Merchants’ Motives: Altruistic or Selfish?
Homelessness and panhandling are both major problems in our community, but they are not necessarily the same thing. Many of those seen on our streets panhandling are not homeless. Those who are homeless or hungry will not truly be helped by money given to them by passersby.
I was pleased to see your July 11 article about the merchants in Santa Monica (“Brother, Keep Your Dime”). They have joined others in an approach to panhandling that is a winner for everyone. The Beverly Center has a campaign like this, urging people to give money to established service providers like P.A.T.H. (People Assisting the Homeless) rather than the street panhandlers. Management of the Beverly Center has pledged to match customer gifts up to $10,000. Canisters, posters and referral cards are provided in stores.
Such an effort helps provide badly needed funds for credible agencies serving the homeless with meaningful assistance; it gives the public a meaningful opportunity to offer help to the people in real need; it protects the public from panhandlers because they will disappear when the money does; it helps the retailer keep a comfortable atmosphere for his customer.
We are delighted to see this type of partnership between the service providers, the truly needy and the business community. The management and merchants of the Beverly Center, those on the Third Street Promenade, and those in Beverly Hills should be commended for their efforts to provide a way for the community to work together to care and share in a way that really does help.
MICHELE A. SMOLLAR
Los Angeles
Smollar is executive director of People Assisting the Homeless.
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Your article “Brother, Keep Your Dime” was fine as far as it went, but it did not go far enough. You neglected to mention the one thing both “Say No to Panhandling” and “Feed the Dolphins” share: support for the CLARE Foundation.
Six days a week, CLARE provides more than 300 hot lunches, showers, referrals, a drop-in center and, if necessary, detox services to homeless people at the Sober Inn at 901 Pico. We have a 20-bed Youth Recovery Home for teen-agers across the street at 844 Pico. Signs of Recovery up the block at 1027 Pico provides live-in recovery for 12 deaf and hard-of-hearing alcoholics and drug addicts, many of whom came from the streets. Women with children can find shelter and support in our Culver City alcohol-free living center. Fifty recovering adults live together in our three-building facility on Ninth Street.
CLARE’s operation is underfunded, yet manages to help thousands of homeless people who want to stop drinking and using drugs to do just that each year. We cannot solve all of Santa Monica’s problems. We don’t try to. But with the continued support of the community, we can help those who want to help themselves to get off the streets and to live free of drugs and alcohol one day at a time.
RUTH KING
Santa Monica
King is executive director of the CLARE Foundation.
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The merchants who dreamed up the anti-panhandling campaigns covered in “Brother, Keep Your Dime” are completely misguided. Their plots against the poor will never make the homeless vanish.
The homeless are people with almost nothing, who beg rather than die of starvation. They have no choice but to go where people with money are and beg; and as long as the Promenade is such a place, they will be there. They cannot disappear until they have jobs, food and houses to disappear into. Try peevishly to take away the little they have and , far from vanishing , they will have to beg more desperately. All that is happening as a result of the merchants’ schemes . . . is that the homeless are now suffering even more than they otherwise would.
More basically, the merchants’ program will not work because it does not even pretend to confront the reasons for homelessness. We are in the midst of a national emergency that has to be addressed as such. We need generous funding for housing, for public employment, for a universal health care system. We need to convert military bases into emergency shelters . To pay for this, we need higher taxes on corporations, and a restructuring of the California tax code to end its blatant subsidy of Proposition 13 homeowners. We need to recognize that the only experts on the homeless are the homeless, and that they should direct the solutions to homelessness. In general, we need to do as much as it takes to get every single person without a roof under one.
GERI SILVA
Santa Monica
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The two anti-panhandling campaigns you describe in “Brother, Keep Your Dime” amount to a vicious and really loathsome program of violence against the poor. With a cruelty that is stunning to conceive, the merchants actually compete with panhandlers for the change in strollers’ pockets. They are actually spending $64,000, not on the homeless, but on well-off sculptors of bronze statues, graphic designers, producers of public service announcements and weekend surfers--in order to out-beg the beggars, and to take from the poor even their alms. This latest anti-panhandling campaign is a particularly hideous example of rich people giving to rich people in order to rob poor people.
In directing money away from the homeless, the merchants are deliberately trying to starve out the homeless, so that they will go away, vanish, leave the Promenade, to the final end that the merchants can better make money, lots of money, from the consumers who frequent the Promenade. That’s the hard answer to the question of why merchants should spend so much cash on a public relations campaign, and there is no other.
DAVID JOSLIN
Santa Monica
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The merchants claim to be altruists when they direct charity away from the homeless to homeless agencies, but in presuming that people without housing are not competent to spend money on themselves, they deny the humanity of homeless people and give license to one scurrilous lie after another: that the homeless are drug addicts, that the homeless are alcoholics, that the homeless are scam artists, that the homeless are secretly rich, $100-a-night beggars.
All these lies mean to blame the sufferers of poverty for their suffering, and to place upon the poor the responsibility that rests squarely upon an economic system that is throwing millions of people out of work, and upon a government that is slashing social programs as fast as it can spend more money on cops and prisons.
Once and for all, the homeless are human beings. They deserve to be treated with respect, and not to be degraded by paternalistic schemes to get them out of sight and out of mind.
DAVID WHAY
Los Angeles
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The two anti-panhandling campaigns on the Santa Monica Promenade can never succeed, because they were born of the self-serving interests of real estate developers and the business community and are all the worse for using the pretense of helping the homeless.
I am a merchant on the Third Street Promenade, and I believe business people must protect their interests, but not by scapegoating a near-helpless sector of our community or by arrogantly directing the charitable impulses of the local shoppers. The campaigns assault the humanity of the homeless and insult the intelligence of all of us because they proceed from the false premise that the homeless somehow have a choice as to how they survive. Short-term solutions for homelessness--food lines, shelters, service agencies, etc.--are essential because people must survive day by day. But they have not and they cannot solve the problem. Homelessness has increased 13% in L.A. County this year alone!
The government and corporate charities have spent years and millions on the problem while watching it grow. They have failed! The solution to the problem of homelessness is obvious: homes and jobs. The resources exist. We’ve all seen billions of dollars become instantly available for failed S&Ls; or for the bombing of other people’s countries. The road to the solution is far more complex, but is most certainly attainable. We must take it. Thousands of us must become involved in our communities on a daily basis, getting to know who the homeless are and what they need, joining with them to form groups in churches, clubs, neighborhoods, and working together to create concrete long-term solutions in each of our communities. For example, there are 80,000 vacant publicly owned housing units in L.A. County. We must demand them as a human right for every person who needs one.
MARGIE GHIZ
Santa Monica
