He is a Good Neighbor, Too

By Connor Carroll

As I drove through Green Hills to pick my wife up from work the other day, a man stood on the corner selling the Contributor. He had kind eyes, a big smile, and he blew kisses to the drivers whom he hoped would help him afford lunch that day. I stopped at the red light and opened my wallet to see if I had cash, and all I had was one $20 bill—I gladly gave it to him.

What he did next was not a unique experience to me: he thanked me exceedingly and told me that both he and God loved me, that my blessings will pay forward, and that he will feed someone else since he now had enough cash. He had an enormous heart.

To me, it doesn’t matter that he was selling the Contributor. He shouldn’t have to peddle anything to achieve basic needs fulfillment. Not to mention, as much good as street papers do for the unhoused community, he did have to buy those papers in bulk at $0.25 a copy. Standing in the heat to garner attention is more arduous than work done in an office, and he risks losing money if the papers go out of date before he sells them.

I told him to keep his paper so that he could hang onto the whole $20. He insisted that I take a copy anyway, that he was happy this edition focused on difficult issues and featured several poems from community members. This time, the Contributor had been written with added purpose, increased awareness, and an editorial sharpness that took me aback.

The point is, I hear a lot of locals talk about “panhandling” as if it were the individual fault of the person asking for help. It’s just not true. Most people do everything they can to survive each day. Leaping across historic barriers is not always in the cards when lunch depends on random acts of kindness and when jobs are unreachable, or if they are, don’t pay enough to afford rising rent prices.

Unhoused people typically suffer from extraordinary hardship and a failure of the social safety net that was supposed to catch them: financial hardship compounding with the cost of living outside, trauma and mental health issues reinforced by unsafe environments, and the abandoning alienation from a society wearing blinders.

The reason that I wanted to write for Jumbled Dreams Changing Lives is that I see true compassion in Sydnee and our team, that social mobility and immediate relief help bridge a gap between the unhoused and the basic needs security that they deserve.

People have often regarded the unhoused as “a nuisance” or somehow a degradation of the face of a city. But what people must realize is that “a homelessness crisis” is a housing crisis that results from political processes.

When units are not affordable and jobs do not keep up with cost of living, the number of people experiencing homelessness rises. So, it is not that people experiencing homelessness degrade quality of life; these extreme, undue hardships are the result of a failure of political economy and abandonment of neighborly values.

The man blowing kisses and selflessly feeding other people is a good neighbor, too.