HwaJeong Kim doesn’t just stop to offer panhandlers pocket change at intersections. She asks how they’re doing, shares food and buys bulk packages of handwarmers to pass out in winter.

Kim, the vice president of the St. Paul City Council, was especially taken aback to learn this week that City Hall is discouraging all of the above through a new street sign campaign, with the stated goal of promoting pedestrian safety.

The signs read, “For Everyone’s Safety, DON’T GIVE IN ROADWAYS,” and encourage donations to service providers instead.

Not everyone has embraced the message. “I guess I’m the problem,” quipped Kim on Wednesday, adding that she had no intention of curbing her giving habit.

The inaugural sign for the city’s “Be the Solution” campaign went up at Dale Street and Rondo Avenue late last month, and St. Paul Public Works since has installed three more signs on existing poles at busy intersections around the city: Phalen Boulevard and Johnson Parkway, Snelling and University avenues, and downtown 5th Street by 7th Street.

Seven or more additional signs will be installed on new poles after permitting and coordination with underground utilities, according to the mayor’s office.

City officials emphasize that while the signs are meant to discourage drivers from encouraging unsafe behavior, panhandling itself is not illegal. The signage directs drivers to a city website — stpaul.gov/solutions — that encourages donations to service providers that work directly with the homeless.

On Sept. 25, 2024, the City of Saint Paul launched the “Be the Solution” campaign, installing signage at 11 busy intersections across the city in an attempt to discourage giving money to panhandlers. The campaign launched with a new website that encourages charitable donations to official service providers. The goal, according to St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter’s office and St. Paul Public Works, is to steer those in need away from dangerously busy intersections and toward services better geared to help them. (Courtesy of the City of St. Paul)

The city is in the process of establishing a giving fund through the St. Paul and Minnesota Foundation to support providers associated with Ramsey County’s Heading Home Ramsey outreach coalition.

“We have a number of intersections where we’ve just been concerned about the safety issues with individuals in the median, or going into the roadway asking for things from people in their vehicles,” Deputy Mayor Jaime Tincher said in an interview.

The campaign, she said, is “pro-donation. It’s 100% not anti-individuals who are struggling and asking for money.”

A difficult backdrop

St. Paul, like many urban areas, experienced a visible uptick in panhandling, loitering and homeless encampments across the city in the early days of the pandemic, and some of that behavior remains visible in key intersections, such as Snelling and University avenues. Police note that some panhandlers can be territorial, driving out others from lucrative corners through threats of force.

St. Paul Police report at least two fatal accidents each year involving vehicles striking pedestrians, and the city saw a recent high of seven such fatalities in 2022. Nationally, pedestrian deaths reached a 40-year high that year, with more than 7,500 pedestrians killed — a 57% increase from 2013.

Given those concerns, “there’s a number of communities that have taken this approach, where they’ve done signage to address people soliciting in the right-of-way,” Tincher said. “Some communities have done billboards. We felt that this was a strategy where we might be able to get some success.”

On social media, reaction to the new signs has run the gamut.

“Good. (Panhandling) is a distraction and dangerous, and they often leave jackets, pillows, trash etc, behind at the end of the day,” wrote a reader on the social media platform X.

“Definitely better things to do than signs discouraging empathy,” wrote a more skeptical commentator.

“I’ll give to whomever I want to,” said yet another. And “give nothing. Stop enabling” responded a fourth.

“Every city should do this,” wrote a fifth. “This should be a statewide effort. We have no obligation to prop up aggressive unsafe scam artists.”

Molly Jalma, executive director of the Listening House drop-in day shelter in downtown St. Paul, said signs discouraging panhandling are fairly common nationwide, and intersections “are probably challenging enough without the increased tension of ‘Do I give now? Do I not give now? Are they coming to my car?’”

She said views on charitable giving to the homeless tend to split into two camps.

“Some do it because it bypasses intermediaries,” Jalma said. “Instead of going to an organization that has to keep the lights on and pay the workers, it’s going directly to immediate needs, and it speaks to the individual’s autonomy. Others want to know where their money is going and having an organization track that. It comes down to individual values anyway.

“At the end of the day, I don’t know how much (signs are) going to deter any type of behavior,” she added. “It does spur conversation, and any conversations happening around that arena are a good thing. We see both sides of it.”

Supreme Court decisions on panhandling

Some wonder whether the city can simply outlaw panhandling. The short answer is no, as that most likely would violate free speech tenets.

A 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling around church signage in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, Ariz. emphasized that government regulation of speech based on its content is almost always unconstitutional. In other words, from a First Amendment standpoint, holding a sign on public property asking for money is no different from holding a sign declaring the earth to be round or Nov. 5 to be a national election.

Since the Reed case was decided, panhandling ordinances across the country have been repealed or struck down by courts. In the City of Lakewood v. Willis the next year, the Washington Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man who was convicted of violating Lakewood, Wash.’s anti-begging statute after holding a sign at a freeway exit ramp asking for help. The Lakewood ordinance had restricted a single kind of speech — begging — which the state Supreme Court found to be overreach.

Still, individual cities continue to outlaw panhandling in certain locations and circumstances, such as begging in confined spaces like New York City subways, or in airports, which under the law are construed as public places but not “public forums.” And many laws still ban aggressive panhandling, or begging that relies on implied threats and coercive actions, such as following a person and continuing to demand money after they’ve said no.

“We’re not targeting the individuals who are asking,” Tincher said. “We’re targeting the people who are stopping and considering contributing to the people who are asking.”

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