Signs of the Times
You have probably seen them: the signs on MUNI buses and Yellow Cabs showing tourists and foxy locals, enjoying the City or hip urban lifestyles, including giving money to panhandlers. Such well-meaning alms, the signs harshly conclude, facilitate drug deaths, sexual diseases, and the demise of neighborhood businesses — things well-meaning people generally frown upon. Through this slippery slope of cause and effect, a painful realization is reached: “Giving to panhandlers doesn’t help, it hurts.”
The source of this message is “We Want Change,” a “campaign” consisting of a website and signage, and not much else. It was established by the Hotel Council of San Francisco, which represents 55 hotels in the city, and local agency Ad Lib Creative.
According to the Hotel Council, panhandling is an epidemic that dramatically harms San Francisco’s tourism industry, and therefore needs to be curbed. The website also claims that giving money to panhandlers makes people unwitting enablers, for the donated cash is spent largely on drugs — and drugged-out beggars proceed to OD or have unprotected sex. Therefore, the Council’s and the panhandlers’ interests are supposedly one and the same: to make San Francisco safe for business and to keep panhandlers from hurting themselves, we have to stop giving them money.
Also advocating this quantum jump of logic is Gavin “Spare any votes?” Newsom, mayoral candidate and caregiver extraordinaire (his signature measure Care not Cash received generous donations from the Hotel Council). Earlier this year, Newsom proposed an anti-panhandling initiative for the November ballot, which would rewrite existing codes against asking for money at ATM’s, ban “aggressive panhandling” — physical contact, verbal threats, following people — and add new “time and place” restrictions, including no begging on median strips, in parking lots, and near schools and bus stops.
Newsom points to old and new polls which show that a majority of San Franciscans support a tougher law-and-order approach to panhandling — a desire he likes to exaggerate when he invokes insecure citizens confronted in the parking lot by beggars with golf clubs. (If you fancy beggars to be armed with golf clubs, clearly you’re spending too much time in Pacific Heights.) Of course, panhandling is an issue for San Franciscans, and it is legitimate for Newsom to consider legal steps to restrict it. Much like the caring folks at the Hotel Council, he claims to be driven mostly by compassion. “I feel very strongly about this,” says Newsom. “I can’t watch people suffer and die.” Being intimate with the underdogs of the City, Newsom knows of their pain and their stories. He talks about “Joe”, a 31-year-old panhandler and heroin addict, who recently died. “I’m sure the person who gave Joe his last dollar felt pretty good about it. But maybe our actions have consequences we don’t intend.”
I should note here which type of panhandler bugs me the most personally: the ones who try to make you feel guilty to get something out of you.
Much like his Proposition N, Newsom’s compassion for panhandlers is based on faulty assumption and sloppy research. While handouts make it easier for an addict to buy drugs, “Joe” would have gotten his fix with or without panhandled cash. Addicts don’t care how they get their dope, and they don’t stop doing drugs when they run out of money. Consequently, even a total ban on panhandling would hardly affect drug use and deaths in San Francisco. The fact is no one really knows how many panhandlers are spending their money on drugs. The Hotel Council’s ‘we want change’ website duly notes that “homeless and panhandling populations are not the same,” and that only “a small percentage of homeless people panhandle.” Yet the next item on the “fact” page, completely out of context, is a list of homeless drug use statistics, to make a case against panhandling!
The campaign’s $65,000 budget obviously did not entail researching coherent facts. Homeless people and panhandlers are commonly lumped together as a bunch of semi-criminal drug addicts. It’s the same vicious simplification that made Propsition N a success with voters (if nowhere else). In the run-up to the ballot measure last November, the Chronicle went out of its way to depict GA recipients exclusively as junkies and freeloaders. Only after Judge Quidachay declared the measure illegal did the paper suddenly manage to find welfare recipients spending their money on rent and food.
State Senate President Pro Tem John Burton was upset about the Hotel Council’s campaign as well, which prompted him to launch his own countercampaign. His latest sign reads, “I gave money to a woman on the street… She bought food for her kids.” Even Trent Rhorer, the director of the Department of Human Services (and co-author of Prop N), disapproves of how Newsom’s panhandling initiative cloaks politics with concern for drug users. “I mean, call a spade a spade,” Rhorer told the San Francisco Magazine. “If you want to make the streets cleaner for business and tourists, do it. But don’t bill it as compassion.”
Regardless of whether Newsom is a hypocrite or just poorly informed, a measure restricting panhandling does not per se have to be a bad thing.
Many San Franciscans are fed up with the sheer numbers of panhandlers in the streets, as well as the occasionally aggressive accosting. Likewise, the Hotel Council has legitimate concerns that deserve a hearing: if conventions are cancelled and tourists stay away from the City, the hotel industry suffers and jobs might get lost. So then why does the Council‘s campaign have to be such a low and embarrassing cheap shot, hateful propaganda cloaked as caring for drug addicts? If the Hotel Council wants people to help clean up the City, following basic rules of decency and respect would certainly weigh in their favor.
“Pretty hard-hitting, aren’t they?” remarked Hotel Council Executive Director Bob Begley on the signs.
Perhaps, Mr. Begley. But mostly crude and pathetic.”
Chester
