While enjoying a delightful visit to my old hometown of Chicago - where I grew up, and spent a good chunk of my early adult years before moving to Seattle - I've been struck this week by how panhandlers have overtaken the city. It didn't used to be like this. At all. Downtown, including Michigan Avenue, is inundated with panhandlers, often fairly aggressive in their approach. They wear out their welcome very quickly. In Hyde Park, on the city's southeast side, they're all over 53rd Street. One focal point is outside a church at 53rd and Blackstone Avenue, where at about noon a few sunny days ago, I saw 10 homeless men, just hanging out, one drinking from a container in a brown paper bag. Every few steps we took along 53rd, someone was hitting us up for money.

Here's something I couldn't avoid noticing, and can't, in good consicence, forego mentioning now. The panhandlers that I've seen each of the last four days, all over downtown and in Hyde Park, and in the near north suburb of Evanston, are all black. Every last one I've encountered, and it's been dozens. Chicago has a long, long history of a prosperous black middle class and black entrepreneurs who've been quite successful. With industrial jobs in decline, many opportunities for steady working-class employment among Chicago's black population may have disappeared. This would leave entry-level laborer jobs often taken now by Hispanics, and other jobs requiring more education and training. Given the trying conditions in urban black neighborhoods, young black males desperately need a cohesive family with a strong father to influence their choices about education, job training and providing for one's children. There are, of course, impressive success stories about black men and women who've turned out well thanks to a strong mother, even with their fathers long gone. To those individuals, and their mothers, goes my utmost respect. But all in all, the odds are much tougher when Dad is just a concept.

I think it's about time some University of Chicago sociologists - or maybe one of Chicago's daily newspapers - did a survey of panhandlers and the homeless in Chicago, so we can actually attempt to quantify what percentage come from broken homes, how much education they have, their employment histories, number of children fathered to how many different mothers, and their patterns of drug and alcohol use.

We need a little bit more to go on here than 400 Years Of Slavery, don'cha think?

TECHNORATI TAGS: CHICAGO, PANHANDLERS, AFRICAN-AMERICANS, FATHERS, PARENTING, EDUCATION, JOB TRAINING

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at April 13, 2006 08:02 AM