Part of which may include addiction, in which case giving money may just feed the addiction.
A colleague of mine did the reverse of this experiment. She is a social worker and when she saw somebody holding up a sign saying they needed help she gave them the address of her agency and said if he would meet her there she would help him get a job. She has never had anybody take her up on it.
However, the mission has homeless people who come in because they’ve hit upon hard circumstances and some of them get help finding jobs and are fine after that.
So much depends on where the person is really at, and what their true intentions are. Really caring about a person would mean NOT giving money in some circumstances. So to judge the motivations of the people putting money in or not putting money in, you’d have to know why they did it. And the truer test would be for somebody to go to the various groups, explain their situation, and see who gives SMART, really helpful care, and who just does the easy thing to make them go away.
Maybe we should have a “panhandler tagging” program where they are tagged like animals and tracked and if they end up living in a nice house and are doing the “panhandle act”. Then arrest them for fraud!!!!
Because they are not only hurting the general goodwill of those who are giving but they are hurting the truly homeless who may actually need a handout...