UT compiles panhandling study
Panhandlers in Austin want regular jobs but confront multiple barriers, including mental health problems and lack of identification materials, that make it hard for them to secure them, according to a study conducted by University of Texas researchers for the City of Austin.
The city's Health and Human Services Department and Police Department together paid $48,000 for the survey, conducted by researchers from UT's School of Social Work and Department of Anthropology. The researchers, including students, interviewed 103 panhandlers for the study.
The City Council commissioned the study after backing away from stricter panhandling rules amid criticism from advocates for the homeless.
Some stats from the study: 35 percent held high school or general equivalency diplomas, while an additional 33 percent had some college education or a degree. About one-third of the panhandlers had served in the military, and 91 percent were single, widowed divorced or separated. On average, panhandlers had been soliciting for about five months, but most had worked for pay sometime in the 12 months preceding the interviews.
$48,000 to ask 103 hobos why they are hobos. This is what you may come to expect from the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology at a major research university. Comes to about $480 bucks per, to find out that they lack identification and don't lack mental health problems but they really want to work. This is what they told the (naive, idealistic, if-I-remember-to-vote-I'll-vote-for-change) students that have been appropriately brainwashed instructed in the methods of surveying the great unwashed.
$48k buys a lot of shovels.
The real story of course, is that the forces of true evil are at work again in the Austin City Council. They want to get "tougher" on the panhandlers, who are swarming this city (see Steve Malanga at City Journal, and yes, Austin is one of the cities he mentions...) but they collapse like cheap lawn chairs in front of "advocates for the homeless." This is complete crap. I know for a fact that the police treat the homeless with kid gloves. Austin is a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants and the homeless and this is leading to crime, unsanitary conditions, and frankly, death in the streets.
Consider the story a friend of mine told me about her law office in the downtown area. She works within a few blocks of Caritas and the Salvation Army and at least one other church that has a soup kitchen (I think it's St. Davids.) One night after she picked up her husband and kids and delivered them home, she went back to the office to finish her paperwork. Everyone else was gone for the day. She went into the suite and headed for her office, was settling in when she heard some music. She thought, "Crap, someone has left their radio on." She went to investigate and found a homeless guy on the phone in one of the other offices, which he had positioned so that he could "talk" comfortably from a reclining position (I'll let your imagination run away with you). She left and called the police, who came and carted him off. She's a lawyer. so she said she wanted to press charges, like breaking and entering. She was told that Austin police didn't prosecute B & E against "the homeless." When her boss was apprised of this, he asked what they would arrest for, and they said, unless the perp takes something or damages property, they wouldn't book him. As it happens, the man had broken in to several offices in the area and a little investigation (on the part of my friend's firm, not the police) revealed that these businesses all had mysterious charges on their phone bills for 977 numbers, amounting to quite a chunk of change. My friend's law firm confirmed with the phone company that, indeed, Mr. Hobo had run up a tab at $0.99 per minute, so, much to the dismay of the police, they had to issue a warrant for his arrest.
And consider the area of Oak Hill in Southwest Austin. At the intersection of 290 and 71, panhandlers are often seen. Two of the most notorious colorful, were known for their public drinking, their public urinating, their general filth, and their quaint signs, to wit, "Why lie? I need whiskey & smokes." Eventually, one was found face down in a bar ditch on Old Bee Caves road, and the other was found burned to death in a car he broke into. He had tried to warm himself with a can of Sterno and probably spilled some whiskey on it. An article was written about him in the local paper in which some local resident was quoted as saying, "He really symbolized Oak Hill!" I'm positive she meant that in the "We are funky and tolerant down here south of the river!" but it was surely taken to mean, "Oak Hill is an armpit" by the good folks north of the river.
At the same intersection, I used to see a tidy female, clean and sober, thirty-something, holding a sign, "Am the victim of domestic abuse. Please help me and my 3 kids start a new life!" Call me skeptical- I never gave her any money. She just looked like she didn't need to be begging. Sure enough, I was driving through the intersection at what was apparently the end of her shift, and she was off to the side of the road, conferring with a man about her age, also neat and clean, and she was handing him a huge roll of bills, clearly the day's take, and he casually paused to count it. What impressed me was the nonchalance of the accounting, in front of the people she was begging from, in the company of some man, this "victim."
And the same people who give money to the to the panhandlers want to have nature trails and hike 'n' bike trails going through the wooded areas along the creek in Oak Hill- the same creek that runs behind people's houses, and behind Oak Hill Elementary. Nice...