Panhandling

David sends us a link to the story, "The Professional Panhandling Plague," in the current issue of City Journal. CJ is published by the Manhattan Institute, a more "conservative-oriented" policy institute. That being said, I find a lot of the work they do and the writing they publish to be interesting, provocative, and worth reading.

In DC also, for the most part, I think that panhandling has been significantly addressed, in large part because of the Business Improvement Districts.

From the article:

Widespread begging bears much of the blame for lingering public impressions that downtowns remain unsafe, even in places like Minneapolis, where crime has fallen. In a survey last year, more than a fifth of Minneapolis’s downtown workers called the area “extremely unsafe” in the evening, largely because of extensive panhandling (nine out of ten downtown workers report getting asked for money at least several times a month). Aggressive beggars have tried to extort cash from waitresses at local restaurants by threatening to harass customers. Families visiting downtown report panhandlers following them down the street and cursing at them if they refuse to give, according to the head of the Downtown Council, a local business group. The bullying shakedowns are having an economic effect on the city: some firms have balked at renewing leases. Downtown business owners in Nashville now rank panhandling as their Number One problem.