How to Handle Aggressive Panhandling
Or How to be a Minimally Decent Human Being to Your Homeless Comrades
Disclaimer: Homelessness is a socioeconomic condition defined by not having reliable access to shelter and the basic comforts of a home. The homeless are people who are experiencing homelessness. These homeless peoples are, in fact, people, with the same human emotions, basic value and worth, equivalent to any other person (including you, yes you).
Orlando is not a city that has dealt with homelessness well; neither in terms of efficiency, or basic human courtesy. It most certainly has not done the latter, because our civic society can only view the problem through a capitalist lens. That sort of optics magnifies the importance of efficiency, while minimizing any thought of the latter to the barest of charity (ie. “which is really a thing a church group or, I dunno, something, should do”). Unfortunately for the ordained leaders of Orlando’s civic society, the rest of society keeps confusing the efficient management of the homeless population with some sort of community deserving of social, political, and legal rights, as if they were people. This approach has made efficiency all but impossible!
Witness the musings on the subject by Orlando Sentinel contact reporter, Kate Santich, in a piece aptly entitled “Downtown Orlando panhandling soaring, leaders say”. This article is almost, well let’s be honest, it is entirely, a rundown of the failed ordinances to somehow get poorer people to stop asking richer people for money, as well as the plaintive wailing of the “downtown business community,” to add a human touch to an otherwise abstract problem. Witness the heartrending struggle of besieged city commissioner Jim Gray:
“As someone who has spent their entire professional career downtown — I’ve spent 30 years [working] downtown, and I’ve been in five different office buildings — I have not seen the aggressive panhandling as bad as it is today,” Gray said. “It’s the nuisance factor.”
This author, for one, is sure this isn’t a quote that Mr. Gray has recycled almost every day for the last 29 years or so. It may even be true! Yes, I am in fact suggesting that letting our most callous and venal people make our most important socioeconomic decisions for the last few decades might not have been the best possible course of action!
Before we proceed into the tutorial segment of this article, it would be worthwhile to establish a framework for this issue in Orlando, and other communities throughout the US. There are two general poles here that correspond to basic Marxist economic classes: on the one hand there is the “civic leaders and business community” (ie. the bourgeois, the owners, the bosses, their lackeys) and the homeless (ie. a subset of the proletariat, the people who work for a wage, me and almost certainly you). Especially due to the focus of tourism in central Florida, the former really does not want homeless people to be anywhere near places where wealthy enough people spend money.
This fear is why the city of Orlando arrested a couple dozen activists from Food Not Bombs for sharing food with homeless people in 2011 despite the negative publicity locally, nationally, and internationally. The bourgeois city leaders don’t have any issue with charity per se, unless it happens to be in a popular park in the middle of the trendy part of downtown. This is precisely why all the city sanctioned shelters and soup kitchens, not to mention things that are actually toxic, like toxic waste dumps, are in impoverished black neighborhoods. Capitalism is inherently a very hierarchical social system, and we needed racism to justify all the slavery and genocide needed to accumulate the capital.
Furthermore, note that racism and other forms of class-unconsciousness are fragile things. The immediate concern may be business, as it always is under capitalism, but there is a more existential threat to capital here as well. There is an amazing degree of unconscious effort that goes into maintaining a sense of validation and self-justification among the higher strata of the elite. This is precisely why the most successful business people are sociopaths, as they are unburdened by the guilt of normal human beings. It is very easy for capitalists and “civic leaders” to mentally compartmentalize, and ultimately ignore, issues like homelessness, when they are physically compartmentalized as well.
So, now that we have a useful framework established, let’s delve into the praxis (ie. a fancy MARXIST word for “practice”…do not email me about this simplification, nerds) of how to be a minimally decent human being when interacting with our homeless comrades.
I. Do THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what this person is telling you to do
From the aforementioned Orlando Sentinel article by Kate Santich, comes this fount of terrible advice…
Shelley Lauten, CEO of the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness, said her agency is also working with the city on an education campaign for residents, hoping to drive home the message that giving panhandlers money doesn’t solve their problems and only encourages more panhandling.
“I know the urge to give, and it’s well-intentioned,” Lauten said. “I can leave my [downtown] office and in three blocks be asked for money a half-dozen times. … But what we want is for people who are truly homeless — and not all panhandlers are — to get connected to long-term help.”
Let’s dissect this a bit since there are several bad ideas packed into a relatively small space here. First, “long term help” is virtually non-existent, as helping the “truly homeless” is not a concern of capital. Given that we live under capitalism, and not some sort of “social” -ism, that’s a problem for the homeless. Since the people actually running society want nothing to do with that large subset of society who can’t afford basic housing, it’s farmed out to groups whose job it is to do something about the homeless. At worst it is a compassion industry, that sickening part of the non-profit industrial complex, and at best it’s a threadbare social safety net barely held together by the compassion of a few generous, kindhearted people.
Next bad idea — means testing. Note how Lauten makes a distinction between the “truly homeless” and those who are not. Means testing is a staple neoliberal idea, very popular in American circles. It rests on the basic intuition that there is a “non-deserving” poor and a “deserving” poor. It’s a tempting idea, because we all know some jerk who despite every advantage and kindness is still a terrible orange asshole who lives in a white house and…DO YOU GET THE JOKE? There was a joke there. Anyway, people like Lauten, the staff of the Atlantic, and every establishment Democrat, are really into the dehumanizing idea that you should take out a ruler and work up a mathematical model where people are variables. Beyond it’s dehumanizing qualities, it’s a bad idea because it assumes that people are poor largely because of their own qualities and not because they live in a system where basic sustenance requires utility to business interests.
