We as development economists are poverty “experts” in many
respects. We are experts at talking and
writing about poverty. We are experts at
developing mathematical models that explain poverty. And increasingly (see the recent Nobel Prize)
we are becoming experts at identifying the effects of interventions designed to
reduce poverty.
But we are not experts at poverty in the experiential sense. The vast majority of us, who typically live on the comfortable salaries of university professors or institute researchers, do not know what it is actually like to be poor.
Recently I became the director of the Westmont College campus in San Francisco, where we are creating a new center for poverty and development studies. The issue of homelessness in San Francisco has dominated our semester together. John Stiefel, a Westmont graduate and member of Outer Circle, a group of young professionals dedicated to serving the homeless in the Haight-Ashbury district, offered to lead us in an experience of 24 hours of homelessness. We would start with no food, no money, and no place to sleep, relying only on the same resources that the unhoused rely upon to make it through one day (and night). I was joined for the experience by one of our undergraduate students, Jonathan Lee, and our administrative director, Kristen Leichty. What follows is a chronological set of reflections on our 24 hours of homelessness in San Francisco.
Saturday, November 23
9:00 a.m. We meet at the Clunie House, our program center, for a last orientation and time of reflection before beginning our 24 hours. John asks how we feel. I feel excited, slightly anxious. I’ve never been homeless before, even pretending to be homeless. For me, at least, this is a new ballgame. We recite a scripture on God’s love for the poor and say a short prayer together, asking God to teach us all we can learn from the experience. We get our backpacks with our sleeping gear, and walk out the door.
9:27 a.m. I’m sitting under a tree in the Golden Gate Park panhandle, aptly named, for this is one of the increasingly common activities in the park. The first thing we do is sit in the park alone under a tree with our packs, watch the people around us, some housed, some not, and reflect on our situation. Right now my situation is that I feel the urge to pee, but there is no public restroom anywhere nearby. I wait until the reflection time is over and ask John where homeless people go. He explains that the City of San Francisco has purposely limited the number of public restrooms to deter homeless people from congregating here. Given that the number has increased markedly in the last few years, it is hard to see positive effects from this policy, and it definitely is not advantageous to my current dilemma. There is one men’s room in the whole panhandle and it is several blocks away, so we head in that direction. The men’s restroom is unlike any I have seen in that it has no solid door, just a kind of grate like a jail cell so that everyone in the park can see guys doing their business at the men’s urinal. I’m guessing this is to dissuade the homeless from doing things in the restroom that they shouldn’t, and I’m grateful that it is too early for little kids to be playing in the area to observe us as we make use of the facilities.
10:33 a.m. John tells us that All Saints Church up on Waller Street, one block south of Haight Street, serves a meal to the homeless on Saturday mornings. We hike up to the church with our backpacks and take our place in the line waiting for the doors of the church to open. I don’t stand out as much as I thought I would. I intentionally haven’t shaved in a week, and when deciding what to wear to blend in a little better, I considered looking like an aging hippie, but instead decided to go for the laid-off steelworker look with plaid shirt, old leather boots, and ripped jeans. I notice that the modal person in line is kind of like me, white and middle-aged, and even though I’m not showing the wear-and-tear of some of the folks in line with me, I realize that I’m not that different from them, or them from me. A few consecutive good or bad breaks and we’re easily in each other’s shoes. But now we’re standing in the same line, waiting for the same food.
10:53 a.m. The four of us sit at a sticky table next to Ralph and Susan.* Ralph is wearing a 49ers shirt and I am a 49ers fan and I ask him if he likes the 49ers. He says no, that he’s from Wisconsin, and he’s only wearing the shirt because somebody handed it to him from a free-clothing bin. He tells me his story that seems to parallel so many of the stories I’ve heard: Was in the army (special ops, he said), then ran a moderately successful junk hauling business until he illegally parked his truck, and when the city found it hadn’t been registered, they impounded it. He and Susan used to sleep in the truck after they used it during the day for hauling, so now they have nowhere to sleep, and they currently spend their days wheeling their luggage around the city looking for food and places to sleep. They can’t earn the income they need to pay the city for the impoundment—they have no more income because they have no more truck. I hear various versions of this kind of “vicious circle” of homelessness around the table that morning and throughout the day. The vicious circle usually has a backdrop of a dysfunctional family situation followed by what economists call a “negative shock.” Other variations are the “got sick, couldn’t work, lost my health insurance and my house, now I’m sicker” vicious circle, or the “couldn’t afford a rent increase, got evicted, got depressed, started taking drugs to self-medicate, lost my job” vicious circle. Hearing a given number of narratives of the unhoused is hearing close to the same number of vicious circle stories. That we as a society can’t figure out solutions to effectively intervene in vicious circles not only strikes me as inhumane, but as an economist, it strikes me as incredibly inefficient. Many of the unhoused wandering the street in San Francisco are capable of leading productive lives if they could break the vicious circle.
