Begging the question

City leaders want to stop aggressive panhandling in Boston. But what's the cost for the city's homeless population?

City Hall by Jason Gay

Last Wednesday, the Boston City Council voted 8-5 to pass an ordinance cracking down on aggressive panhandling on the city's streets. Given the holiday season, it was a tricky call for the councilors, and the media were more than happy to pounce on the pols for dropping some coal in the stockings of the city's unfortunate. SCROOGED! the Herald's front page crowed the day after the vote.

Bad timing wasn't the real problem with the council's decision, however. In fact, the ordinance -- which bans aggressive solicitation within 15 feet of banks or ATMs, blocking the way, and following or accosting someone for money -- was first proposed in May. Likewise, it's hard to disagree with the principle of the new law. Though begging is a protected right, no one should be intimidated physically, verbally, or otherwise for declining to drop some change in a cup. Banks and ATMs -- sensitive areas where money is exchanged -- ought to be free of solicitors.

"We're not asking this city to turn its back on the homeless," councilor Maureen Feeney said Wednesday. "We're asking to strike a balance."

But there's a big difference between what the city council is asking for and what it might get. Experience in other US cities has shown that aggressive-panhandling laws and similar antivagrancy statutes are constitutionally problematic and notoriously difficult to enforce. Instead of punishing aggressive beggars, advocates for the homeless say, these laws are too often used as a tool to drive homeless people out of urban centers.

"There is a national trend to legislate homeless people out of sight, and fortunately, Boston has been above that," says Greg Payne, policy director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless. "We have to make sure that this ordinance isn't the beginning."

The first question is whether the laws work in the first place. In other cities where panhandling statutes have been adopted, they have often been ineffective, for the obvious reason that homeless offenders are extremely unlikely to pay fines or perform community service -- if they get convicted at all. A 1996 study of Atlanta's "nuisance laws" found that more than half the cases brought under these laws were dismissed -- 20 percent of the time because homeless offenders never showed up in court. (Still struggling with red tape, Atlanta is now considering creating a separate court specifically to deal with nuisance laws.)

Another issue is fairness. Aggressive-panhandling laws have been challenged in cities including San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, and Los Angeles for violating First Amendment rights and unfairly targeting the homeless. Sarah Wunsch, a lawyer for the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, notes that Boston's new ordinance is technically an aggressive solicitation law, and not specific to homeless people. But Wunsch doesn't think the law will be used to arrest Salvation Army workers ringing bells outside ATMs -- and that might make Boston's new law vulnerable to a court challenge.

"What's wrong with this [law] is that it's going to be used to justify arresting panhandlers," says Wunsch. "It's going to be selectively enforced."

Even more troubling is that nationwide, anti-panhandling and antivagrancy laws are increasingly being used to rid downtown areas of homeless people altogether -- whether they are bothering anyone or not. A study last year by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty found that of the 50 biggest US cities, 77 percent have ordinances prohibiting or restricting begging, and a startling 54 percent have engaged police to sweep homeless people out of certain locations.

"There are people out there being punished for being homeless," says Catherine Bendor, counsel for the National Law Center.

Bendor and other advocates say the number of homeless people who panhandle aggressively or threaten the public is actually very small. They note that most of the threatening behaviors covered by new aggressive-panhandling laws were already punishable under existing laws. And they worry that these statutes are little more than a cover for civic leaders who want to brush homelessness -- and poverty -- under the rug.

"Aggressive-panhandling laws cover things that, by and large, are already illegal," says Doug Ring, a director with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. "So what we're saying with these laws is that if you are poor and do things that are illegal, we'll make it two crimes instead of one. Personally, I think it would be a better move to just declare being poor illegal."

Indeed, it's getting harder to live on the street in dozens of American cities. After several antivagrancy laws were passed in Atlanta, where Greg Payne worked before coming to Massachusetts, he frequently watched police round up homeless people who were doing nothing to disturb passersby. "We'd do stings," Payne recalls. "We'd go downtown into the main business corridor and sit a homeless person down with a sign. And time and time again, the police would come, rip the sign up, threaten arrest, and make sure they didn't stay."

Now, Payne says, Boston may be joining what homeless advocates call a growing effort to "criminalize" poverty in US cities in the name of urban redevelopment. In their zeal to reclaim our downtowns, activists say, city leaders have been too quick to tackle homelessness in an aggressive and punitive fashion.

Occasionally, this enforcement comes in anticipation of a special event: in Atlanta, officials used antivagrancy laws to sweep homeless people out of the city before the 1996 Olympic games, and similar action was taken in LA prior to the visit of Pope John Paul II.

But more often -- as is the case in Boston -- laws targeting the homeless are justified as "quality of life" measures to improve downtown safety and commerce. This has been the thinking in New York City, where leaders attribute record crime drops not only to arrests of hard-core felons, but also to crackdowns on comparatively minor miscreants such as panhandlers and the city's infamous "squeegee men."

New York subscribes to the "broken windows" theory of community policing, which holds that controlling petty annoyances can help stop bigger offenses. (Boston city councilor and former police commissioner Mickey Roache cited "broken windows" before voting in favor of the aggressive-panhandling law.) But although community policing has lowered crime, the problem of homelessness has not dissipated. Mary Brosnahan, executive director of the New York Coalition for the Homeless, says tough enforcement simply moves the problem to less visible areas. The net effect, Brosnahan says, "is to push homeless people to the more marginalized sections of the city," where shelters and assistance are less available.

The same has been true elsewhere in the country, advocates say. "The proposed justifications for criminalization usually fail to address the fact that efforts to rid public places of homeless people through such policies are likely to be futile," the recent National Law Center report states. "In the absence of adequate housing and jobs, penalizing people for such conduct as sleeping in public places or begging on the streets will not deter them, since they have no alternative . . . [they] will simply appear in another area."

Despite these failures, there's no shortage of city leaders who want to put aggressive-panhandling and other quality-of-life statutes on the books. It's politically safe, says LA's Doug Ring. "The number of homeless people who vote is nonexistent," Ring points out. "But the amount of nice middle-class people who vote is very large, and we don't want to be impinged upon by the poverty of others. We're saying it's all right to be poor -- but be invisibly poor."

Right now, Boston seems unlikely to start rounding up its homeless people and carting them out of town. The city has a progressive reputation on homeless issues -- it was recently recognized by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for its winter preparations to care for the homeless -- and no political leader is about to crusade against unfortunate street people.

But at the same time, no one can expect Boston's new aggressive-panhandling law to help the poor. It certainly won't make a dent in the city's homeless population, which last week's annual census numbers at 5016 people and counting, despite the booming local economy. (Homelessness actually tends to rise during periods of economic prosperity, when rent increases drive more people onto the streets.) Laws may grab headlines, but they cannot prevent tragedies like that of Jose Flores, a homeless man who froze to death on the Boston Common in early December.

As Boston pushes to revitalize its urban centers, it's worth pausing to assess the human cost. Homeless advocates are hoping that as the city cleans up its streets, it will also protect the lives of those who call the streets their home. But as experience in other cities has shown, this is a difficult goal -- and one that no law can achieve on its own.

"Any time there are people on the street, it detracts from the idyllic city on the hill we all hope for," says Philip Mangano, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance. "However, passing an ordinance of this sort does little about moving people off the streets -- or the root causes of why people panhandle in the first place."

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.