Santa Monica Daily Press has an article in 9/22/2007 edition about SM starting a campaign to discourage people from directly giving money to homeless people. In the article a couple of interesting quotes:

“About 80 percent of the time, those who panhandle will use the money for drugs and alcohol or another forms of substance abuse”

and

“giving money directly to individuals gives them resources to continue to live on the street instead of accessing services”.

They have been doing some interesting reporting on the problem. I work in Santa Monica and the problem is completely out of control… to the point of I have no idea why tourists/businesses/anyone would want to be in Santa Monica. I walk diagonally across a corner from where I park to where I work and in that short space pass 3-4 homeless sleeping or begging or living on the benches provided for bus stops.