11:44 a.m. John, Kristen, and Jonathan head up to the park where young runaways hang out near Haight Street, but my lower back (on good days held together with a little duct tape and bailing wire) is starting to ache from my backpack, and so I decide to sit on the street corner instead. This is a new experience. There is generally only one kind of person who sits against a church building next to a backpack on the street in Haight-Ashbury, and that is a homeless person, and with my 7-day scruff, I’m at least passable. What I do for the next 45 minutes is study how people engage me sitting on the street in this way with how they normally do in my ordinary life as an economics professor. As an econ prof, when I make eye contact and engage someone, even someone I don’t know, they invariably do the same. Like most professional people, I’m usually engaged and respected during the course of a day. Sitting on the street, I smile and make eye contact with folks as they walk by and keep an informal tally of the responses. About 60 percent don’t even make eye contact; they are too used to homeless in San Francisco and ignore them like dirty candy wrappers on the street. Another 30 percent make eye contact and then turn their heads. About 10 percent smile back, smiles ranging from condescending to genuine. A small subset of the latter group say “Hi.” I remember seeing one cardboard sign of a homeless man saying “Even a smile helps,” and I now understand why. The feeling of disconnectedness from mainstream society is arguably just as painful as being poor, or having to sleep outside. Even in my faux-homeless state, I appreciated the verbal interaction.
1:00 p.m. We walk with our packs a little less than a mile over to “Hippie Hill” in Golden Gate Park. It’s a beautiful day, especially for late November, and the “drumming circle” is in full, enthusiastic rhythm, a collection of people playing congas, other types of drums, and pretty much anything else that makes an interesting noise when you hit it. John introduces us to a few of his friends sitting on the grass on the hill. Most of the unhoused in the Park go by aliases, he explains. So we meet Wild Bill, a harmonica player with a beautiful case of 12 harmonicas, all in different keys. He takes one out and makes it sing to the Latin beat of the drum circle. Next to Wild Bill is another acquaintance, Lewy, about 70, who is smoking a joint with his wife Anna while playing with a metal slide on an old Dobro guitar. I talk about guitars with Lewy and he offers to let me play his Dobro for a while. I try out my riffs in beat with the drum circle, but it’s a challenge because Lewy uses a non-standard tuning, and there’s no way I’m going to re-tune Lewy’s Dobro. While we listen to Lewy and Wild Bill’s playing, we wait for the “Street Professor” John has told us about, who is going to give us lessons on panhandling.
2:18 p.m. Jeremiah, a.k.a. “The Street Professor” shows up about 45 minutes late, but greets us in the park with a warm smile. John tells us one of the Street Professor’s favorite activities is instructing housed people like us about the ways and wisdom of the Street. He has lived in Golden Gate Park for many years, but in the last few years he has become a pastor to the unhoused community here. With his pastor’s salary John says he could probably afford a room somewhere, but chooses to live outside with the people he cares for.
2:40 p.m. The Street Professor gives Jonathan and me lessons at a park bench on “spanging,” an abbreviated word for “spare changing” or what most housed people would call panhandling. The first lesson in Spanging 101 is the careful development of the cardboard sign. The Street Professor explains that for maximum spare change donations, the sign needs to be attractive, but not too attractive. The best signs that people “fly” (hold up to passers by) contain either a witticism or an element of self-revelation that engages the emotions of the potential contributor. I am captivated by the Street Professor’s lecture. Without what I assume is any training in behavioral economics, the Street Professor has a depth of insight into human behavior that I have rarely seen exceeded in academic seminars. He admonishes us to smile and make eye contact with all who pass by. For maximum donations, he explains, you need to stand up and hold your sign right in the middle of your chest. I’m feeling OK in my foray into spanging if I can sit on the sidewalk, but Jonathan and I both recoil at the standing idea. The Street Professor leaves to scout out a couple of spanging sites next to a Safeway parking lot near 8th Avenue and leaves us with the assignment of making our cardboard signs. I ponder what to write on my sign. My wife Leanne is leading our church home group in a study on gratitude, and it’s getting close to Thanksgiving, so I decide to write on mine, “What are You Grateful for Today?”
