A PhD candidate at the University of Windsor is releasing some of the findings from his study on panhandling.
Travis Reitsma spent the past six months speaking to 34 panhandlers throughout Windsor with the goal of finding out why people choose to panhandle.
While he admits it's not empirical evidence by any means, his research unearthed some interesting information.
Reitsma says some common misconceptions painting panhandlers as drug and alcohol addicted homeless-people became more and more improbable. While 14 of the people in his study were actively dealing with an addiction, 20 were not.
"The majority of the people that I talked to weren't actively suffering from a drug problem. An interesting misconception is that they're all drug addicts, they're all alcoholics, and while a lot of them have struggled with that in the past, many of them are finding their way out of that," he says.
Nearly all his subjects experienced homelessness at some point, but only 14 are currently homeless. Of the 34 people he interviewed and observed, 17 were in subsidized housing, and three were in regular housing.
The common thread for those with a home is they simply don't get enough money under government programs like Ontario Works, or have been declared disabled in some way under the Ontario Disability Support Program.
"These are often people that can't find jobs because of various barriers, maybe with mental health or physical health, or just the barriers again of trying to survive," says Reitsma. "You're not exactly going to be in a position to hand out resumes if you're just worried about your day to day survival."
Reitsma says it's easy to walk by people on the streets and say "we have programs" for people like you — those people don't stop and think that the panhandler is using those programs and still trying to survive.
He says taking on a minimum-wage job would be no better for many of those he spoke to, the money taken from their assistance, which many say isn't enough meet basic necessities, would be pointless unless they made a living wage.
The biggest factor in taking on more work is it could also cost them benefits under those programs, which could be a hardship for those in need of medication and treatment for mental health issues — which Reitsma says is a common theme among those he studied.
"This is the effect of rampant social inequality. You have people who fall off the end of that and end up sort of becoming forgotten and hated by society," he added.
He agreed panhandling can be seen as one step away from homelessness, but argued the reasons people turn to begging on the street are too diverse to tie up in a neat package and homelessness is just one face of poverty.
Reitsma currently holds a Master's Degree in Communications from the University of Windsor and hopes to defend his dissertation for his PhD in sociology in the spring of 2019.