Middle-Class Backlash Hits at Panhandlers

When a federal court judge here struck down a long-standing ban against panhandling at the Port Authority bus terminal, James Benagh could not wait to apply for one of the new begging permits transit officials began issuing to comply with the ruling.

“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 proudly recalled.

But Benagh had 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 candidly admits, 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 Atlanta, as downtown business districts are being overrun by homeless people and as 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, may provide some of the most extreme examples.

Last January, for instance, Rodney Sumter said that he and his 3-year-old son were approached by a panhandler at the Columbus Circle subway station on Manhattan’s West Side. Sumter said the man spit on him, shouted profanities at him 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 a similar hardening of public sympathy can be detected.

In Philadelphia, for example, downtown merchants presented a petition last month to Mayor W. Wilson Goode 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 both Atlanta and Miami, businessmen similarly 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, the annual costs have more than tripled from $10 million to over $30 million, while the number of homeless people seeking emergency quarters 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 Father Charles Woodrich. “But that kind of support is just not there today. Poverty is becoming less popular.”

In Santa Ana, city officials have proposed restrictions on mobile soup kitchens that would require them to provide portable toilets, tables and trash cans at each stop despite protests that such facilities would dramatically increase the costs of trying to feed the homeless.

In Costa Mesa, city officials are evicting a social agency known as Share Our Selves from its quarters in a middle-class neighborhood and forcing it to move into an out-of-the-way industrial district.

“People in Orange County have allowed the old conservative attitudes to raise their heads again, and the poor are suffering down there,” said Scott Mather, chairman of the California Homeless Coalition.

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, director 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--which included the California cities of Los Angeles, Santa Monica, San Diego and San Francisco--demand for emergency shelter for homeless people increased by an average of 25% from the year before--the highest overall percentage jump in that measure since 1985.

The estimates of the number of American homeless range from 250,000 to more than 3 million. Whatever the real figure, 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.

“Seattle is part of the national problem,” said Beverly Sims, co-chair of the Seattle-King County Coalition for the Homeless. “We’re keeping people in shelters because they have nowhere else to go. We are becoming frustrated that homelessness is becoming institutionalized.”

But finding solutions to the problem remains elusive.

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 the homeless from returning.

But Wendy Marsh, communications director for Burnside Community, a nonprofit organization serving the poor and homeless, said: “We’ve gone down to the ‘camps’ and found out that most of the people are not drug abusers.

“A lot are vets whose psyches can’t cope with the crowded conditions in the shelters. There are couples who don’t want to be separated. There are also families of illegal aliens and . . . the new homeless who aren’t ready to deal with the shelters, which have become a dumping ground for other people that society doesn’t want to take care of.”

Even advocates for the homeless themselves sometimes do not see eye to eye. In Santa Monica, a service center for the homeless known as Step Up on Second has launched a campaign imploring the public to give money to homeless service agencies, not to street people.

“It goes about 90% to alcohol and drugs, and not to food,” said Susan Dempsay, Step Up’s director. “And this is where the controversy comes in. Many people feel that if you have, you give.”

But Rabbi Jeffrey Perry-Marx of the Westside Ecumenical Council responded by citing a Jewish legend in which the prophet Elijah comes to Earth each week, often disguised as a beggar.

“If when Elijah extends his hand, he is met with a smile and a contribution, he knows that perfect world for which we long is one step closer,” Perry-Marx said. But if not, “he knows that, sadly, we have turned away from our vision of God’s kingdom.”

“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.

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 to the nation’s needs.

It also is very little compared to the amounts state and local governments are spending to combat homelessness. In New York City alone, 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 attorney. “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.”

Contributing to this story were Jill Stewart in Los Angeles, Lisa Phillips in New York, Edith Stanley in Atlanta, Anna Virtue in Miami, Lianne Hart in Houston, Ann Rovin in Denver, Tracy Shryer in Chicago, Leslie Arengaard in Detroit, Aleta Embrey in Washington and Bill Dietrich in Seattle.