Giving the Cold Shoulder

By Jill Smolowe

Perhaps the best way to explain Antonio Pagan is to remember that it took Richard Nixon to open China. As councilman for Manhattan's Lower East Side, Pagan may be the only elected official in America who is an openly gay Puerto Rican liberal. Yet these days he is best known as the champion of a distinctly unprogressive-sounding cause: an effort to sweep the homeless people from the streets of his district. In 1991 he spearheaded a successful campaign to chase squatters out of Tompkins Square Park. Now he is leading the charge to block radical gay activists from building a day center for drug-addicted, HIV- infected street people -- just a block from two elementary schools.

Pagan, who was formerly a not-for-profit developer of housing for the homeless, is unapologetic. "I'm a liberal," he says. "We're not feeling guilty."

Increasingly, liberals like Pagan in big and small cities alike are replacing pity with "pragmatism," as Pagan calls his approach. As they do so, they are riding a wave of resentment building up against America's most disenfranchised population. The sympathy of the 1980s that gave way to compassion fatigue by the turn of the decade is now an open expression of loathing for the homeless. Once romanticized as impoverished casualties of an uncaring society, America's homeless -- who number anywhere from 600,000 to 3 million, depending on whose count you believe -- are now more likely to be demonized as pathological predators who spoil neighborhoods and threaten the commonweal.

The national spotlight trains on people such as Larry Hogue, a chronic mental patient and crack abuser who terrorized Manhattan's Upper West Side, or Andres Huang, the transient accused of building the campfire that recently set off a raging blaze in California. "About two years ago, we began to see what is almost a national arms race to criminalize homelessness," says Madeleine Stoner, a professor of social work at the University of Southern California. "People are beginning to fear for their safety." Concurs Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, the man charged by the Clinton Administration with devising a solution: "A backlash is growing. What I believed was an almost universal compassion has today given way to an impatience, a frustration, an anger toward the homeless."

Lost in the rush to shed collective guilt, however, is the distinction between the majority of the homeless, who require only temporary shelter, and the chronic street people -- the 15% or so of the unhoused population who are the most unstable, the most sick and often the most visible. Also obscured is the inevitable fact that herding the homeless out of one neighborhood only forces them to take shelter elsewhere. Some communities, acknowledging that reality, are seeking a proper balance of compassion and practicality.

At this point, however, innovation is the exception. Even in communities that boast a spirit of tolerance, citizens are turning their energies to driving out the homeless. In San Francisco, city planners have designed sleep- proof seats to chase the homeless from bus shelters. Santa Monica's police issue citations to people who loiter in parks after midnight; repeat offenders go to jail. Legislators in Madison, Wisconsin, have outlawed "aggressive panhandling." In Atlanta, where civic leaders want to polish their city in preparation for the 1996 Olympics, new ordinances make it illegal to sleep on park benches, wash motorists' windows or even walk onto a parking lot (unless the visitor has a car parked there).

New York City voters sent a clear signal when they elected Rudy Giuliani mayor last month. The former U.S. Attorney's campaign included proposals to boot the homeless out of shelters after 90 days and rescind the city's unique, state-imposed decree to provide emergency shelter for anyone who asks for it. Generosity is clearly ebbing. Soup kitchens and food banks across the country report a drop in donations by as much as 40% this Thanksgiving. Sometimes the backlash expresses itself in ugly ways. Last month a homeless man in San Francisco was critically injured when attackers doused him with rubbing alcohol and set him ablaze.

Perhaps the most telling sign that even America's softest hearts are hardening is a radical reframing of the debate into terms that reject a sympathetic view of the homeless. In the '80s, the issue's leading spokesman was Robert Hayes, founder of the Coalition for the Homeless, who identified the three main causes of homelessness as "housing, housing and housing." People who challenged that thinking were accused of blaming the victims. Today the leading voices are authors Alice Baum and Donald Burnes, who claim the very word "homelessness" is a misnomer coined by activists to persuade the public that street people are just regular folks with a housing problem. In A Nation in Denial: The Truth About Homelessness, Baum and Burnes claim 85% of all homeless people suffer from alcoholism, drug abuse or mental illness. The authors' stated aim is to force society "to stop making distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving poor" and address the underlying problems head on. More often, their book has served to deepen the homeless stigma.

