Help for homeless shouldn’t be cash

Should we give money to beggars on the street? Many people do – because they are compassionate, generous and worried about the division in society between the haves and the have-nots. But even social service agencies now say they are doing the wrong thing.

The chief executive of the Christchurch City Mission, Matthew Mark, warns that many beggars are not homeless and may even be ‘‘making a jolly good living out of it’’. He says that the money people so kindly drop into a cap or a cup might be fuelling alcohol or drug addictions.

Begging used to be a rare sight on New Zealand streets, but it has risen in the past decade or two to the point where councils in a number of cities – Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, even Palmerston North – have been forced to consider bylaws or other measures to combat it.

Such bylaws are ineffective. An attempt by Auckland to outlaw begging which intimidated people or caused offence proved difficult and expensive to enforce. In one month during the 2015 cruise ship season, council officers clocked up 900 breaches, but the number of beggars didn’t decrease. It is difficult to actually ban sitting on the street.

The appearance of street beggars is a symptom of a wider failure in society – some might say an extreme and visible consequence of what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has called the failure of capitalism.

The economic theory which has informed New Zealand government policy since the 1980s proposed that the benefits of a strong economy would ‘‘trickle down’’ to the needy. Many are having second thoughts about that.

But even at the most basic level – literally street level in the case of begging – the problem is more complicated than even the vexed question of poverty.

Those who work with them say that the lives of people reduced to the indignity of begging are often blighted by mental illness, alcohol or drug addiction, or by failures of rehabilitation from prison.

These people deserve our sympathy, and should not be ignored or criminalised, but their problems cannot be solved by well-meaning people directly handing over the change from their pocket or purse – however worthy the giver might feel about that transaction.

And it could be that begging is more lucrative than people think. Former Christchurch city councillor and Central City Business Association manager Paul Lonsdale has said that some beggars might be making between $100 and $150 a day.

Maybe, then, well-meaning citizens are simply too generous, to the point of incentivising the activity.

Stephanie McIntyre, the director of Wellington’s Downtown Community Ministry, suggests that the begging ‘‘phenomenon’’ might disappear if people stopped handing over their loose change. Don’t give them a cent, she says. ‘‘It’s the public who are fuelling this, so why would we not expect it to grow?’’

Altruism is not misguided, it is merely misdirected. If people want to give money to help alleviate the very real distress of poverty and homelessness, or even of addiction and mental illness, they should give it to people who have built up expertise in tackling these issues at the grassroots.

In Christchurch, worthy beneficiaries would include the City Mission, the Salvation Army and Odyssey House. Give money to them and not to the beggars.