@lifeflame I can tell you from my own intimate daily contact with large numbers of panhandlers, that the majority do it because they have a disability[1], are trapped on welfare[2] as a result, and simply don’t have enough money to survive[3].
[1] By disability, I mean either physical disability, mental illness, or substance addiction. These three things can’t really be separated. Nearly every panhandlers I have ever met or known suffers from post-trauma. Sometimes the trauma occurs before they end up on the street, and sometimes after. More usually, they have post-trauma before, and their subsequent experiences on the street (often including rape, violence, and brutal, sadistic oppression by police and private security) make the damage much, much worse. Once on the street, a substance addiction is almost a guarantee[4]. This is why current thinking is that homelessness must be prevented rather than cured. Our city, for example, now operates a “rent bank” where people can request up to three months worth of rent arears once every two years; the money this costs the city is a pittance beside the astronomical cost of maintaining a person’s homelessness. The longer a person stays on the street, the harder and more costly it becomes to get them off the street[5].
[2] We have a disability program here, which, while it’s still well under minimum wage, which is itself well under the poverty line, is still almost double what people receive on welfare. The problem is that the government makes it as difficult as possible to get a disability pension. The unofficial policy is that they reject all applicants, forcing them to go through a lengthy and complicated appeal process to discourage as many as possible. Since people with serious mental illnesses on the street lack the legal, medical, and social supports necessary to follow through on an appeal process which can take as long as two years, they end up trapped on the street for years at a time, collecting welfare (or less).
[3] To give you some idea of the scales involved, welfare pays about $580 a month, disability pays about $1000 a month, and minimum wage pays about $1400 a month. A one-bedroom apartment in Toronto will run you an average of about $1100. A room in a run-down transient hotel or rooming house will cost you anywhere from $450–600. If you are on the street and sleeping at a homeless shelter, the city is already paying the shelter $45 per day to feed and shelter you, which means you don’t even receive welfare; instead, you’re given about $120 per month for “personal needs.” All of this means that panhandling is a virtual necessity if a person has no other resources. The idea that “they’ll spend it all on drugs and alcohol” is at best incorrect class prejudice, and at worst a deliberate, sadistic lie designed to inflict harm on the weakest and most oppressed people in our entire society.
[4] In order to survive on the street, particularly as a youth, you need to belong to what’s called a “street family.” This is an affinity group of individuals who watch each other’s backs, engage in mutual aid, and provide emotional and material support to each other. If a single person in this street family has a substance addiction, all will have eventually have it. It’s part of the culture. And since life on the street is harsh, brutal, and degrading (largely as a result of the kind of class-hatred seen in some of the responses given to this question), substance addiction occurs as a kind of unconscious self-medication. Even animals have an instinct for self-medication when they are sick and/or traumatized. Humans under similar conditions react the same way. And there are predators ready to offer them the most medically and psychologically addictive substances known to science.
The waiting list for addictions treatment is more than two years long in Ontario. And none of them will accept you if you have a criminal record with weapons or violence on it.
[5] In New York, the Republican Party hired a consultant to investigate the most efficient and least expensive way to deal with homelessness. He followed ten homeless men around for a year, carefully noting which and how much of each resource they were currently using. His final report noted that some of these men were consuming in excess of a shocking $300,000 per year worth of health care alone — not including the extra cost to policing and emergency shelter. He noted that it would literally be cheaper to build each one of these men his own house and staff it 24/7 with private nurses than to keep them homeless. This consultant now travels around North America, giving presentations to various levels of government on his findings.
As you can see, these issues are all extremely complex. The kind of people who shout “GET A JOB!” at panhandlers are not given to listening to this sort of information. I’d be interested to know how many people here looked at this wall of text, glazed over, and said TL;DR. Whether you agree with what I’ve written or not, click “Great Answer” if you’ve actually read this far.
Composing members:
0
Composing members:
0