In an article in New York magazine, street-smart liberal columnist Pete Hamill asserts that homelessness is a public-health problem spawned by "drunks, crackheads or crazies," not a housing problem. "In a health crisis," Hamill contends, "the rights of the community must take precedence over the rights of an individual: your freedom ends at my lung." (Hamill did not mention in the story that he battled tuberculosis a few years ago and may have contracted it from a homeless person, though he has spoken publicly of his TB in the past.) Calling for "tough-love" solutions, Hamill offers a startling proposal: quarantine male street people on military bases and compel them to accept medical treatment. "The men would be treated as menaces to the public health, not as criminals," he writes. Yet under his prescription those who resist such attentions "would be charged with crimes of violence and turned over to the criminal-justice system."

Andrew Cuomo, who serves as HUD's czar for the homeless, is among those who dismiss such ideas. "You can't force people into treatment programs," he says. "It won't work." But Cuomo thinks he understands the roots of the backlash that Hamill represents. "People are afraid, and I think that fear is vented in terms of anger," he says. "They see all these groups that have raised hope by saying they could help, and the situation is worse now than it was 10 years ago."

The Clinton Administration, which has targeted homelessness as HUD's top priority, has the unenviable task of persuading Americans that the problem can be tamed, then finding the money to put more programs to work. For the current fiscal year, Cisneros has inherited a national homeless budget of $570 million -- barely more than the $500 million New York City alone spends on its local homeless problem. Cisneros has boosted next year's budget to $823 million, which seems woefully inadequate since he hopes to "not only deal with the people who are still on the street but work to keep people off the street."

Cisneros thinks an answer may lie in a new partnership between cities and the Federal Government. He has chosen Washington to launch a program that aims to shift the focus from cities' narrow efforts to erect emergency shelters to a more far-reaching campaign to provide the needy with social services and permanent housing before they ever land on the streets. The D.C. program calls for creating 1,000 permanent housing units, 100 job-training slots and 400 places in substance-abuse treatment facilities. The government will contribute $20 million in three installments over two years, but only if the District meets strict performance standards. Local skeptics question whether the inept D.C. bureaucracy can manage the project efficiently. Cisneros, however, fears partisan bickering on Capitol Hill could delay the program's launch until next fall.

Most local officials know better than to wait for the feds to come to their rescue. Instead, some communities are fashioning their own promising solutions. San Francisco has launched the "Matrix" program, which teams up police with social-service and health-care workers. As the cops make their sweeps of parks, the specialists examine the homeless for disease and provide information on where to get shelter or treatment.

In Orlando, Florida, the 30,000-sq.-ft. Coalition Campus offers one-stop- shopping to the area's homeless. Unlike most cities' shelters, which typically screen out people who are drunk or drugged, the Orlando facility provides beds for as many as 700 people, no matter how sorry their state. The facility, which is open around the clock, offers substance abuse and mental- health counseling, plus adult education courses and such basic amenities as telephones and mail service. All this is free, and people can stay as long as they want. Since opening last September, the $1.3 million-a-year facility, funded by government and private money, has produced immediate benefits for the community. "Petty crime has dropped about 40% to 50% downtown," says Michael Poole, head of the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida. "There's cost savings in police time and prison beds." Dade County commissioners are so impressed that they aim to open three similar facilities with grant money and funds collected from the 1 cents tax they recently levied on large restaurants.

While such efforts hold promise for the future, the current situation is bleak for most of the country's homeless. Some, like James Morse, a 38-year- old who makes his way along Chicago's streets spitting, urinating and shouting "Some money, folks, just a dollar," are too far gone to recognize the depth of their suffering. Others, such as Jack Rumpf, 34, know exactly how low they have sunk. Every afternoon, Rumpf stands on the median of a busy Los Angeles intersection, holding a sign that declares him a homeless veteran who would be happy to work for money or food. Each day, motorists lock their doors as they brake for the nearby stoplight, and Rumpf hears the offensive click. He says that "things have changed" during his four years on the street. "The economy's part of it," he says quietly, "but people blame the homeless for everything -- drugs, crime, everything." Rumpf would like to tell everyone "the way it is out here." But these days motorists would rather lock their doors than listen.

With reporting by Greg Aunapu/Miami, Ann Blackman/Washington, Massimo Calabresi/New York, Dan Cray/Los Angeles and Jon D. Hull/Chicago