Mayor's panhandling ads to begin airing Monday

Starting Monday, Houston drivers will begin hearing radio advertisements in which Mayor Bill White will urge residents to give money to social service agencies instead of street panhandlers — and the city has already started gearing up to help make that point.

The ad campaign is part of a strategy White announced last year to help reduce panhandling; another part is an ordinance City Council approved in December that put restrictions on roadside soliciting (which, based on what we've seen, isn't being enforced too well). "We want to give people real change and not just spare change," White said. "People shouldn’t give to people soliciting on the streets. That’s dangerous and is not good for our community."

Social workers are already hitting the streets to warn panhandlers about the coming crackdown, including the Search Homeless Project's Don Hall, who KHOU found driving around, talking to solicitors. "We try and find homeless people, and then we try and get them engaged in services," Hall said. And just in case that doesn't work, the municipal courts have already started holding special court sessions for panhandlers, which let them perform community service to work off warrants. "Warrants build up, and people do get paralyzed in that, if they have five or six tickets and there's $200 bonds per ticket, they may not do anything about it," Judge Berta Mejia told Channel 11.

We understand the motivation for the panhandling crackdown, but we still wonder how effective it'll be — as we said, enforcement of the panhandling ordinance is spotty, and with an already overworked police department, we're not sure that will improve. Plus, as good an idea as it is, getting people to donate to social service agencies could be a hard sell when they can slip a dollar or two out their car window and clear their conscience much more easily. So we'll see.

The mayor's commercials are being paid for with private funds.