However, all of this is dancing around the main issue, which is the main focus of Lauten’s message, ‘do not give money to the poors, it does not helps the poors’. Another appealing message, in part because it’s partially true. A dollar or two to someone on the street won’t solve the problem of homelessness. Nor will it fundamentally change the life of the person receiving it. So why do it? Doesn’t it just make people dependent on charity?
People who are homeless and poor are dependent on charity, but that is all they have. Not giving a homeless person a dollar or a sandwich isn’t going to “help” them become self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency is itself a great big evillie. No one is a closed system, an island. You constantly receive help from the government, school, religious organizations, cults; from your friends, relatives, social relations, family, hell your mom gave you life for fuck’s sake (your dad helped…a little).
I don’t mean to say that to be a good comrade to the homeless you should go out and give the homeless all your money. There are multiple reasons for this, not the least of which would be that you would then be homeless, unless you’re Jeff Bezos, in which case no one would be homeless . As of this writing Jeff Bezos currently is “worth” $143.1 billion, the overwhelming majority of which should really belong to all the people who actually produced that wealth. Exploitative parasites and hoarders of his stripe are why there is so many homeless people as they are.
Another interesting note in Lauten’s quote, is another reason why you should give money to the homeless. Note how she mentions her downtown office. Her concern towards the homeless may have genuine moral sentiment, but regardless, the general focus of these kind of “education campaigns” are, again, focused on wealthy areas where the homeless are. If the homeless are panhandling in Parramore or Pine Hills, these campaigns would not exist.
Which makes it especially important that the homeless be encouraged to congregate downtown. It may not alter the fundamental power relationship that causes homelessness in the first place, but it does force the ruling classes and their wealthy backers to confront the human costs of their policies. The danger, discomfort, and psychological impact of these conditions are precisely why the rich sequester themselves in gated communities, send their children to private schools, and otherwise retreat from larger civic society. Part of wresting power from the bourgeois will be requiring them to live in our world, whether they want to or not.
II. Treat the Homeless Like People, Because They Are People
This is not a point anyone should have to make, and certainly not as many times as I have, but there is a concerted effort to dehumanize the homeless. It is not a difficult thing to do, because it allows us to shrug off what should otherwise be a difficult moral weight and avoid a major civic problem. That we have such great wealth and yet such a vast population of homeless and impoverished people is a dramatic failure of society. If the fault can be offloaded onto the homeless, then we either don’t have to care or can simply approach the problem as one where educating the homeless to be “responsible people” is all that we can do.
Past civilizations did not have the same problem of chronic homelessness that is seen in advanced capitalist economies. This is because past civilizations did not have such formal and extensive commercialization of land. There are movements such as the Levellers in 17th century Britain, who mobilized against the commercialization of land, a generally foreign concept in a proto-capitalist society. This is not to say that private land ownership didn’t exist, but under feudal and earlier systems, the average individual was allowed to live on private land, typically in exchange for productive labor. This is not like the present where there exists an entirely new and expansive class of landlords, real estate agents, speculators, etc. who have created a far more vast and exclusionary market for land and shelter.
Homelessness is a result of this process. It is not a lack of skills, criminal tendencies, drug abuse, or any of the other supposed properties of the homeless which make them homeless, but rather conditions that are accrued from having to live in a system that is fundamentally unconcerned with human beings. In interacting with homeless people, this needs to be front of mind, that homeless people are people who are doing the best they can to live in an unjust world.
So treat a homeless person as you would anyone else. A lot of this is really just basic social interaction and common courtesy: listen, make eye contact, be sympathetic, and reasonable. Help out as you can, if you can, and within reason. There is often a tendency for the homeless to try to explain that they aren’t “those homeless” (ie. the unworthy) or to come up with an elaborate story to explain why they’re asking you for money. There is nothing wrong with interrupting and letting them know they don’t have to explain, but it might also be worthwhile to just listen. There might be a personal benefit for a person to frame their condition in such a way, in any case the basic point stands, treat a homeless person as the person they are.
III. Advocate and Support Radical Solutions to Homelessness
No amount of charity, education, or money will solve the issue of homelessness. Which is a problem, because these are the only tools that our capitalist society uses when it bothers to use anything other than force in regards to the issue of homelessness. The problems are fundamental ones, and inherent to capitalism. Therefore the solution to homelessness can be nothing short than a radical transformation of our society beyond capitalism.
That, however, will likely take a long time to achieve. This is not reason enough to abandon that goal, but there also needs to be more immediate action taken to provide substantive relief to our homeless comrades. The obvious solution is affordable housing and no-strings-attached programs for housing the homeless. These programs have proven to be effective where they have been implemented.
This is all possible without substantial costs to the working class. The argument that this will “hurt businesses” is nonsense. For instance, the “head tax” proposed by Seattle city council woman Kshama Sawant, and members of the Democratic Socialists of America as well as Socialist Alternative could have easily been paid by Jeff Bezos himself, and he would still be the wealthiest man in the world. The problem is not that society cannot afford to end homelessness, it’s that society cannot afford to do so while a few hoard immense wealth.
Additionally, effort needs to be made to curb, and eventually destroy, the scourge of landlords and the real estate industry. Their focus on making a profit from renting and selling property ensures that the focus will be on rising home prices and investment properties, rather than actually housing people. When these landlords even bother to provide affordable, usually heavily government subsidized, housing, it can be assured that they will cut every corner to ensure a profit.
Homelessness is not an intractable problem in a logistic or technical sense, it is only a problem in political sense. It is a problem of power, and the only way we can solve it is to take power from the ruling elite. Only then will we be able to end homelessness, and be true comrades to those on the streets.
