Lawmakers Try for Permit Requirement for Panhandlers in Washington D.C. Area

By Luiza Oleszczuk, Christian Post Reporter Saturday, November 26, 2011

Three state Democratic lawmakers reportedly plan to file bills during next year's session in Maryland requiring panhandlers, including the homeless, to obtain a permit before asking people for money.

Anne Kaiser and Aruna Miller, two Delegates, and the state senator, Jamie B. Raskin, plan to crack down on the practice of panhandling in the Montgomery County, a Washington suburb, reported Fox News. One planned bill would allow the Montgomery County Council to implement a system requiring anyone asking for money on local streets to obtain a permit first, the news network reports. That would also include sports teams, police officers and firefighters. But the bill proposed by Miller and Raskin would reportedly leave the council an option of either demanding permits or banning panhandling all together.

Kaiser told Fox News that she wants to give the council "the flexibility to create a permit system to train panhandlers," adding that regulations would be needed to ensure the safety of panhandlers on busy roads.

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The idea has divided organizations that help the homeless in Montgomery County, with some supporting the idea, but some, like the National Coalition for the Homeless, suggesting that the permit requirement would criminalize homelessness, which would be the beginning of an attempt to control and, ultimately, get rid of homeless people, Fox News reported. Supporters of the proposed legislation claim that controlling and limiting the panhandling practice should mobilize the homeless to obtain more sustainable means of support.

Exact statistics on the number of homeless people are hard to come across, especially since not all panhandlers are necessarily homeless. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless: "As a result of methodological and financial constraints, most studies are limited to counting people who are in shelters or on the streets. While this approach may yield useful information about the number of people who use services such as shelters and soup kitchens, or who are easy to locate on the street, it can result in underestimates of homelessness."

The agency's latest numbers from 2009 indicate that, on an average night, in the 23 cities surveyed, 94 percent of people living on the streets were single adults, 4 percent were part of families and 2 percent were unaccompanied minors. Seventy percent of those in emergency shelters were single adults, 29 percent were part of families and 1 percent were unaccompanied minors.

But those numbers are likely to have increased.

For example, the New York branch of the Coalition for the Homeless has recently published a report that claims that the numbers on homelessness passed all records in the United states' most populated city recently. There are now more than 41,000 homeless adults and children sleeping in New York City shelters every night, according to the report. Homeless children and families are also staying longer in the expensive shelter system.