Behavior: Harassing the Homeless

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Commercial interests are also involved. Store owners fear that customers will be driven away if vagrants take over a block. Fort Lauderdale is considering a number of antihomeless measures, largely because street people are bad for tourism. "There is a perception that downtown is unsafe; even the mayor was robbed at gunpoint," says City Commissioner John Rodstrom. He proposes spending more money to help street people, "but we are caught between a rock and a hard place. We don't want to make it too attractive for vagrants to come here." In Yonkers, N.Y., the Calvary Center Church has run afoul of the city administration by sheltering the homeless, some of them minorities, in a largely white residential neighborhood. If the two parties cannot agree on a new location for the shelter, says the Rev. John Gould of Calvary, "it's going to be an all-out war."

Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, says the backlash "reflects a kind of deepseated fear and anxiety; it's like lynching in the South, a way of purging fears through extreme action against scapegoats."

Some of those fears are justified. In Tucson last year, a drifter kidnaped an eight-year-old girl. She is still missing. After Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal was left open around the clock to accommodate the homeless on cold winter nights, commuters complained of being hassled and one man was found dead of head injuries. The terminal is now closed from 1:30 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. And in The Bronx three weeks ago, three men living at a shelter for the homeless were charged with kidnaping a doctor and torturing him for an hour before leaving him for dead along a parkway.

In crime-ridden cities, many residents see no need to add to their woes by allowing vagrants to establish themselves in train and bus terminals and residential areas that are otherwise generally safe. In his 1975 book, Thinking About Crime, Harvard Professor James Q. Wilson says that the acceptance of vagrants, panhandlers and sleeping drunks on the sidewalk is the traditional sign that the cycle of urban decay is under way: informal controls break down, muggers and burglars move in, and stable families begin to move out. "Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is," writes Wilson. "But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community."

That traditional protectiveness of the community can come to look something like class warfare. As skid rows overflow with the homeless, residents of nearby middle-class neighborhoods who feel threatened will often push back. Says one Yonkers woman: "Why can't they improve the quality of their lives without taking away from mine?"