Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 7, 1990 TAG: 9003071917
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: DAVID TREADWELL LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
"I put on my best suit and tie, shined my shoes and shaved - everything - and got the very first permit," the 52-year-old New Yorker recalled.
But Benagh has no intention of using the permit to wheedle spare change out of the thousands of travelers and commuters who daily pass in and out of the mammoth depot near Times Square.
As a New York Times sports copy editor and the author of 26 books - the latest a biography of football star Herschel Walker - Benagh earns a comfortable living without having to moonlight as a panhandler.
His real aim, he admitted, was altogether different. He wanted to make sure that as few of the permits as possible went to the people the federal judge had in mind when he declared that panhandling was a constitutionally protected form of free speech for "the least affluent, least powerful and least welcome."
"I felt the judge's ruling was so ridiculous," Benagh said. "I don't want to sound like some right-wing beggar-basher, but you can't go anywhere in this city without someone pestering you for money anymore. I even had a beggar pull a knife on one of my kids once."
Benagh's complaint is no isolated beef. From Southern California to the Deep South, downtown business districts are being overrun by homeless people and panhandlers are confronting middle-class citizens with increasingly aggressive and frightening tactics. Americans are finding that their compassion and tolerance are wearing thin.
New York, where residents daily encounter multitudes of destitute and down-and-out people, provides some of the more extreme examples.
Last January, for instance, Rodney Sumter said he and his 3-year-old son were approached by a panhandler in a New York subway station who spit on him, shouted profanities and knocked him down with a punch to the eye.
Police said Sumter reacted by ramming the panhandler's head onto the concrete platform, killing him. Sumter has been charged with first-degree manslaughter in the case.
"I was surprised by the amount of sympathy I felt for the father when I first heard of this case," said a native New Yorker, echoing what seems to be a not-uncommon sentiment. "I used to be reduced to tears by the sight of homeless people . . . but my compassion is now mixed with a lot of anger and resentment."
Elsewhere, there is a similar hardening of public sentiment.
In Philadelphia, for example, downtown merchants presented a petition to Mayor Wilson Goode last month claiming that they were "under siege" by panhandling crack addicts and the homeless. Goode promised to beef up police patrols, crack down on panhandlers and steer homeless people toward city shelters.
"You can't sit on the sidewalk in a box in broad daylight and prevent someone from walking on the sidewalk," said the mayor, who also beseeched Philadelphians not to give money to panhandlers but, instead, to donate to advocacy groups and charitable organizations dealing with the homeless.
In Atlanta and Miami businessmen are putting pressure on city officials to rid the downtown streets of what they consider unsavory elements. Atlanta businessmen want a "hospitality zone" between the downtown hotel district and Underground Atlanta, a brand-new, $142 million festival marketplace, that would be kept free of vagrants and homeless people.
City Council members in Washington are studying proposals that would sharply curtail the city's obligation under a 6-year-old law guaranteeing anyone seeking emergency shelter the right to receive it.
Since the measure was put into effect, annual costs have soared from $10 million to more than $30 million, while the number of homeless people seeking emergency shelter has grown from less than 5,000 to more than 26,000.
"I think that it is a real shame that there are so many homeless," said a secretary for a private firm in the capital city. "At the same time, I feel that they are all over - at the top of the subway entrance, at the bottom of the subway, in the corners. You can't go anywhere without seeing the homeless. You lose your sensitivity to them."
In Denver, officials of the Roman Catholic archdiocese are experiencing an erosion in financial support for their Samaritan House program to shelter and feed the homeless - one of the major efforts of its kind there.
"When we opened our first Samaritan House in 1981, we had incredible support and raised over $4 million for the construction of a larger shelter," said the Rev. Charles Woodrich. "But that kind of support is just not there today. Poverty is becoming less popular."
Among the poor and homeless themselves, the new mood is particularly discernible by those with the longest experience on the streets.
Ernest Boyd, a 39-year-old Chicagoan who has been homeless since his release seven years ago from Joliet Penitentiary, said it used to take him a half-hour to make $10 panhandling when he first hit the streets. Now, he says, it can take up to 10 hours to make the same kind of money. "Maybe one of 20 gives me 50 cents," he said.
George Mills, 64, who has worked a block on Houston's Main Street since the mid-1960s, agrees. "People aren't giving nearly as much as they used to, maybe half as much," said Mills, a blind beggar with a tin cup and pencils. "There are more people out here asking for money, maybe that's it. When I started, I was the only one on this block. Now there's three or four regulars."
Advocates for the poor and homeless are understandably disturbed at this latest twist in public attitudes.
"If you look at public opinion polls, you'll see the public consistently favors greater government aid to the homeless," said Maria Foscarinis, direction of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty in Washington.
"I think what's happened is public officials haven't responded to the growth in homelessness and to public demands for solutions. The result is that people are becoming frustrated at having to confront, day by day, the growing homeless problem."
According to a 27-city survey last year by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, demand for emergency shelter for homeless people increased by an average of 25 percent from the year before - the highest overall percentage jump since 1985.
The estimates of the number of American homeless range from 250,000 to more than 3 million, and local governments are making little headway against the problem.
In Seattle the homeless population continues stubbornly to number about 2,500 each night despite a total of $6 million each year in public and private expenditures for shelters and street programs and a growth in the city's subsidized housing stock to 19,000 units from 9,000 units in 1980.
But solutions to the problem are elusive.
City officials and advocates for the homeless often find themselves viewing the same problem from widely divergent perspectives.
In Portland, Ore., for example, the City Council recently approved a resolution calling for widespread "sweeps" to clean up the more than 50 sites where homeless squatters have settled and building barriers to deter them from returning.
Drugs - particularly crack cocaine - add to the intractability of the homeless issue.
"If you want to know what the new problem in the homeless issue is, it's drugs," said Debora Thomas, director of clinical services at the Open Door drop-in center for the homeless in Manhattan. "The drug problem has increased like crazy among the homeless in the past three to five years."
Suspicions that so many of the more aggressive panhandlers are crack addicts may be behind much of the hardening of the public's attitude toward the poor and homeless.
"The problem people here are the crack addicts," said Nick Della Serra, station house officer at New York's Port Authority bus terminal. "They need money to buy drugs and alcohol. If they go to a shelter, they can't drink or do drugs. These panhandlers are criminals of opportunity. They don't want to be a part of the system."
Most state and local officials and advocates for the homeless agree that without a stronger federal initiative and sharply increased federal funding, the homeless problem will continue.
In his most recent budget plan, President Bush has proposed $728 million in funding for the McKinney Act, the major federal legislation providing aid to the homeless.
That is an increase of $120 million over the previous year, but advocates for the homeless contend that it is minuscule compared with the nation's needs.
It also is very little compared with the amounts state and local governments are spending to combat homelessness. In New York City, the Human Resources Administration spends about $330 million annually on such programs.
"I feel the government should be doing more for homeless people," said Mike Steinberg, a Detroit lawyer. "The government should be housing people, not the MX missile. But they're not going to do anything until enough people put pressure on them to do something."
by CNB