Shane Wade
Opinion Editor
Just as when we’re born into this world, when we move into an urban area, we sign a social contract. We’re entitled to certain protections and rights but we’re also beholden to certain limitations, whether we like them or not. That includes a controversial aspect of urban life: the panhandler.
So, because life isn’t a struggle enough for them already, Henrico County is now considering a proposal that will close a loophole allowing panhandlers to sit in medians at intersections.
Ignoring the legal issues of restricting citizens from public property (although it should be noted that in March, Utah’s Supreme Court defended panhandling as a protected right under the First Amendment), both individuals and the city have a responsibility to treat these people that literally beg strangers for money on tiny strips of land with some semblance of compassion.
The kind of exclusivity it takes to propose such a petty ordinance is, by the nature of American democracy, sinfully intolerant. It also helps to breed a society that damns the have-nots and cultivates a pervasively ignorant prejudice.
Don’t believe me? Just listen to the rhetoric conservatives and Republicans spew on the radio and on news outlets, denigrating America’s poor. It’s not uncommon to hear jeers of “Get a job” or “Stop living on the government’s money.”
Don’t tell homeless people to get a job, when 71.8 percent of them have been incarcerated and the city you live in has an unemployment rate of 9.1 percent. Try getting a job in a country where a major political party’s presidential candidates says you’re part of the 47 percent of Americans who are too lazy to get a job and your vote doesn’t matter to them.
Every city has a responsibility to its citizen populace, no matter who they are or what they do, even if men like councilman Bruce Tyler, who proposed the ordinance in 2009, would rather give police the authority to “move these folks along” rather than give them some sustenance or direction in life.
That view is further evident in Richmond’s 2009 Downtown Plan, a branch of the city’s growth and development plan for the city. Although the plan’s fairly dated, there’s a severe lack of address toward the city’s homeless population, which, according to Homeward RVA, is currently at 1,040 as of January 2012. It’s abhorrently inhumane for anyone to promote city aesthetics over human life, but it’s happening right here, right now, and the citizens of Richmond remain silent.
Instead of supporting class division, the city needs to support programs, clinics and initiatives that provide food, shelter or job training sessions to the least fortunate among us. Instead of sponsoring proposals that hide the problems of homelessness and poverty from the public eye, we ought to promote its visibility, so much so that citizens begin to pressure their local government officials into making the changes necessary to promote upward mobility.
If you have a problem with seeing the homeless, do your part in helping to take them off the street. That doesn’t mean tell your elected officials to implement laws to toss them into overcrowded jails. It means supporting local Richmond organizations like Homeward, which coordinates homeless services in the city, or Freedom House, which provides homeless people with food and shelter.
That strip of land that panhandlers often occupy is their work space. That area, their signs and their clothes are often all they have. A few men — a few “haves,” if you will — want to take that from them to save their eyes from seeing the naked truth that is urban life. They’re willing to breach the urban social contract that makes cities so richly unique and realistic as a microcosm of modern life. Here, we can bear witness to the realities of economic disparity in its sincerest of forms: on the same city blocks where CEOs bank thousands of dollars a day, sits juxtaposed a man without a dollar to his name.
Don’t let them take reality, however ugly, away from you. Don’t let them paint their illusions. Don’t let them make the homeless, the have-nots, and the vagrants even more invisible.