Ask around our great nation, and, in-between the stereotypes about cowboy hats and skies that are not cloudy all day, you may well hear that Houston’s a welcoming city. A city that opened its arms — and its stadium — to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, a good city for business, maybe even a city where the American dream’s going strong.
But ask Houston’s large homeless population, which stood at between 12,000 and 14,000 even before the devastating hurricane season of 2005, and you’ll hear a different tale. Houston ranks No. 7 in the National Coalition for the Homeless’s list of meanest cities in 2006.
It's soon to be illegal to panhandle around here, despite the stories of people like Carol Walker. Even in 1994, when her story appeared in Essence magazine, conditions were hard, and with the growing number of homeless people that have inevitably followed the hurricanes, Houstonist can only imagine they’ve gotten worse. Walker, who became homeless only after a car accident in which she was hit by an uninsured driver, says that panhandling is always a last resort. She will “work when [she] can get it…but there are not many [work] crews willing to give women jobs.” Sometimes, she says, she cleans up clubs after hours for $10.
If Carol’s still out there, 12 years later, things may have gotten even worse. While Houston used to, according to City Councilwoman Addie Wiseman, “encourage [homeless] people to go into public buildings” during the unbearable summer heat, now there’s an ordinance on the books that says the city’s homeless are no longer welcome even in the Houston Public Library, where they used to be a commonplace sight. Perhaps Houstonist is unclear on the definition of “public?"
The bill forbidding panhandling to those who need it will probably pass about the time that Houston-born Clay Chastain goes off to pricey Trinity University in San Antonio. Meanwhile, as an article in this week's Houston Press tells us, he’s doing some panhandling of his own: hitting people up online for money to fix his Porsche. Ain’t America grand?
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Photo from flickr user di1980
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