Cracking down on panhandlers with fines and penalties could create a prostitution problem in New Brunswick's capital city, a public forum heard Wednesday night.

City merchants have long complained about panhandlers begging for change in downtown Fredericton, and the city responded with a bylaw and a fine.

But Mavis Doucette, who volunteers at the city's community health clinic, which offers medical care and addiction treatment for the city's poor and homeless, told the meeting that fines won't solve the problem.

Doucette said that without clean, affordable housing, the city's poor will turn to tricks other than panhandling.

"They're getting rid of all the panhandlers? Well, I'm going to tell you, we might have stopped panhandling, but the next thing were doing starts with P too and it's called prostitution and there's a lot more of that going on," she said.

Kelly Anibus provides stark truth to that statement. She and her husband are both opiate addicts trying to go straight, and waiting to get into a methadone program.

"I'm too proud to beg. I'd rather sell my ass than beg for change," she said.

Michael Anibus says the couple are desperate for help with their addictions. "It's impossible to get help. I'm being told there's at least a year wait list. I could be dead in a year."

Doucette says a lack of decent housing in the city forces low-income earners to spend all their money on run-down rooms in slum buildings.

Welfare cheques are $270 per month for single adults in New Brunswick, which barely pays the rent on a room in a rooming house, sending recipients onto the street to beg for money to cover the rest of their needs.

Forum organizer Melynda Jarratt, of the Fredericton Anti-Poverty Organization, agrees that Fredericton's lack of low-income housing is encouraging people into the street. "With housing comes dignity and everything flows from that."

Jarratt hopes the meeting, which attracted approximately 50 people, will be a start to finding a solution to the basic problem of poverty in the city.

She says the next step is to meet with downtown business and then lobby governments for improved housing and an expanded methadone program for addicts.