As hundreds of prospective students and their families continue to tour the University before the end of college ap- plication season, the issue of homelessness in Charles Village has drawn attention.
While poverty and homelessness are more rampant in other parts of the city, Baltimore City Police Sergeant Russ Robar said panhandlers are Attracted to the neighborhood simply because there is money in Charles Village.
“You come to Charles Village and you have out of state residents, you have people that are upper middle class, you have all walks of life there,” Robar said. “They can get more bang for their buck and their time just panhandling right there.”
Generally speaking, Robar doesn’t think the homeless people in the area are a threat to anyone’s security. The homeless, he explained, are usually only concerned with getting the basic necessities for that day, but there are exceptions.
“A shoplifter could be a shoplifter could be a shoplifter until one day it goes really bad and he ends up hurting someone,” Robar said. “But generally, that type of crime is not harmful.”
Some homeless people also prey upon the large number of students in the area, Baltimore City Police Officer William O’Donnell explained.
“The students, in many cases, are not exposed to a lot of the issues in the big city and they think that maybe the homeless person probably does need a meal so they give him five dollars,” O’Donnell said.
“And sometimes that homeless person takes that five dollars and goes to buy drugs or something like that and takes advantage of them . . . the best intentions sometimes do not lead to a good end.” Most of the time, homeless people are not mean or vicious, but have psychological problems that prevent them from taking care of themselves in a normal way,“ O’Donnell said.
“We go to great lengths to get them the medical attention necessary to try to resolve their issues,” O’Donnell said.
“But it is a challenge and we’re constantly working with them.”
A challenge that the University alone cannot directly solve, Director for Community Affairs Salem Reiner explained.
“Ideally, are homeless people an asset to the community? No,” Reiner said.
“Are they an asset to what the University wants to represent itself as? No. But these are people that need help, and to some degree we all have that responsibility.”
Although Reiner has heard of very few homelessness-related complaints in the nine years he has worked at the University, he noted that University’s relationship with the surrounding community is important.
“There are many different parties that come together in the neighborhoods surrounding the University,” Reiner said.
“From students to full-time residents, businesses, people that work in the area and obviously homeless people. So we need to try find ways we can all work together and the environment that best serves the population.”
The University does not have a formal comprehensive strategy to address the issue, but works with city and non-profit organizations that are engaged with homeless people to find solutions citywide, Reiner explained.
“So can the University do more? Should it do more? I would say yes,” Reiner said.
“But that kind of thing is going to typically come from one or two actions. Somebody, whether it’s a student, or a faculty member, or staff, takes on the responsibility of saying I’m interested in doing something about this, or it comes out of crisis.”
But taking an interest in Charles Village’s homeless people is a bit easier said than done. Simply giving out food to the homeless on the street can be problematic, Director of the Center for Social Concern Bill Tiefenwerth explained.
“If you do something like [give out sandwiches] there’s an expectation that you’re going to continually provide that,” Tiefenwerth said.
“There are really no controls, and I don’t think that Baltimore City generally approves of people doing this a lot.”
“Anything that we do where we interact with the homeless population is done pretty much in an agency setting, so it’s more of a controlled situation rather than coming across somebody walking along St. Paul Street.”
Campus Kitchen Board Member Lena Denis echoed the concern, explaining that giving out food on the street isn’t even really feasible.
“Giving out food to anybody who asks for it on the street sounds like a really nice idea,” Denis said.
“And sometimes it’s possible depending on if we have one time events that people can go to . . . but it’s kind of a legal and logistical nightmare.”
Unrelated to her work for Campus Kitchen though, Denis said she definitely thinks homelessness in Charles Village is a problem and has had experiences where she has felt very uncomfortable.
“There’s that guy around here who people call Crazy Mike,” Denis said.
“He would hang out around the dumpster near my apartment building, and he was really threatening and really racist and really rude to some of my friends who are different races, calling us really horrible names. . .It’s a little difficult as a student to deal with people who are frightening you and making your life difficult on a daily basis.”
But sophomore Gaurav Dhar says he has never personally felt threatened by any homeless person or panhandler in Charles Village, though he doesn’t go out his way to talk to them.
“Most of the time they don’t seem like they’re drunk or they don’t seem that threatening,” Dhar said.
“They just seem like they’re really in need, so I think I feel more sympathy than anything.”Dhar also added that he has never given money to a panhandler in the area, something that Student-Community Liaison Carrie Bennett strongly advises.
“If a person finds that panhandling in our area is lucrative, they will continue to do so until the money dries up,” Bennett wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
“Students need to be aware that often times the story behind a request for money is made up ... If a student feels particularly uncomfortable about any individual in our area, we would definitely advise them to call the campus police to report the problem.”
