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It seems SoFla is taking a page from the Rudy Giuliani playbook, trying every which way to get homeless people off of our streets and out of our sight. To that end, three initiatives have been proposed in three cities in recent weeks.
Two weeks ago, Palm Beach County unveiled a plan to dissuade
do-gooders from giving money to the homeless by encouraging them to
donate — via text-message — to established homeless charities. “For
every panhandler asking for a handout,” City Commissioner Priscilla
Taylor told the Palm Beach Post, “there are hundreds of men and women asking for a hand up.”
Today, New Times asked
her where she got that figure. “We didn’t have any exact figures on
that,” Taylor said. “The Homeless Coalition and the Homeless Advisory
Coalition, where I sit, they basically give us the numbers, and they
come up with that.” The Coalition could not be reached for comment.
“You
have to realize,” continued Taylor, “the reason we came up with this
from the very beginning. Here, we have certain corners within our
communities, where people who aren’t homeless come in on a van from
different areas and ask for donations — and these people have
children…. I don’t think [panhandling] is worth the safety risk of
letting
them get hit by cars.”
The other new anti-homelessness initiative comes
from Miami, where the City Commission voted to expand the
panhandler-free zone in the area immediately around the Arsht Center.
“They can punish us for panhandling all they want,”
says Caleb, a homeless man from Ocala, now panhandling near Oakland
Park. “It don’t change what we’ve got to do. You can go to a shelter,
get discharged because you had a beer, and then you can’t get no more food.
You’re hungry. You ain’t gonna break the law if you’re hungry? Bet you
are. Bet the politicians would too.”
An initiative proposed at a City Commission meeting last
Wednesday in Oakland Park would have jailed
panhandlers, because — unlike billboards, sandwich-board advertisers,
or an over-abundance of sinister-looking police cruisers hiding in the
parking lots and alleys of Oakland Park Boulevard — panhandling
“distracts drivers from their primary duty to watch traffic and
potential hazards in the road.”
But the ordinance would not only
jail the panhandlers. It would also punish the do-gooders who give them
cash. Both could have been tossed into jail for up to 90 days. (Lest you
think the measure heartless, let City Commisioner Jed Shank disabuse you of the notion: He insists the measure would have been good for
homeless people, because panhandling is an awful way to have to earn a
living. Which is true. But he never bothered to explain why it’s not
better than making no living at all. That initiative failed.
