National Review: Charity Shouldn’t Result in Handcuffs
Thanksgiving is a time when many feel compelled to help those less fortunate. As temperatures drop and families gather for bountiful meals, the contrast with people lacking housing, blankets, warm clothing, and food becomes stark. Yet, in some localities, sharing food or clothing with the homeless without government permission is a punishable offense.
Take Dayton, Ohio, where a man was recently put in handcuffs for handing a burrito to a homeless person. The city requires individuals and groups seeking to share food, clothing, or hygiene products in public spaces to secure a permit — at least if they’re trying to help the homeless. Picnics, barbecues, and birthday parties in public parks go unbothered. The targeted enforcement appears designed to sweep homelessness under the rug, even as it stems in part from the government’s own restrictive housing and employment policies.
Rather than drug use or mental illness, the most relevant factor to homelessness is a lack of affordable housing. And housing scarcity is a direct consequence of overregulation. When states or cities make building harder, the predictable result is a lack of low-cost options. Occupational licensing requirements compound the problem, locking people out of a job. In some states, individuals must obtain a costly license to perform simple tasks such as shampooing hair. In others, you have to get permission from your competitors before starting a moving business. Meanwhile, a labyrinth of laws blocks addiction treatment centers and mental health facilities from opening.
If people can’t find low-cost housing, paying jobs, or treatment, it’s not surprising that they would fall into homelessness. It’s also not surprising that community members would want to step in and help. When the government helps put people into poverty, it should at least allow the community to help them make their way out.
Forcing people to get a permit to be charitable does not benefit the public. Dayton can’t say, for example, that its ordinance is about food safety or keeping public parks clean. On its face, the permit requirement does nothing to ensure food safety. And part of the group’s mission is to leave all public places cleaner than they were. Volunteers pick up piles of trash before each event and send volunteers a block in each direction after the event has ended. Dayton’s ordinance isn’t regulating sanitation or trash or encampments or threats to public safety. It’s simply thwarting periodic services where volunteers try to help people secure jobs, housing, blankets, and food — all while cleaning up after themselves.
The city has ample tools (e.g., littering ordinances and nuisance laws) that it can use to alleviate any legitimate concerns. And, in fact, it relies on these laws rather than permitting for events that present similar concerns, such as birthday parties, barbecues, and picnics. The permitting requirement for charitable acts doesn’t appear to be related to anything other than the city asserting undue control over its residents.
Dayton’s not alone. Police recently arrested a 78-year-old woman in Bullshead, Ariz., for preparing food for the homeless, resulting in a lawsuit against the city. Micah’s Way, a Christian group in Los Angeles, similarly became embroiled in a lawsuit against the city after being threatened with fines for the “crime” of handing out food or drink in a professional district. Health inspectors in Missouri even went so far as to pour bleach in the soup that a group planned to hand out without a permit, rendering it inedible. For its part, Nourish Our Neighbors brought a civil rights lawsuit last week arguing that Dayton’s law burdens its freedom of expression and its right to help people in need.
The practice of private charity in America goes back centuries, from the Puritans and Quakers who started philanthropic institutions in the 1700s to modern institutions that teach chess to children in inner-city Chicago, free people who have been wrongly imprisoned, help people escape poverty and start their own businesses, and assist people recovering from natural disasters. It was even private charity that allowed famed (and orphaned) Founding Father Alexander Hamilton to leave the island of Saint Croix and study in America.
Nourish Our Neighbors’ members simply want to continue that tradition. They consider food sharing an expression of their dissatisfaction with society’s treatment of the poor, meaning their activities are entitled to First Amendment protection. And given charity’s place in American history, the group’s ability to share food and clothing qualifies as a fundamental constitutional right.
This Thanksgiving, Nourish Our Neighbors would be grateful if Dayton would relinquish its monopoly on kindness and allow its residents to safely and responsibly share food with those in need.
This op-ed originally appeared in National Review on November 28, 2024.