3:30 p.m. The Street Professor gives Jonathan and me our assigned spots. Mine is near the entrance to the Safeway store, about 20 yards from a Salvation Army bell-ringer. My greatest fear right now is running into one of my USF students. What I am doing sitting out in front of a Safeway panhandling is simply too difficult to explain in any kind of comfortable way. I try the standing posture for a while, but it’s just too awkward, feels way too confrontational. My pride just can’t handle the standing, so after about 5 minutes I just sit slumped against the parking lot wall with my sign aimed at sidewalk pedestrians. Jonathan is spanging on the other side of the parking lot. I can only see him vaguely, but he doesn’t look that comfortable doing what he’s doing, and he’s going the whole way standing up with his sign “College Debt Sucks, but You Don’t.”
4:03 p.m. The Street Professor checks in with each of us after about half an hour. Jonathon’s sign has earned him four quarters so far. I tell the street professor the bad news that I have received exactly $0 in donations, but the good news is that none of my USF students have walked by and asked me what I’m doing panhandling on the street. He says I need to make more eye contact, be more positive, and stop acting like a morose unemployed steel worker with my head down so much.
4:08 p.m. I am happy that there is only 20 minutes left to my spanging experience when the dreaded event happens. I look up to see Katie, one of my favorite masters students who cheerily sits in the front row of my econometrics class this semester, walking out of the store hand-in-hand with her boyfriend. We know each other pretty well—I’ve had her in class two consecutive semesters and she comes to my office for help with her thesis. She looks at my sign and her eyes meet mine for a moment, and then she turns back to her happy conversation with her boyfriend. She doesn’t recognize me as she passes a foot away on the sidewalk.
4:20 p.m. A woman with a southern accent asks me “Y’all want somethin’ to eat?” I look around me and all I see is me and not y’all, but I decline. I’m OK with accepting spare change, but I don’t want her going out of her way. But with my refusing food, she probably thinks I wanted to spend the money on something illicit. About 10 minutes before the end of our exercise, a nice kid driving a nice car, stops to look at my cardboard sign, puts his hazard lights on, then gets out of his car to hand me $2. I thank him, and he smiles, tells me to have a good day, and hops back in his car. Wow.
4:30 p.m. The Street Professor, John, and Kristen arrive at the Safeway after scouting places to sleep tonight in the park. Jonathan is pretty done with spanging, and so am I. Jonathan’s donations ended at his 4 quarters, and I have the $2 from the kid with the nice car. We had agreed to divide what spare change we were handed among the four of us, and so we go into the Safeway to maximize the number of calories we can get for four people on $3. With unexpected glee, we find a display of over-ripe bananas at a bargain price, and we get four of those. We consider buying a can of chili, but we have nothing to cook it with and a couple of us recoil at the thought of taking turns eating cold chili out of a can. Then we see a club-card special on generic Safeway fruit pies for $0.50 if you buy four or more, and the decision is easy. The four of us are able to fill our gut tonight for $2.79.
5:20 p.m. It’s getting dark, and John tells us about a place where we might be able to supplement our collective $2.79 Safeway meal. A church group often hands out pizza on Saturday nights at the “horseshoe” right where Haight Street hits Golden Gate Park. We pick up our backpacks and walk there to wait in line for about an hour before the group shows up. The pizza is pretty lousy and tastes like the kind where you get 2 larges for $10, but that probably makes sense if you are trying to feed pizza to the largest number of people on a low budget.
6:30 p.m. I’m standing around talking to some homeless folks who have been fellow beneficiaries of the pizza, but look around for my backpack and it’s no longer behind me. I tell everyone that it had been right there, but someone has obviously taken it when I wasn’t paying attention. I’m unhappy. Without my sleeping bag, it’s going to be a cold night in the park. Then the Street Professor hands me my pack. “Always pay attention to your stuff,” he lectures. “Out here on the street, it has a habit of walking away.”
8:00 p.m. John and the Street Professor take us for a walk down Haight Street at night to meet their friends. They seem to know everyone, many of the runaway teenagers, just about all of the homeless folks. It is a tight community. Everyone shares with each other. It’s a way of survival, just like we teach our students in development economics classes: the rich are independent; the poor are interdependent. And, explains the Street Professor, this is why people generally don’t go for the relocation schemes offered to them by the City. Their whole support network is here, not in Fresno, Redding, or Antioch.
8:32 p.m. John introduces us to some of his friends on Haight Street. One is a teenage runaway who shows us his dog who can ride a skateboard, and I’m amazed because the dog (named Rider) actually can ride a skateboard and I’ve never realized a dog could do such a thing. He then introduces us to a marijuana dealer named Ape Man, who he later explained operates a lucrative illegal pot farm up north and comes back down to the Haight to unload his harvest. I look closely at Ape Man, and suddenly realize that Ape Man is a student I had in one of my upper-division economics classes about six or seven years ago at the University of San Francisco. Ape Man doesn’t recognize me either. He was a good student; I think he even got a B+, but I’m doubting his business success story is going to be featured in the alumni magazine.
