Help the Homeless: Buy Them Drugs, Alcohol, and Tobacco?

Good Article!!! Glad to see some discernment in dealing with the issue of homelessness.

Here is another article from 3 years ago, where the ACLU sued the city of Grand Rapids over the right to panhandle. http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/09/is_panhandling… They interview Don Tack, the former director of Servants Center and the man who trained me in Urban Ministry. Don was saved in an IFCA Church in the 1960’s and was a professor at GRSBM in the 1980’s before it merged with Cornerstone U. This really stood out in the article:

She has an unlikely foe in this debate: Don Tack, the founder and executive director of Servants Center, an agency that works with the homeless and mentally ill. Tack does his work on the street, going to those who need help. He said he is convinced that, rather than helping homeless survive, begging only worsens their situations. In Grand Rapids, at least, there are places where the homeless can easily get free meals. Tack said panhandling can ruin businesses, with potential customers staying away from places where they are likely to be targeted for begging.

In some cases, panhandlers can be aggressive. People feel intimidated and hand over a couple of dollars to avoid trouble, Tack said. “My view is that the great majority of people panhandling for money are using the money for alcohol and drugs,” he said. He said most people who give think they’re helping. He recently spoke at a church and debated with a woman who said she gave a man $5. She said it was between the man and God how he spent the money. “I said, ‘No, it’s between you, him, God and me. You’re making my job more difficult. We’ve had people die in this city. They had no source of income, yet they’re drunk all the time. … When people give money to panhandlers … it becomes a way of life.”

When I used to work for Don at Servant Center, I distinctly remember Don finding homeless people dead under bridges because they drank themselves to death in below zero weather because people (including Christians)had given them money, which was used to buy alcohol. Don would say on TV that those who gave them money were helping to kill homeless people.

….of asking the liquor store behind me in college to stop selling forties and bum wines because the store was attracting large numbers of, well, bums in bum-rich Boulder. A couple of years later, Boulder had one of its worst years for murder in its history, led by a few murders of, you guessed it, homeless men and people around them.