Two blocks from posh Union Square in San Francisco, I used to give a sweet little black woman a dollar every time I passed by. Friends thought I was nuts. She’d only buy drugs with it, they said. But no, she went into the deli on the corner every time and came out with a piece of fruit to eat. How in the world this woman fell through the cracks was a mystery. She was clearly someone’s grandma if not great grammie.
That was twenty years ago. Many more panhandlers now, but some might be someone’s sweet grandma who really needs to eat something. You can probably tell by looking at them, which are truly needy and which are crooks. Hopefully.
My wife ran across one with a sign saying that he would "work for food", she went to a nearby Hardee's and bought a bag of burgers and fries and a soft drink and took it to him, she told me the man took the bag, sat down on the curb and ate it like he hadn't eaten in days. My wife, ever the old softee, cried about that one.
Any major city has massive programs—governmental and charity—to feed the homeless. Nobody is begging on the streets because they don’t have access to food.