9:15 p.m. We say goodbye to Ape Man, and are ready to head to the park for the night. John and Kristen found four spots, and they lead us to them in order of quality, quality being defined as flat and concealed from view. We are fortunate tonight—the first spot we explore, the best one, is located in a thick grove of trees and bushes only about 500 yards from the de Young museum. John tells us that it’s one of the prime sites in Golden Gate Park. He instructs us not to use our flashlights because this is the first way that park rangers and the police are able to spot people camping in the park at night. Instead he uses a red bike light aimed at the ground to give us enough light to roll out our tarps and sleeping bags. We play a few games of Connect Four illuminated by the red bike light, which is our only light except for the more distant lights of the DeYoung. Jonathan wins all the games. Other than this it is very dark; there is no moon tonight.
9:30 p.m. We hear raccoons around us, and also what sounds like the whining howl of a coyote. Birds are making night noises everywhere; we hear owls hoo-hooing and some kind of more squawky bird. I realize there is a whole eco-system out here in the park. In whispers John tells us about a practical joke that the Street Professor played on him when they did their first homeless experience with another group, where the Street Professor chubbed their sleeping area with granola before he kindly bade them good night. In the middle of the night one guy in their group awoke to a raccoon practically kissing his face, and when they looked around, the whole camp was infested with raccoons scavenging the granola. Because of this John says no food at the camp site.
Sunday, November 24
2:00 a.m. The raccoons and owls are really loud. Nature calls and I use my phone as a flashlight to walk away from the camp. John wakes and thinks I’m a cop doing a sweep in the park, but luckily it’s just me. I wake about ever hour or two during the middle of the night. It’s not a bad night, just one without lots of sleep. And it only seems really cold in the morning when we have to wake up in the dark. We have to clear the site before the sun comes up.
8:00 a.m. We arrive back at the Golden Gate Park panhandle a couple of blocks away from Clunie House, where we each spend an hour alone in reflection time with God and what he has taught us through the experience. First, I am grateful for the weather, which could not have been much better for this time of year, and I realize how much more difficult the conditions must be for the unhoused when it is much colder or rainy. I realize as “successfully housed” people or even as white-collar folks, we attribute so much of our success to our own smarts and effort, when whatever virtues we possess are strongly complemented by a series of breaks that have broken in favor of our worldly success. What I see among the unhoused community is a group of people who have essentially the same level of smarts as everyone else, but have not had these complementary breaks. So often they emerge from abusive families, have experienced a series of unfortunate events, and have lacked the adequate support network or timely intervention that would prevent the onset of the vicious circle. I also realize that I will never look at a homeless person the same again.
9:00 a.m. We debrief together back at the Clunie House. One of the thoughts I cannot help but share is the faithfulness of the church in the ministry to the homeless in San Francisco. We would have been much more hungry, much more dependent on our (inept) spanging without both of the opportunities for food offered to us by All Saints in the morning and the Lighthouse Church in the evening. The City and County of San Francisco apparently spends $250 million dollars to “combat” homelessness in its annual budget, and I’m not arguing that this has no effect. But what I noticed more was the kindness of the church in not only caring for, but incarnating itself into the homeless community. It is this work that inspires me and gives me hope that the church may one day begin to posture itself, and be seen by others, not principally as an actor in right-wing politics, but as servants to those in need reaching out to and engaging the poorest, the marginalized, and most needy in our communities and in the world.
I’m also struck by how complicated are the lives of the unhoused. My workday is relatively routine by comparison: I eat breakfast that is virtually sitting there waiting for me. I follow a reliable routine getting to work. I work at my desk, have meetings, teach classes, and return to my family and a place where I know I will sleep that night. So much of my day is practically on auto-pilot. But basic food and shelter issues make up decisions that have to be made each day by the unhoused; there seems to be virtually no predictability. And a great deal of recent research has shown how this constant mental labor taxes the decision-making of the ultra-poor. I still don’t know what it’s really like to be homeless, but I know a little more than before, and probably more importantly, I feel more than before. Empathy runs deeper than sympathy.
Follow AcrossTwoWorlds on Twitter @BruceWydick. Shrewd Samaritan is my new book on how ordinary people can effectively engage poverty, both abroad and at home.
*To protect their privacy, the names of the unhoused people
we met have been changed.
