For years it seemed in my neck of the urban woods, only one beggar holding a sign for money stood at every major thoroughfare. ‘Clever-like-a-fox’ we drivers passing by would think, noting the beggars always choose the busiest intersections along highways. Lately, they’re accompanied by groomed and well-behaved dogs, usually pit bulls. It’s surprising how clean and calm those dogs are, given their days are spent breathing in auto exhaust fumes from millions of passing cars and hearing loud nerve-racking engines. Dogs I know would bark angrily at all that noise.
But since the pandemic I suppose, we’re seeing A LOT MORE homeless people who’ve taken to sleeping everywhere and anywhere along our busiest city streets. They hang quilts somehow beneath overpasses where they evidently live and certainly sleep. They roll all their stuff in shopping carts or suitcases, again along the busiest thoroughfares. So we’re bound to see them when driving to and from our work-a-day jobs. And now after the pandemic, the homeless population has EXPLODED along our city streets—witness all their stuff strewn for blocks.
My city is no different from other cities and even suburbs and rural towns across the U.S. Homelessness has multiplied and expanded into our country’s most perplexing, yet solvable, problem. And yes, Americans, we are the ones responsible for solving this problem.
King of the road?
Most Americans are a paycheck away from joining the homeless population. When driving past their clusters or solitary adults, we think the same thing: drugs and/or mental illness. And we’re accurate to a point. What kind of person would stand on a street corner begging for money? Their signs never say HELP! as much as NEED MONEY or just $. No amount of a month’s collection would cover rent. So the coins and bills must go for drugs and liquor, solace for addiction and street life.
But during the pandemic of 2019-2021, thousands of jobs were cut, meaning tens of thousands of families had no choice but to leave their housing immediately and figure out where they are going to go and how they are going to live. It would explain why our nation’s public schools have lost tens of thousands of students with no way of finding them. They’re not enrolled in private schools, other public schools across the country or home schooled. Where’d everybody go?
We expect government social workers to find and help perpetual beggars. Yet, it’s always the same guys and occasional gals individually pan handling at street corners and more and more at convenience store entryways, store parking lots and during winter inside professional office buildings.
Why aren’t the cops clearing beggars from dangerous street corners? Surely the police don’t need citizens calling 911 every time we see a beggar. Yet day after day, the same faces are seen begging for money and maybe food. Street beggars nowadays usually carry a water bottle with them.
There’s a whole underground of homeless folks who’ve banned together and deal with their situation as intelligently as possible. One may pay for mobile phone plans they all share. Another pays a monthly health club membership for restroom and shower access. Another knows the best times to pick through restaurant garbage bins. There’s a way to survive on the streets, sort of. It’s clever and probably organized by our growing number of homeless veterans given our two 20-year wars. If anyone knows how to survive on nothing, it would be a person with firsthand war experience.
Who are the homeless? Years ago newspaper reporters got to know a few who were willing to share their hard-luck stories and provide access to their lifestyles. One couple raked in lotsa dough begging on the streets. Beats working for ‘the man,’ they’d say. There were addicts admittedly who, if you can believe it, had not reached rock bottom, still able to move and groove and pan handle on the streets.
Left unsaid about our nation’s homeless problem are the ‘burnt bridges.’ Perhaps quite a number of homeless individuals crashed on couches of family members who after a respectable amount of time kicked the relative freeloader to the streets. This happens all the time in many families. It’s called tough love.
Speaking of love, why haven’t the mega churches mounted a campaign to go out and help the homeless and stop the crisis? If I were homeless and had absolutely no family to turn to, the places from which I’d first seek help are the largest, most impressive-looking churches. That’s where the money is. And when a beggar asks me for money, I advise him or her to ask a big church. Seek help there. But I can tell when the smile turns upside down, my sage suggestion goes in one ear and out the other. I ain’t gonna give them any money.
I used to, for years, until the city banned citizens from giving to pan handlers standing along the streets. When I was much younger and idealistic, I volunteered at a city homeless shelter, one that took in families with kids instead of individual adults. The kids were taken by bus to school every day. Most parents had jobs, even junk cars parked in an adjacent lot. But … the families could not afford rent, groceries and utilities on a low-income job or even two or three jobs. They were on waiting lists for low-income housing. They were allowed one month to stay at the homeless shelter, then they’d have to pack all their stuff in trash bags and go out to find another shelter with their kids in tow. The families would make the rounds and return within a year. Their plight never ended. Meanwhile, the kids are growing up.
The mean streets of America
People who don’t have a home due to whatever reason still have one thing: freedom. It’s why addicts stay away from family who love them. It’s also why people from dysfunctional families would rather live on the streets than return to live with parents and siblings they know well. Family abuse was a big reason women told me why they refused to move in with the families who raised them. Hurt, anger and hatred are so deep, emotional wounds so fresh, living on the streets and staying high is preferable.
The issue of mental illness prohibits most people from reaching out and personally helping the homeless. There’s a story about a homeless woman in NYC. A businessman walked past her every day for ten years. She yelled obscenities and smelled bad. One day she was gone, the man noticed. A year later, she spotted the businessman, the one who always saw her and ignored her. She had been taken to a hospital where she stayed until the right medication made it possible for her to live a normal life. She went up to the man and bawled him out, telling him if she had been bleeding from a physical wound, he would have called an ambulance and tried to help her. But because she was filthy and yelling, obviously mentally ill, he left her alone.
Americans could ban together and end homelessness, at least reduce it. People should never have to resort to living on the streets. And the homeless are first human beings, second dealing with major problems THAT CAN BE FIXED. Austin’s building tiny houses for their homeless folks, and LA’s giving some homeless people $1,000 a month—trying something instead of doing nothing. Habitat for Humanity has been a nonprofit solution where the recipient family must contribute ‘sweat equity’ in the building of their new simple house as the rest is installed by volunteer carpenters and electricians—usually all in one day. But it requires a city’s blessing and private landowners to donate property for the cause.
Until we admit there’s an undeniable crisis in America with homelessness, the rows of one-man tents, hanging quilts and strewn clothing will continue to stretch from sea to shining sea.