When you see a Homeless person, Do you give to them or ignore them? (deaths, Jesus)
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Some of them have mental health issues, so even if you denied them drugs or alcohol, it's not like they'll "magically" find a job that can allow them to rent an apartment. Many mental health facilities have already been shut down.
Perhaps, but others see this as seeing an "opportunity and taking it". In the end, money is money. It's no different than your typical business that's managed to get their buyers to depart with their hard earned money.
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Cigarettes are also addictive. Literally. I wouldn't be surprised if it truly is hard for some of them to quit, considering those who aren't homeless and well off have had difficulty as well.
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As for giving up cigarettes for rent and food, last price on a pack of cigarettes I've got is $8. Assuming you smoke 1 pack of cigarettes a day, that's only $240 per month. I guess you could find section 8 housing, but those aren't always available. Otherwise, I'm hard pressed to figure out what you could do with $300 a month. Plus, if you're in an area that's fine to be outdoors, saving the money by not having to pay rent can go a long way.
Homeless people do not spend $5-$10 a pack for cigarettes. I pay only $2.25 a pack, because I buy the empty filter tubes and a pound of smooth cigar tobacco and make my own, been going it for 15 years. Outside some homeless shelters there are entrepreneurs who sell single cigarettes, made the way I make them. We're looking at around 10 cents per cigarette.
When I used to walk my ferret on the Las Vegas Strip, if you looked through the cigarette receptacles outside the casino hotels, you'll find cigarettes where someone only took 2 puffs on it.
I’ve seen homeless people dumpster diving like they were looking for gold. It’s a crazy sight to see. I wouldn’t be surprised if they hangout at the back near every buffet or pizza joint at night ready to get those scraps.
I recently read a book authored by a homeless person who spent 3 years on the streets of Austin, TX, and he never panhandled all those 3 years and he was a dumpster diver, where he'd find all kind of treasures, day and night, and enough food to share it with others.
He'd hit the dumpsters outside the Dormitories around the University where lots of rich kids, supported by their parents, would through all kind of good stuff into the trash, and when the term ended, just about everything went into the trash. He'd even find prescription drugs, which he sold to other homeless people. He claims the laziest of the homeless panhandle.
While bicycling one night in Las Vegas I noticed a homeless man dragging out boxes out of a dumpster outside a Domino's Pizza place. There were 8 boxes of pizza's in that dumpster that hadn't even been touched. At 7/11 I saw someone dumpster dive there, and he was scooping out a whole box of sandwiches, past their expiration date.
You do know that on a national average it costs taxpayers roughly $42,500 a year to have one homeless person on our streets, mostly hospitalization/emergency room costs.
I don’t give them anything. I used to, but one day I followed a guy around the block to see him get in an Escalade and I said never again! Yes, I know,that was an isolated incident and does not give a true representation of the homeless.
Sorry, but I don't believe that.
Maybe you do, but I don't.
Reason: I've seen memes like this circulating the internet for years.
It started out as someone claiming to be behind someone in line at the grocery store watching someone loaded up with steak and lobster, wearing designer jeans, Air Jordans, and talking on a tricked out cellphone and then paying with foodstamps -- and the story always ended with that person climbing into an Escalade.
Then it was how the welfare office parking lot was damn near filled with Escalades .... and it went on from there.
And it was *always* an Escalade ... as if that were the only high-end vehicle in existence.
The story is always told as if the author of the post witnessed it himself. Pretty soon people on two different continents were seeing people buying fancy food, wearing expensive clothes, and using cutting-edge technology getting into that by now ubiquitous Escalade.
So I just automatically dismiss stories that deal with poor people and Escalades. There's just no possible way that so many people are seeing the poor and homeless driving Escalades --- *Escalades* and nothing else. That's just far too coincidental for me to believe.
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Originally Posted by Ron61
Where I live now there is a great place where any homeless person can go and get a free meal three times a day, get a shower, and get clean clothes. Also, this place actually takes meals to any homeless camp they are made aware of. Did I mention it’s all free?
The problem is that the vast majority of homeless people are mentally ill. Most of them debilitatingly so. It's easy as a high-functioning adult to ignore the homeless because there are government programs and free shelters around, but when you're literally "out of your mind," doing the normal things we do is impossible for them.