Reflections on a Self-Experiment: 24 Hours of Homelessness in San Francisco
We as development economists are poverty “experts” in many respects. We are experts at talking and writing about poverty. We are experts at developing mathematical models that explain poverty. And increasingly (see the recent Nobel Prize) we are becoming experts at identifying the effects of interventions designed to reduce poverty.
But we are not experts at poverty in the experiential sense. The vast majority of us, who typically live on the comfortable salaries of university professors or institute researchers, do not know what it is actually like to be poor.
Recently I became the director of the Westmont College campus in San Francisco, where we are creating a new center for poverty and development studies. The issue of homelessness in San Francisco has dominated our semester together. John Stiefel, a Westmont graduate and member of Outer Circle, a group of young professionals dedicated to serving the homeless in the Haight-Ashbury district, offered to lead us in an experience of 24 hours of homelessness. We would start with no food, no money, and no place to sleep, relying only on the same resources that the unhoused rely upon to make it through one day (and night). I was joined for the experience by one of our undergraduate students, Jonathan Lee, and our administrative director, Kristen Leichty. What follows is a chronological set of reflections on our 24 hours of homelessness in San Francisco.
Saturday, November 23
9:00 a.m. We meet at the Clunie House, our program center, for a last orientation and time of reflection before beginning our 24 hours. John asks how we feel. I feel excited, slightly anxious. I’ve never been homeless before, even pretending to be homeless. For me, at least, this is a new ballgame. We recite a scripture on God’s love for the poor and say a short prayer together, asking God to teach us all we can learn from the experience. We get our backpacks with our sleeping gear, and walk out the door.
9:27 a.m. I’m sitting under a tree in the Golden Gate Park panhandle, aptly named, for this is one of the increasingly common activities in the park. The first thing we do is sit in the park alone under a tree with our packs, watch the people around us, some housed, some not, and reflect on our situation. Right now my situation is that I feel the urge to pee, but there is no public restroom anywhere nearby. I wait until the reflection time is over and ask John where homeless people go. He explains that the City of San Francisco has purposely limited the number of public restrooms to deter homeless people from congregating here. Given that the number has increased markedly in the last few years, it is hard to see positive effects from this policy, and it definitely is not advantageous to my current dilemma. There is one men’s room in the whole panhandle and it is several blocks away, so we head in that direction. The men’s restroom is unlike any I have seen in that it has no solid door, just a kind of grate like a jail cell so that everyone in the park can see guys doing their business at the men’s urinal. I’m guessing this is to dissuade the homeless from doing things in the restroom that they shouldn’t, and I’m grateful that it is too early for little kids to be playing in the area to observe us as we make use of the facilities.
10:33 a.m. John tells us that All Saints Church up on Waller Street, one block south of Haight Street, serves a meal to the homeless on Saturday mornings. We hike up to the church with our backpacks and take our place in the line waiting for the doors of the church to open. I don’t stand out as much as I thought I would. I intentionally haven’t shaved in a week, and when deciding what to wear to blend in a little better, I considered looking like an aging hippie, but instead decided to go for the laid-off steelworker look with plaid shirt, old leather boots, and ripped jeans. I notice that the modal person in line is kind of like me, white and middle-aged, and even though I’m not showing the wear-and-tear of some of the folks in line with me, I realize that I’m not that different from them, or them from me. A few consecutive good or bad breaks and we’re easily in each other’s shoes. But now we’re standing in the same line, waiting for the same food.
10:53 a.m. The four of us sit at a sticky table next to Ralph and Susan.* Ralph is wearing a 49ers shirt and I am a 49ers fan and I ask him if he likes the 49ers. He says no, that he’s from Wisconsin, and he’s only wearing the shirt because somebody handed it to him from a free-clothing bin. He tells me his story that seems to parallel so many of the stories I’ve heard: Was in the army (special ops, he said), then ran a moderately successful junk hauling business until he illegally parked his truck, and when the city found it hadn’t been registered, they impounded it. He and Susan used to sleep in the truck after they used it during the day for hauling, so now they have nowhere to sleep, and they currently spend their days wheeling their luggage around the city looking for food and places to sleep. They can’t earn the income they need to pay the city for the impoundment—they have no more income because they have no more truck. I hear various versions of this kind of “vicious circle” of homelessness around the table that morning and throughout the day. The vicious circle usually has a backdrop of a dysfunctional family situation followed by what economists call a “negative shock.” Other variations are the “got sick, couldn’t work, lost my health insurance and my house, now I’m sicker” vicious circle, or the “couldn’t afford a rent increase, got evicted, got depressed, started taking drugs to self-medicate, lost my job” vicious circle. Hearing a given number of narratives of the unhoused is hearing close to the same number of vicious circle stories. That we as a society can’t figure out solutions to effectively intervene in vicious circles not only strikes me as inhumane, but as an economist, it strikes me as incredibly inefficient. Many of the unhoused wandering the street in San Francisco are capable of leading productive lives if they could break the vicious circle.
