experience and ended up in a battered women's shelter with 3 kids. The program they put her on was better than any homeless program I've seen. Within weeks, she had a job, psych counseling for her and her kids, and in a couple months had moved out of the shelter and was splitting a town home with another woman from the program at hugely subsidized rent (based on how much she made at her job). Within a year they had found her a two bedroom apartment just for her family. This was for a person who had money in her bank account, work history and some job skills, and a sizable social network who helped her out during her ordeal with food, money and places to stay.
It wasn't perfect, but I was surprised at how much better it was for her than for the homeless who don't really have anything at all.
There's a large problem with the "filling in potholes" part. Road construction is a skilled trade (no, it's not just digging ditches). I've heard this "ditch-digging" argument on HN before (the other commenter wanted welfare recipients to dig a ditch on the Mexican border to keep illegal immigrants out...). Using public funds to effectively put tradesmen (some of whom are unionized) out of work to provide busywork to welfare recipients is not a good idea from a free-market point of view.
well they wouldn't exactly be welfare recipients if they're working
As you might imagine, having homeless people standing around outside harassing your customers is not great for business.
Oh yeah sure, they're homeless because they are asking for food, that's their own fault for staying homeless and not the fault of the society. This is very convenient.
Or maybe they just go to food sharing programs because they are hungry and that's their only option ? Who knows...