When it comes to generous help to the homeless, San Francisco has been hard to beat, paying cash grants of up to $400 per month. Unfortunately, the result of such generosity has been to make the homeless more numerous there.
So, after years of wrestling with homelessness as a growing civic headache, voters in the City by the Bay have had enough. San Franciscans voted Tuesday to slash the city’s monthly cash grants to $59 and to put the money that is saved into food, shelter and other services for the homeless.
Is the city once known for “Flower Power” suffering compassion fatigue? More charitably, San Francisco is searching like other American cities for a break in the behavioral cycles that lock so many of the homeless in perpetual poverty.
The cash payments do not buy much in San Francisco’s inflated economy, but they have enabled some recipients to support addictions and other habits that were making their lives worse. Brutal realities such as these have moved San Franciscans to join other cities and counties normally known for high tolerance and conspicuous compassion in asking for some accountability from the less fortunate.
Philadelphia has launched an ad campaign to discourage the giving of spare change to panhandlers, because it encourages more panhandling. Madison, Wis., has been considering similar approaches. It handed out a record number of citations to transients this year.
New Orleans has removed park benches from its historic Jackson Square, so the homeless no longer can use them for beds. Key West, Fla., has banned panhandlers from three of its most popular tourist attractions. Santa Cruz, Calif., has passed an ordinance to prohibit panhandlers from coming within 14 feet of building entrances, water fountains and pay phones.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently vowed to revive former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s controversial sweeps of the homeless off of city streets and subways.
Some cities and counties have begun to consider what two counties in California’s heavily agricultural Central Valley have done: Offer to pay moving expenses and as much as $3,000 in rent for welfare recipients who are willing to move to where jobs are more plentiful. The four-year-old program called MOVE (More Opportunities for Viable Employment) makes the offer to welfare recipients in Fresno and two nearby counties. It has helped some families move out of state and out of dependency. Some other welfare households have problems that run deeper than a ticket out of town can solve.
Despite widespread talk of compassion fatigue, Americans do not appear to be any less compassionate than they ever were. The age of welfare reform appears to have encouraged municipalities to sensibly explore the differences between generosity that helps feed a problem and that which helps bring real remedies.
Assistance should be funneled through public and private agencies that are knowledgeable and equipped to offer the food, clothing, health and employment services. Sensible assistance should help people to help themselves. Otherwise it can feed more dependency.