11:44 a.m. John, Kristen, and Jonathan head up to the park where young runaways hang out near Haight Street, but my lower back (on good days held together with a little duct tape and bailing wire) is starting to ache from my backpack, and so I decide to sit on the street corner instead. This is a new experience. There is generally only one kind of person who sits against a church building next to a backpack on the street in Haight-Ashbury, and that is a homeless person, and with my 7-day scruff, I’m at least passable. What I do for the next 45 minutes is study how people engage me sitting on the street in this way with how they normally do in my ordinary life as an economics professor. As an econ prof, when I make eye contact and engage someone, even someone I don’t know, they invariably do the same. Like most professional people, I’m usually engaged and respected during the course of a day. Sitting on the street, I smile and make eye contact with folks as they walk by and keep an informal tally of the responses. About 60 percent don’t even make eye contact; they are too used to homeless in San Francisco and ignore them like dirty candy wrappers on the street. Another 30 percent make eye contact and then turn their heads. About 10 percent smile back, smiles ranging from condescending to genuine. A small subset of the latter group say “Hi.” I remember seeing one cardboard sign of a homeless man saying “Even a smile helps,” and I now understand why. The feeling of disconnectedness from mainstream society is arguably just as painful as being poor, or having to sleep outside. Even in my faux-homeless state, I appreciated the verbal interaction.
1:00 p.m. We walk with our packs a little less than a mile over to “Hippie Hill” in Golden Gate Park. It’s a beautiful day, especially for late November, and the “drumming circle” is in full, enthusiastic rhythm, a collection of people playing congas, other types of drums, and pretty much anything else that makes an interesting noise when you hit it. John introduces us to a few of his friends sitting on the grass on the hill. Most of the unhoused in the Park go by aliases, he explains. So we meet Wild Bill, a harmonica player with a beautiful case of 12 harmonicas, all in different keys. He takes one out and makes it sing to the Latin beat of the drum circle. Next to Wild Bill is another acquaintance, Lewy, about 70, who is smoking a joint with his wife Anna while playing with a metal slide on an old Dobro guitar. I talk about guitars with Lewy and he offers to let me play his Dobro for a while. I try out my riffs in beat with the drum circle, but it’s a challenge because Lewy uses a non-standard tuning, and there’s no way I’m going to re-tune Lewy’s Dobro. While we listen to Lewy and Wild Bill’s playing, we wait for the “Street Professor” John has told us about, who is going to give us lessons on panhandling.
2:18 p.m. Jeremiah, a.k.a. “The Street Professor” shows up about 45 minutes late, but greets us in the park with a warm smile. John tells us one of the Street Professor’s favorite activities is instructing housed people like us about the ways and wisdom of the Street. He has lived in Golden Gate Park for many years, but in the last few years he has become a pastor to the unhoused community here. With his pastor’s salary John says he could probably afford a room somewhere, but chooses to live outside with the people he cares for.
2:40 p.m. The Street Professor gives Jonathan and me lessons at a park bench on “spanging,” an abbreviated word for “spare changing” or what most housed people would call panhandling. The first lesson in Spanging 101 is the careful development of the cardboard sign. The Street Professor explains that for maximum spare change donations, the sign needs to be attractive, but not too attractive. The best signs that people “fly” (hold up to passers by) contain either a witticism or an element of self-revelation that engages the emotions of the potential contributor. I am captivated by the Street Professor’s lecture. Without what I assume is any training in behavioral economics, the Street Professor has a depth of insight into human behavior that I have rarely seen exceeded in academic seminars. He admonishes us to smile and make eye contact with all who pass by. For maximum donations, he explains, you need to stand up and hold your sign right in the middle of your chest. I’m feeling OK in my foray into spanging if I can sit on the sidewalk, but Jonathan and I both recoil at the standing idea. The Street Professor leaves to scout out a couple of spanging sites next to a Safeway parking lot near 8th Avenue and leaves us with the assignment of making our cardboard signs. I ponder what to write on my sign. My wife Leanne is leading our church home group in a study on gratitude, and it’s getting close to Thanksgiving, so I decide to write on mine, “What are You Grateful for Today?”