Unless someone takes the time to take them by the hand and lead them to the welfare office, fill out the paperwork for them, act as their advocate, and obtain for them a caseworker, they are simply incapable of doing all of that on their own. Plus, you often need a permanent address in order to enter the programs. They don't even know where they are most of the time much less have the ability to navigate often confusing and bustling streets with no map and no one there to keep them on task. A goodly number of the homeless elderly are wandering around with Alzheimer's, dementia, and other diseases that would make them forget where they were going long before they got there -- and they wouldn't remember why they were there even if they managed to arrive. You can't just point them in the direction of the welfare office and expect them to be off the streets in a month or two -- especially if they have no documentation, no ID, no birth certificates. How many homeless carry around those things or even know where they are or how to get them? Much less have the money necessary to pay all the fees associated with obtaining new paperwork and ID cards.
And who is going to do all of that for a complete stranger in rags smelling of cheap wine and urine? Yeah, right. I honestly don't care if they spend their money on booze or drugs. They're still homeless regardless and who am I to deny them the very few pleasures they get out of their miserable existences? I'm not their conscience, their savior, or their next of kin. It's not for me to say whether what they're doing is right or wrong. So if they want the comfort of a bottle because the booze keeps them warm at night, I say have at it, my good fellow. Enjoy yourself!
A certain political party has done a wonderful job dismantling our mental health infrastructure; almost ALL of the government-run campuses have been closed down. Now all they're good for are to make creepy episodes for ghost hunting televison shows.
Those that still exist minimally treat patients and then dump them back onto the street with a bottle of meds that they may or may not take and that may or may not work. Usually meds like that require numerous follow-up visits to tweak the dosage for it to work effectively. Those folks could never find the place again even if they tried ... or to even know they should be trying.
We also have a BIG problem in this country whereby everyone -- including the government -- is more concerned about frauds, scammers, and exploiters gaming the system than they are about the people they're trying to help. And that never EVER leads to good results for the poor, sick, disabled, and the elderly. Programs and services become increasingly more complicated to apply for and increasingly impossible to qualify for. What's worse is that the services themselves are whittled down to a nub so that those who are honestly sick are given the MINIMUM amount of help to barely sustain life just to discourage scammers.
The Disability Program is horrible for that, keeping the disabled living in abject poverty just so no able-bodied person would ever want to be on Disability. It's a form of extremely ammoral if not immoral exploitation of people who are genuinely sick and disabled -- holding them up as an example of how awful it is to be on Disability. You don't want to live like THOSE people, do you? So yeah, go out and find a job!
As if being disabled isn't depressing, miserable, and demoralizing enough on its own. For those who have no support network, no family connections (either because everyone is dead or because their families kicked them out) really need more expansive help, but no.
Better that one scammer be denied the program than for 100 genuinely sick and disabled people to receive a decent amount of help. For the cost of what the government pays in oil subsidies every year to an industry making record profits, over 6 million Americans could be on Disability at $15,000 per year, which still isn't great, but it's better than the $8,000 to $10,000 per year many receive now.
Hence why they are homeless. They're not given anywhere near enough money to afford rent even in a dump.
So, to answer the OP's question, I do give money if I have it, but like a lot of people, I've gone pretty much all electronic now and use debit cards instead of cash. So I usually never have any money, not even pocket change.
The only exception I make regarding my charitableness is that I won't give to those people who hang around on the corners of busy intersections holding cardboard signs about being out of work, need food, desperate! The reason is because there *are* a lot of perfectly healthy, middle class people who simply dress up like a beggar every day after work and go out and panhandle. I don't have much sympathy for someone making $70k per year but who simply mismanaged their funds and now need to beg -- or people who just want a down payment on a new car or they want a new 90" 3D HDTV and don't want to pay for it themselves. I'll just get the bleeding-heart dummies to pay for my new television instead!
I’ve seen homeless people dumpster diving like they were looking for gold. It’s a crazy sight to see. I wouldn’t be surprised if they hangout at the back near every buffet or pizza joint at night ready to get those scraps.
Yeah, when I worked at a grocery store, a small crowd of homeless people were always waiting out behind the store for me to bring out all the expired dairy products. I had to throw out so much food it was heart-wrenching to see it all go to waste, so I was happy to let them have it. Especially since that's the "sell by" date not necessarily when the food actually goes bad.
I donate cash and other goods to the Salvation Army and to my own church, both of which give out free meals to the homeless.
The Salvation Army has a drug rehabilitation center around here, it is totally free of charge to anyone who needs it...BUT they must pass a criminal background check in order to qualify!!!
It's gotta be on a case-by-case basis, but yeah, there's no "definite" correlation. That's because someone's driving some luxury car, doesn't mean they're rich. They may have pissed away what money they had, on it. Well dressed people have done so to keep up appearances, but really live in dinky, studio apartments, that in more run down areas of town. A professional who got laid off lost the house isn't going to switch to rags. He's still got the kakhi's and collared shirts he had from before.
