Income and spending patterns among panhandlers.

Panhandlers are a highly visible group of street people in urban areas. Some believe panhandlers must beg because they have fallen through the social safety net, but others have suggested that panhandlers make considerable amounts of money and spend most of it on their addictions. This raises the question of whether giving money to panhandlers is beneficial to them or not. Income from panhandling could clearly have significant health effects: higher income is strongly associated with better health, and panhandling could have a positive effect if earnings were used to obtain food or housing. On the other hand, use of panhandling income to buy alcohol or illicit drugs could be harmful to health. Although panhandlers have been studied from a sociologic perspective, little quantitative information is available on income and spending among panhandlers. The characteristics of homeless people have been described, but the relevance of this information is uncertain because not all homeless people panhandle, and those who do so may be atypical. We therefore conducted this survey of panhandlers in Toronto to determine their demographic characteristics, income from panhandling and other sources, spending patterns and attitudes toward panhandling. We defined panhandlers as individuals who were soliciting donations of money for personal use from passersby, without providing any goods or services in return. We therefore excluded people who were actively busking (performing music), selling newspapers or using squeegees to clean car windows at the time they were approached to participate. Between February and April 2001, we located panhandlers by systematically searching major streets and subway stations during the late afternoon in a 6-km region of downtown Toronto. To avoid double-counting, a single investigator visually screened all panhandlers. We decided in advance that panhandlers would be offered a nonnegotiable amount of money in exchange for their participation. Participants were not allowed to solicit donations during the 20-minute interview and could not bargain for greater amounts of reimbursement. We sought to determine the lowest payment that would elicit a high response rate by offering $10, $1, $4, $5, $7 and $8 to sequential groups of panhandlers. The number of participants offered each level of reimbursement was recorded, and all individuals who refused to participate were asked to Income and spending patterns among panhandlers