3:30 p.m. The Street Professor gives Jonathan and me our assigned spots. Mine is near the entrance to the Safeway store, about 20 yards from a Salvation Army bell-ringer. My greatest fear right now is running into one of my USF students. What I am doing sitting out in front of a Safeway panhandling is simply too difficult to explain in any kind of comfortable way. I try the standing posture for a while, but it’s just too awkward, feels way too confrontational. My pride just can’t handle the standing, so after about 5 minutes I just sit slumped against the parking lot wall with my sign aimed at sidewalk pedestrians. Jonathan is spanging on the other side of the parking lot. I can only see him vaguely, but he doesn’t look that comfortable doing what he’s doing, and he’s going the whole way standing up with his sign “College Debt Sucks, but You Don’t.”
4:03 p.m. The Street Professor checks in with each of us after about half an hour. Jonathon’s sign has earned him four quarters so far. I tell the street professor the bad news that I have received exactly $0 in donations, but the good news is that none of my USF students have walked by and asked me what I’m doing panhandling on the street. He says I need to make more eye contact, be more positive, and stop acting like a morose unemployed steel worker with my head down so much.
4:08 p.m. I am happy that there is only 20 minutes left to my spanging experience when the dreaded event happens. I look up to see Katie, one of my favorite masters students who cheerily sits in the front row of my econometrics class this semester, walking out of the store hand-in-hand with her boyfriend. We know each other pretty well—I’ve had her in class two consecutive semesters and she comes to my office for help with her thesis. She looks at my sign and her eyes meet mine for a moment, and then she turns back to her happy conversation with her boyfriend. She doesn’t recognize me as she passes a foot away on the sidewalk.
4:20 p.m. A woman with a southern accent asks me “Y’all want somethin’ to eat?” I look around me and all I see is me and not y’all, but I decline. I’m OK with accepting spare change, but I don’t want her going out of her way. But with my refusing food, she probably thinks I wanted to spend the money on something illicit. About 10 minutes before the end of our exercise, a nice kid driving a nice car, stops to look at my cardboard sign, puts his hazard lights on, then gets out of his car to hand me $2. I thank him, and he smiles, tells me to have a good day, and hops back in his car. Wow.
4:30 p.m. The Street Professor, John, and Kristen arrive at the Safeway after scouting places to sleep tonight in the park. Jonathan is pretty done with spanging, and so am I. Jonathan’s donations ended at his 4 quarters, and I have the $2 from the kid with the nice car. We had agreed to divide what spare change we were handed among the four of us, and so we go into the Safeway to maximize the number of calories we can get for four people on $3. With unexpected glee, we find a display of over-ripe bananas at a bargain price, and we get four of those. We consider buying a can of chili, but we have nothing to cook it with and a couple of us recoil at the thought of taking turns eating cold chili out of a can. Then we see a club-card special on generic Safeway fruit pies for $0.50 if you buy four or more, and the decision is easy. The four of us are able to fill our gut tonight for $2.79.
5:20 p.m. It’s getting dark, and John tells us about a place where we might be able to supplement our collective $2.79 Safeway meal. A church group often hands out pizza on Saturday nights at the “horseshoe” right where Haight Street hits Golden Gate Park. We pick up our backpacks and walk there to wait in line for about an hour before the group shows up. The pizza is pretty lousy and tastes like the kind where you get 2 larges for $10, but that probably makes sense if you are trying to feed pizza to the largest number of people on a low budget.
6:30 p.m. I’m standing around talking to some homeless folks who have been fellow beneficiaries of the pizza, but look around for my backpack and it’s no longer behind me. I tell everyone that it had been right there, but someone has obviously taken it when I wasn’t paying attention. I’m unhappy. Without my sleeping bag, it’s going to be a cold night in the park. Then the Street Professor hands me my pack. “Always pay attention to your stuff,” he lectures. “Out here on the street, it has a habit of walking away.”
8:00 p.m. John and the Street Professor take us for a walk down Haight Street at night to meet their friends. They seem to know everyone, many of the runaway teenagers, just about all of the homeless folks. It is a tight community. Everyone shares with each other. It’s a way of survival, just like we teach our students in development economics classes: the rich are independent; the poor are interdependent. And, explains the Street Professor, this is why people generally don’t go for the relocation schemes offered to them by the City. Their whole support network is here, not in Fresno, Redding, or Antioch.
8:32 p.m. John introduces us to some of his friends on Haight Street. One is a teenage runaway who shows us his dog who can ride a skateboard, and I’m amazed because the dog (named Rider) actually can ride a skateboard and I’ve never realized a dog could do such a thing. He then introduces us to a marijuana dealer named Ape Man, who he later explained operates a lucrative illegal pot farm up north and comes back down to the Haight to unload his harvest. I look closely at Ape Man, and suddenly realize that Ape Man is a student I had in one of my upper-division economics classes about six or seven years ago at the University of San Francisco. Ape Man doesn’t recognize me either. He was a good student; I think he even got a B+, but I’m doubting his business success story is going to be featured in the alumni magazine.
