Behavior: Harassing the Homeless

In New York City’s Greenwich Village this winter, odd-shaped metal boxes and barbed wire were placed across hot-air exhaust grates to keep homeless people from sleeping in the neighborhood. A center helping the homeless in downtown San Diego burned in a fire classified as arson. And in Santa Cruz, Calif., where vagrants are called trolls, the police brass felt it necessary to warn their officers not to wear TROLL BUSTER T shirts while off duty.

As the number of street people grows, so does the backlash, raising disturbing questions about hostility to the poor and the use of the homeless as scapegoats. A Fort Lauderdale city commissioner suggested rat poison as a topping for local garbage, then retracted the statement and recommended the use of chlorine bleach instead. In Santa Barbara, Calif., a 35-year-old drifter was found shot to death in December, and a flyer was circulated threatening more violence to the homeless who camp there. Jerry Hill, an Episcopal priest in Dallas, says that people who camp at the outskirts of the city endure “tremendous abuse by young punks who prey on them and beat them, sometimes very sadistically.”

Some of the worst behavior toward the homeless seems to have subsided since last fall, partly because of publicity and legal actions filed on behalf of victims. A flurry of civil suits in Winnemucca, Nev., charge that the 20- member police force has been tossing “undesirables” into garbage pits or driving them deep into the desert and leaving them. Troll-busting attacks on the homeless in Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz are sharply down from 1984. But the intimidation appears to have taken its toll nonetheless. “After the attacks and the shooting into the bushes and cars where they sleep, a lot of the street people have left town and haven’t come back,” says Peter Carota, who runs the St. Francis Catholic Kitchen in Santa Cruz. “This hateful talk and terrorism have been very effective.”

Some offer a Darwinian explanation for the backlash. Katy Sears-Williams, 42, a stockbroker and city council member in Santa Cruz, says, rather clinically, “It’s an understandable and common reaction for any animal society to rid itself of those who aren’t productive.” Part of the reaction seems to stem from a common perception that the homeless of today are basically the crazies of the 1960s refurbished with a new name. “We called them the hippies, and the beatniks before that, and hoboes before that,” says Sergeant Bill Aluffi of the Santa Cruz police. “Most of them, I think, are burned-out druggies who walk around in a daze, begging on the mall, eating out of garbage cans, urinating on storefronts.”

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?”