By Michael J. Tittinger
Santa Monica is a city built on competition. The city thrives on it. Just look at us. We drive Jaguars and “Beamers” newer and niftier than those of our neighbors. We wear black sportscoats to the chain coffee shops on 90-degree afternoons because somebody oh-so-hip and important may be watching. And we struggle with issues of pansy envy as we spend countless hours manicuring our lawns to keep pace.
So why can’t the homeless take their cues from the demographics that pass by their makeshift dwellings daily? Truth be told the city’s vagrants and panhandlers could use a lesson in marketing. They just don’t know their target audience. Most of Santa Monica’s residents would be deemed at least modestly successful in their respective careers; they would almost have to be in order to afford housing in our little beach-side oasis. It would seem quite natural that those same residents (and supporters of the homeless) would respond to effort and hard work as opposed to nonchalance and laziness. So why don’t the transients who are quite capable of picking up a broom and sweeping up the mess they left behind from the night before get it?
Marketing 101: The Greasy Wheel Theory. The dog that wags its tail and licks its owner’s face more often is gonna get the bone time and time again. Now I’m not suggesting that the vagrants and homeless begin licking our faces, but I am suggesting they begin to show a little initiative if they want to be rewarded.
In actuality, I admire the city’s theoretical stance on the homeless situation, that we are all indeed equal and therefore equally invited to enjoy the resplendent and intrinsic beauty of Santa Monica. We do not turn our brothers away, no matter the circumstances that brought them here. It’s a beautiful sentiment, but the respect we offer goes hand-in-hand with the problems that accompany vagabond visitors – panhandling, foul odors, public sleeping and ill-placed excrement.
Merchants and city officials will continue to point fingers at one another while the homeless population continues to proliferate. We have everything in our fair city, and especially along the Third Street Promenade, a vagrant or transient could want — live entertainment, the beach, passersby with fat wallets, plenty of benches for weary panhandling bones and a thriving non-working-class subculture. We offer it to them free of charge, no questions asked. But maybe it’s time we expected a little more from them, and they from themselves.
“Give us your poor, your tired, your hungry,” — but don’t let them abuse us!
The way I see it, we need to approach the “problem” we place upon ourselves from a different perspective. Let’s give them the tools they need to “market” themselves to us, and let’s reward them in turn for a job well done.
I propose we equip our parks and public streets and the Promenade with run-of-the-mill tool caddies, and stock them with brooms and rakes (plastic) and garden weasels and invite the homeless sleeping on the streets and in the parks to begin pitching in. They can begin by cleaning up the store-fronts or sod strips they called their beds the evening before, and spread out from there. Give them shirts as unofficial members of the city’s maintenance team and let them go to town, as it were.
The transients can pay back the city that takes care of them, welcomes them and provides them with an income. They can clean the streets and lawns they sleep on rather than defecate on them. This not only serves to keep Santa Monica beautiful, but may just instill the transients with a sense of work ethic and pride in the process.
I’ll tell you this, I would go out of my way to stick a dollar or two in the hand of a homeless person I see sweeping the sidewalk or tilling the flowerbeds abounding in our city’s public domains. If we all followed suit, those who chose to work would be reaping the rewards, while the listless, static vagrants would be left behind and hopefully, have a helping of humble pie. The ones that work will get ahead, the ones that don’t will be left out in the cold. Competition breeds motivation and motivation breeds success.
The United States has always shone as a beacon to immigrants across the globe, not just for the personal freedoms it affords, but also for the opportunities it grants. Everyone entering Ellis Island had a dream, an ideal burned into their mindsets that if they worked hard, harder than the next guy, they could achieve all they imagined and more. The operative word there was “worked.”
I’m not saying we must force anyone to work or advocating a socialistic society, but I sure respect someone who works hard more than someone who hardly works.
Michael J. Tittinger is a freelance writer living in Santa Monica.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 25, 2002. Read the original PDF.