9:15 p.m. We say goodbye to Ape Man, and are ready to head to the park for the night. John and Kristen found four spots, and they lead us to them in order of quality, quality being defined as flat and concealed from view. We are fortunate tonight—the first spot we explore, the best one, is located in a thick grove of trees and bushes only about 500 yards from the de Young museum. John tells us that it’s one of the prime sites in Golden Gate Park. He instructs us not to use our flashlights because this is the first way that park rangers and the police are able to spot people camping in the park at night. Instead he uses a red bike light aimed at the ground to give us enough light to roll out our tarps and sleeping bags. We play a few games of Connect Four illuminated by the red bike light, which is our only light except for the more distant lights of the DeYoung. Jonathan wins all the games. Other than this it is very dark; there is no moon tonight.
9:30 p.m. We hear raccoons around us, and also what sounds like the whining howl of a coyote. Birds are making night noises everywhere; we hear owls hoo-hooing and some kind of more squawky bird. I realize there is a whole eco-system out here in the park. In whispers John tells us about a practical joke that the Street Professor played on him when they did their first homeless experience with another group, where the Street Professor chubbed their sleeping area with granola before he kindly bade them good night. In the middle of the night one guy in their group awoke to a raccoon practically kissing his face, and when they looked around, the whole camp was infested with raccoons scavenging the granola. Because of this John says no food at the camp site.
Sunday, November 24
2:00 a.m. The raccoons and owls are really loud. Nature calls and I use my phone as a flashlight to walk away from the camp. John wakes and thinks I’m a cop doing a sweep in the park, but luckily it’s just me. I wake about ever hour or two during the middle of the night. It’s not a bad night, just one without lots of sleep. And it only seems really cold in the morning when we have to wake up in the dark. We have to clear the site before the sun comes up.
8:00 a.m. We arrive back at the Golden Gate Park panhandle a couple of blocks away from Clunie House, where we each spend an hour alone in reflection time with God and what he has taught us through the experience. First, I am grateful for the weather, which could not have been much better for this time of year, and I realize how much more difficult the conditions must be for the unhoused when it is much colder or rainy. I realize as “successfully housed” people or even as white-collar folks, we attribute so much of our success to our own smarts and effort, when whatever virtues we possess are strongly complemented by a series of breaks that have broken in favor of our worldly success. What I see among the unhoused community is a group of people who have essentially the same level of smarts as everyone else, but have not had these complementary breaks. So often they emerge from abusive families, have experienced a series of unfortunate events, and have lacked the adequate support network or timely intervention that would prevent the onset of the vicious circle. I also realize that I will never look at a homeless person the same again.
9:00 a.m. We debrief together back at the Clunie House. One of the thoughts I cannot help but share is the faithfulness of the church in the ministry to the homeless in San Francisco. We would have been much more hungry, much more dependent on our (inept) spanging without both of the opportunities for food offered to us by All Saints in the morning and the Lighthouse Church in the evening. The City and County of San Francisco apparently spends $250 million dollars to “combat” homelessness in its annual budget, and I’m not arguing that this has no effect. But what I noticed more was the kindness of the church in not only caring for, but incarnating itself into the homeless community. It is this work that inspires me and gives me hope that the church may one day begin to posture itself, and be seen by others, not principally as an actor in right-wing politics, but as servants to those in need reaching out to and engaging the poorest, the marginalized, and most needy in our communities and in the world.
I’m also struck by how complicated are the lives of the unhoused. My workday is relatively routine by comparison: I eat breakfast that is virtually sitting there waiting for me. I follow a reliable routine getting to work. I work at my desk, have meetings, teach classes, and return to my family and a place where I know I will sleep that night. So much of my day is practically on auto-pilot. But basic food and shelter issues make up decisions that have to be made each day by the unhoused; there seems to be virtually no predictability. And a great deal of recent research has shown how this constant mental labor taxes the decision-making of the ultra-poor. I still don’t know what it’s really like to be homeless, but I know a little more than before, and probably more importantly, I feel more than before. Empathy runs deeper than sympathy.
Follow AcrossTwoWorlds on Twitter @BruceWydick. Shrewd Samaritan is my new book on how ordinary people can effectively engage poverty, both abroad and at home.
*To protect their privacy, the names of the unhoused people we met have been changed.