My fair city just enacted an "aggressive panhandling" ordinance that prohibits verbally requesting money.  (Passively holding a sign, however, is still permissible.)  Controversy has of course ensued.

Perhaps it’s the Daily Show’s penchant for frequently using the word "hobo," but I’m wondering what happened to America’s affection for hobos.  Are today’s begging homeless all that different from the hobos of a hundred years ago? 

Wikipedia advises me that hobos themselves used the word "hobo" to refer to only to itinerant migrant workers; those outside the definition they branded "tramps" or "bums."  But with any slang term for a group, there are always at least two definitions—one used by those inside the group and one by those outside.  So perhaps non-hobos used "hobo" to mean the down and out generally?

What killed the "hobo?"  Was it Eisenhowers’s interstate highway system’s murder of America’s railway system?  Did LBJ’s Great Society and War on Poverty change what homelessness meant because the homeless became an obvious sign of those efforts’ failure?  Did the "streeting" of the mentally ill under Reagan’s dismantling of social support structures release a new breed of more aggressive homeless persons onto America’s streets, laying the ground for a backlash?

I’ll occasionally spot a homeless camp here in Atlanta, usually behind the treeline in a park or in the woods near to an undevelopable ravine.  But they don’t last for long.  What happened to hobo camps?  Were they so bad that we now outlaw them under "urban camping" laws?   Or do we just fear them, plain and simple?

Perhaps the price of outlawing substandard tenement housing is that those who would have dwelled in them now live on our streets.  Would the presence of "tent cities" in unused or unusable land just be too much of an affront to our progressive sensibilities?  By protecting the poor from substandard housing, have we somehow forced some of them into homelessness?

A neighbor with schitzophrenia (and probably some light paranoia) helps me around the yard to get money for what his disability checks don’t cover.  He lives behind us with his retired mother (when she hasn’t kicked him out for smoking).  What will happen to him when she dies?   Odds are he won’t be able to keep the house up, even if it’s paid for.  He’s a hard worker, but he’s too undependable to be employable.  Is he one of America’s hated hobos waiting to happen?