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Originally Posted by rstevens62
When you see alot of these homeless people smoking cigarettes, most of the time, they are not actually buying packs of cigarettes. Homeless come around to our stores and look thru the ashtrays to find butts that were put out early, that still have alot of cigarette left, Ive seen people fill up bags of cigarettes from the ashtrays that have only had a few puffs taken on them.
It may sound gross and disgusting, but its what they do in order to smoke.
Plus, in many of our stores, the manager will allow a homeless person to do some odd jobs around the store, like changing trash cans, sweeping the lot, etc, something that takes about 30 minutes and then offer them either food or a pack of cigarettes, whatever they want that is equal to about $5-8.
Agreed. When you're homeless, you do things a "regular person" would never imagine doing. There are cases where "table scraps to be thrown away" for one family would be considered a fine meal for another. I read someone answer on Quora "what's it like being poor?", growing up in SE Asia, her mother was able to cook a chicken for dinner. However, there were roaches all over it. She just said to pick them off/shoo them away. After that, they dug in. To me, that's gross, but in her case, they haven't eaten in 5 days, so that's something that I would have to take into account.
Last edited by ackmondual; 09-18-2018 at 12:58 PM..
Reason: Added another response to this
I live in Philadelphia. If I were to give each homeless person money each time I walk the streets of Center City, ride the El or Broad Street Line, go to Reading Terminal Market, etc., I'd be broke. I won't give money to them the vast majority of the time (mostly because I don't carry cash), and the ones who I DO decide to give money to have to do something more than look at me and shake a cup full of change.
I graduated from college back in May, and I make significantly more money now than I did as a student; however, I used to give money to the homeless much more frequently when I was a broke college student. Three incidents occurred that made me stop giving away money:
1.) One time, I was walking back to North Philly from Center City. I encountered a homeless person sweeping the streets. When I learned that he was homeless, I offered to buy him a meal. I was living in the suburbs with my mom at the time, so most of the money I made at my $8.00/hr job went towards my Zone 3 SEPTA TrailPass (about $50/week). I didn't have that much money to spare, but I respected the fact that he was helping keep the city I was born in and love clean. 7/11 was having a special on pizza, so I walked in and bought him two slices. He looked at the food, turned to me, looked me in the eyes, and said "I wanted Chinese!" I walked away at that point.
2.) One time, I walked into the Wawa on 17th and Arch. I saw a woman sitting on a crate, and I felt sorry for her. I walked into the Wawa and bought what I could afford. She straight up told me that she didn't want it. I shrugged, caught my train, and ate it there.
3.) I was exploring North Philly (just north of Temple's campus) when a homeless man approached me and asked for change. I told him that I didn't have any cash on me. After telling me that he was HIV positive, he began to follow me down the block. Being 6'2" and having a fairly muscular build, I knew that I could take him on; however, I didn't want any of his bodily fluids on me. I walked until he gave up.
Due to past experiences, I usually don't give to the homeless of Philly. This is also true of any other city I visit, as I had to turn down several panhandlers in D.C. and NYC this past weekend.
Always look at the clothes, especially the shoes. If they are in decent shape they haven't been homeless for long! There was a local guy pitching a story, local news channel nailed him........HE WASN'T HOMELESS but rather panhandling as a job! He parked his car a few blocks away and started on the corners like 8-5ish.
As much as I hate to say this... some of these people "are the smart ones". Why toil away at MW, filling out tons of applications, doing very hard work, when you can make much more money for much less work? Businesses do this all the time.
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Originally Posted by remco67
When i was young i would always give them money, then in a period of a couple of days my whole attitude changed. I saw one of the guys i always gave to who worked the intersection near my house. He was being interviewed on tv about his thoughts on a new law which would disallow working these intersection and he was saying he made 2 or 300 dollars a day doing this and he would have to get a "real" job if that law was passed. By the way this was about 1990 and i made 6 bucks an hour at my student job. The next day i gave to a young guy on crutches who looked like a street kid. 2 hours later i am with a friend getting coffee and i see him and she knows him. He was just fine no crutches he was paying his way thru college doing this. Since then any donations i give go to known causes, which is a shame to those who actually need help on the streets.
People in general get defensive when their livelihood is on the line. In some cases, it goes to extremes, but that feeling "to survive" is still built in.
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Originally Posted by phetaroi
That could be almost a month's worth of groceries.
If you're single, $240 to $300 is quite a lot for groceries. I wonder how effective groceries are if you don't have a fridge, microwave, cooking range though. I guess you could just walk in and order a sandwich a day, but then another poster is saying they spend even less on cigs... http://www.city-data.com/forum/53116664-post151.html
Either way, it seems they've already been getting free food dumpster diving, so why incur the cost if what you have works for you?
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