
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, December 27, 1993                   TAG: 9312270019
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

AMERICAN CHARITY TURNING INTO ANGER AND FRUSTRATION

Americans may have finally decided this year they've had it with panhandlers and loiterers, drug sellers and prostitutes, squeegee men and graffiti artists, welfare parents without jobs, streets littered with people in obvious need of medical care.

Call it compassion fatigue or plain frustration. But cities and states increasingly are trying to restore order to their streets and discipline to their social policies, with Congress poised to do the same to the federal welfare program.

"Clearly something has crystallized in the last year," said Fred Siegel, a historian at Cooper Union college in New York. "This is becoming mainstream thinking." It's not that America has become a nation of Scrooges. In fact, one recent poll found 81 percent would pay higher taxes to help the homeless. But there are many signs that the pendulum is on its way back from the far side of the permissive 1960s.

"The implicit slogan of the '60s was `it is forbidden to forbid,' " said Siegel. "But people are discovering that if you allow dysfunctional behavior in a limited way, you allow it to spread throughout society."

Election returns this year suggest that politicians are imperiled if they don't deal head-on with the declining quality of urban life and the public's increasing impatience with what Siegel calls "the moral deregulation of society."

In New York, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, the candidates who won understood their constituents' anger about steps that smell like urine. Sidewalks lined with sleeping bodies. Open-air drug markets. Frighteningly aggressive panhandlers. "Tagging crews" that cover a city with graffiti. Squeegee men who smear filthy cloths on windshields and then demand money from motorists.

These are the nightmares that cause business and the middle class to flee, that discourage urban investment, that keep suburbanites at home on weekends. The bottom line is economic survival.

"I think people have had it, even many who are liberals," said author Joel Kotkin, an expert on urban affairs. "People are saying look, we want the streets back. And they have a right to that."

by CNB