Friday, July 21, 2006

Please don't feed the homeless

Las Vegas has passed a law that prohibits people from giving food to homeless people in public parks. The law also prohibits people from selling food to the homeless at a nominal fee. Passage of the new law is an attempt to prevent mobile soup kitchens from operating; residents say that when homeless people are fed in a park, the park cannot be used by families (one assumes they mean families with homes).

City officials said they instituted the law in part because of recommendations from some who work with the homeless who say offering food separately from other services, such as counseling and drug treatment, is counterproductive.

Do I hear the word faith-based behind this statement? Because offering food to those who do not have any is somewhat productive in that it keeps them alive. And all the counseling and drug treatment (most of which is pure hogwash) is useless if someone does not have shelter and food.

I am reminded of the time a client came to me after she had spent the day volunteering at the polls. "Did you know," she asked me, "that there were homeless people trying to vote?" I asked her what it was about not having a home that stripped a person of her American citizenship, and she just looked at me as though I had crawled out from under a rock. Did I say that she was volunteering through her church?

10 Comments:

ACK! That is unbelievably anger inducing. Of course, a huge problem homeless people face in voting (as well as getting a job and even getting into some shelters) is because... surprisingly enough- they don't have id's! Seeing as how that's something you kind of need an address for. It's pretty upsetting. As far as the whole "drug treatment" thing is concerned, I think I'd probably want to be a little out of it myself if I had to sleep on the streets and didn't know how I was going to eat. Call me crazy! I really don't get how feeding people could be called "counterproductive" unless they're just trying to punish people to "whip them into shape!" (ie: we're going to starve you unless you do what we say!)

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 5:00 PM  

They are prohibiting people from giving them food, not money.

But you are right--there has to be a comprehensive plan.

By Blogger Diane, at 6:58 PM  

"Which means it isn't going to actually help anyone."

People need to be empowered, not saved. They need, on a most immediate level, the resources to make it through today so that tomorrow is a possibility.

Do you honestly think that the root cause of homelessness is people who won't go to shelters and therefore cannot be linked up to services? That's ludicrous. The component of the problem related to services, in most jurisdictions in a North America deep in the thrall of neoliberalism, is inadequate funding for services so people who would access them if they existed or were adequate just cannot do so.

And the deeper issue is an economy that depends upon making people poor and that treats housing as a commodity rather than a human right. Build social housing and undo the attack on the poor represented by the Clinton/Gore "welfare reform"...that'll start dealing with homelessness, but would only be a beginning on a "comprehensive plan" in my book.

That Vegas law is disgusting....yet another example of social cleansing (the exclusion of people living in poverty from public spaces, or the legitimation of their harassment, so that the space can be kept pristine for use by middle-class people and businesses).

By Blogger Scott Neigh, at 10:29 PM  

Just for the record...nowhere in his comment did Mac say that not getting people to shelters is the cause of homelessness.

By Blogger Diane, at 10:38 PM  

Wasn't Jesus homeless?

Just askin...

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 6:05 PM  

"Do I hear the word faith-based behind this statement?"

I've been hearing about this Vegas law for a couple weeks now, mostly from the Mike Malloy show on Air America radio. But this rhetorical question of yours has caused a penny to drop in my dusty brain.

Who exactly are the "some who work with the homeless" who urged the city to forbid offering the hungry a sandwich? It is bad enough that we are slipping into such a police state mentality that we insist that the homeless must head for state-approved shelters and programs, even if there might be good reasons for some individuals to stay away from from some of them. One hopes (against the trend of evidence unfortunately) that this kind of "concern" for the homeless manifests also as diligence about seeing to it that the programs are well-run, fairly administered, not exploitive, and properly funded. But with the evidence of decades of watching various localities "deal" with homelessness in the most outrageous ways, one doubts it.

But worse, isn't there an obvious conflict of interest here? The "pros" strongly recommend that the homeless be forced by threat of starvation (and jail time for any Good Samaritan who ignores or defies the law) to come to their doors, which would of course justify their funding and paychecks. And also lower any pressure there may be for them to improve the quality of their services, as their "clients" will have no alternative other than starvation to whatever they might choose to offer.

Such services, such as they are, generally _were_ offered via "faith-based" institutions even before a President sleazed into office with promises to put them all on the social services gravy train.

It makes me wonder how "faith-based" indeed this latest proclamation is--how much it has to do with a blueprint for "seizing dominion" by a bunch of churches, and how little with any objective evaluation of what actually works for the homeless whatsoever.

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