Atlanta, the host-designate for the 1996 Olympics, considers itself the Mecca of the New South. But how magnetic can a city be, business people ask, with an estimated 10,000 homeless people scattered around town? Mayor Maynard Jackson proposed a “public nuisance” law last week to give police broad powers to arrest beggars and to sweep the homeless from vacant buildings and parking lots. Jackson believes panhandlers alienate visitors, and police say that drug dealers take over buildings occupied by the homeless. Homeless advocates plan to fight back, but they know public sympathy is fading. “To see poor, raggedy homeless people,” says Constance Curry, Atlanta’s former director of human services, “irritates people now.”
The sidewalks of New York are safe for panhandling, but beggars beware the subway. Plagued by subway crime, transit police have cracked down on vagrants who beg in stations or on trains. How does ejecting the homeless prevent crime? Transit officials believe that if someone with mugging on his mind sees police hassling panhandlers, he thinks twice. It may be working. In the first three months of 1991, officers booted 28,000 vagrants from the subway, a big jump from 3,600 in the same period last year; in a six month period, ending in April, subway felonies dropped by 16 percent.
Last April, San Francisco’s political leaders were shaken by a public-opinion poll. Conducted by the city attorney’s office, the poll showed that 25 percent of Bay Area residents, turned off by panhandlers, shop in town less often. So officials proposed an alternative handout: a card that tells a homeless person where to go for help. Advocates are outraged. “It’s downright deceitful,” says Anthony Vondermuhll of the Coalition on Homelessness, who believes it perpetuates a myth that the city has adequate programs. If the plan goes through, police will refer beggars to agencies, too, instead of arresting them.
No one walks in Miami, which makes it hard to be a beggar. Instead, the homeless gather at highway exits and offer to clean windshields. Drivers, especially women traveling alone, don’t like it. So, in 1989, Dade County outlawed window washing, and Miami assigned a three-officer unit to hunt down offenders. Says a police spokesperson: “We take them to the county jail, which just releases them, and they walk back two or three miles and start again.”
“Las Vegas is probably the meanest city. in terms of how it treats its homeless,” says Stephen Switzer of the Homeless Advocacy Project. “Casinos don’t want anything tampering with tourists spending money.” Switzer may be overstating the case, but Vegas officials make no secret of their determination to keep beggars off the Strip. Last spring a federal judge declared an anti-vagrancy law unconstitutional, but officials enforce other statutes, such as trespassing laws, to move the homeless out of sight. The Vegas plan, like the others, offers only a cosmetic fix: vagrants may be cleared off the main streets for a while, but the homeless problem won’t go away.
