Want to Help the Homeless? Don't Avoid Them

It's a perennial moral dilemma of city living: Should you give money to the homeless person on the street? When a fellow human being, especially one in visible poverty, asks for help we naturally want to do something. We wrestle with our conscience, asking ourselves whether we should give cash, offer food, save the money to donate to shelters or simply ignore the request. Whatever we decide, it can tear at us and lead us to question our moral character.

But the truth is that how you respond to people asking for money on the street isn't that important. The cash earned from panhandling will not help address the underlying issues keeping people on the streets - such as disconnection from family, barriers to employment, substance abuse or untreated mental illness. And few would argue that panhandling is a promising route to stable housing.

If you really want to help the homeless the answer is simple - don't avoid them. It's tempting to try to escape a situation that causes us discomfort. Seeing someone bundled up in blankets against a building might lead us to walk on the other side of the street. A panhandler outside a shop can lead us to take our business elsewhere. Cities with reputations for highly visible homelessness might even be crossed off our list of vacation destinations.

The problem with avoiding the homeless is that it creates a demand for "clean cities." When constituents no longer feel they can access public areas, when local businesses lose money, and when tourism industries feel threatened, our city leaders respond. Unfortunately, they often provide solutions which do nothing more than drive the homeless out of sight.

Fort Lauderdale, FL passed a law restricting public feedings of the homeless, and followed through by citing a 90-year old World War II veteran for continuing his weekly feeding program of over 20 years. A recent report by the National Coalition for the Homeless finds that Fort Lauderdale is not alone - over the past two years, 21 cities have cracked down on feeding the homeless in public.

In Hawaii, a lawmaker personally crusaded around town with a sledgehammer to smash carts storing the belongings of homeless people. Paired with the tactic of yelling "get your ass moving" to people sleeping at bus stops during the daytime, this was part of a strategy to "solve" Hawaii's homelessness problem. Despite shaming from the media, the lawmaker was recently reelected.

Some cities take an even more direct approach. "Greyhound therapy" refers to shipping the unwanted homeless out of town without verifying whether they have support networks at their destination. A public hospital in Las Vegas was accused last year of sending homeless, mentally ill patients to cities across the country without any plans for further care. When it comes to the most marginalized and disconnected people, greyhound therapy may be the easiest solution for cleansing cities, and therefore the most troubling.

Fortunately, there are many examples of communities reaching out to help the homeless instead of driving them out of view. In San Francisco, a new streamlined website empowers homeless individuals to seek out services using their own mobile phones. A Houston police officer reaches out to homeless people living on the streets, offering them a sympathetic ear and helping hundreds of them move into housing. And the Pope, rather than pushing for clean cities, literally helped homeless people get clean when he installed public showers in the Vatican.

None of these measures is a solution to homelessness on its own. But each takes the important first step of prioritizing the needs of the homeless over the inclination to quickly sweep them under the rug. Helping people requires seeing them first.

What is our role in this? It starts with the simple step of acknowledging that hardship exists whether we see it or not. It means being willing to experience the discomfort of homelessness in open view so that people in need aren't driven out of the reach of service providers. It means judging cities not on how many homeless people we see, but on the compassion used to reach out to the homeless people that exist. Doing so will help ensure the homeless have access to the kind of assistance they truly need.

In our approach to homelessness, let's choose compassion over cleanliness. After all, a society is not measured by how many vulnerable people can be seen - it is measured by how it treats the vulnerable wherever they are.