Affluent Beggers
Here’s why I don’t give money to panhandlers:
[Elizabeth] Johnson and her 34-year-old partner, Jason Pancoast, who have been together for 14 years, support themselves and their three children, 6-year-old Seth, 3-year-old Adrianne and 3-month-old Synclair, by panhandling.Pancoast refers to himself and his family as “affluent beggars.”
“If you’re an affluent beggar you stay in a hotel and eat a continental breakfast,” he says. “It makes it a lot easier to be philosophical about it.”
They’ve been begging for six years, yet have had two more children.
Carrying her smiling baby in a navy blue front pack and pushing Adrianne in a green jogging stroller, Johnson stops people on the street and asks them for money to find shelter for her children. … The family is staying at the Cedarwood Inn in a room with a kitchenette. It costs $243 a week.
Help her find shelter, because they are looking for someplace “more permanent” than an inn.
According to Pancoast, begging can be lucrative. He claims the family sometimes makes $300 a day asking for money and has made as much as $800. The family also receives $500 a month in food stamps.
$300 dollars a day, five days a week (you don’t expect them to work on weekends, do you?) for fifty weeks per year (they have to take vacation!) comes out to $75,000 a year. Do the math.
“I always felt bad for her because she had a baby in the hot summer sun,” says Debbie, an Ashland resident who asked that her last name not be used. …But then Debbie saw Pancoast drop Johnson off at the Ashland Plaza in a nice car and kiss her and the baby goodbye. “Then I became a little bitter,” Debbie says. “I was working my tail off at three jobs — waitressing and babysitting — and I see her eating at restaurants that are so expensive I can’t afford to eat there.”
I spent a week in San Francisco a few years ago, a city overrun with homeless people. Every day on the way to the convention center I would pass one guy on a particular street corner and he was there each evening as I walked back to my hotel. He never missed a chance to hit me up for some cash. Until the last night of my trip when I was running a little late. He was on his cell phone calling someone to come pick him up.
We are the “Affluent Beggars”, our situation was
grossly misrepresented in the not locally owned local press, get the picture.We can make 300 somtimes and have made 800 once in Santa Barbara.
As you can see the focus on the gross sum we can occasionly commandeer is specifically designed to
create the illusion we are not needy, when we are.
Being in a consistent diasporadic mode drives our cost of housing up 300-400%. Do the math, we may make 30-40 thousand per year but between our travel expenses and our hotel costs you can quickly figure that our situation is nowhere near as lucretive as this character assasination campaign has led others to believe. After the
20,000 we allocate to basic needs coupled with the fact that we only started receiving food stamps in Nov 06 it is evident that the context and perspectives created by the mass mediation of our plight are patently absurd.
Read Between The Lines
Elizabeth Jason
Sethinus Adrianne
Synclair
I will admit the math is flawed and that trying to save up enough for first/last months rent for an apartment is difficult when paying the high cost of Inn housing.
However, the fact remains that you have a “nice car” and that you depend on the sweat of other people’s brow to raise your children. You have been looking for “suitable employment” for seven years? Your wife doesn’t want to work because it takes her away from the children? You’ve birthed two more mouths to feed when you couldn’t take care of the one you had without the help of others?
You are both healthy, have healthy children, are evidently not of low IQ, don’t seem to have any mental disabilities, etc. There are plenty of responsible people who struggle through life with much larger problems than you have.
The paper did not have to engage in character assasination — you do it yourselves.
I went to preschool with this guy. He was always asking for my cookie. I only gave him my cookie once.
the fact was we did not have a car and still don’t,the fact was we never patronized fine diners,the fact was that our brows sweat when we went about our days staying afloat in a ocean of doublespeak and doublethink, maneuvering our way by relatively any means necessary, out of the desacrelative quagmire we were not drowned within. the piece was a critical mass operation designed to engender disbelief in the public at large locally, this was seen as necessary do to the fact that one on one people were being compelled to allocate resource to my love, this was seen as a threat by the local social hierarchy, so spinning the situation into what the editorial board did furthered the agenda of silencing elizabeth, confusing what the reasons for our activities actually were, and banishing us to discontinue our so called ‘panhanding’(fundraising)from interfering with the ordained scamming , spirituality in the community.
do you really understand to what degree the powers that be will go to silence good people who are persecuted and thought of as expendable remainders by who pretends to actually have their vested interests at heart,think about it
jason pancoast
WTF? LOL
LP