Begging: To Give or Not to Give

By Nancy R. Gibbs

For ye have the poor with you always . . .

Always at the street corner, always at our side, often at our mercy. The wild- eyed man blocks the subway-car aisle, slinging curses and entreaties. The gray madonna and her smudges of children hover outside the church, despair incarnate. The glib hustler in designer jeans glides down the movie line. The kids with the grimy windshield rags orbit the intersection. The old man with no eyes sits on the steam grates in winter in a wet cloud of pain. The obsequious panhandler waits outside the automated-teller machines, where wallets are full and walls are transparent. Somehow, always never seemed so often as now.

The streets of America's cities have become desperate crossroads. To walk any distance at all is to run a gauntlet of beggars of every imaginable description with every conceivable need. Some passersby do not believe their stories; others just do not believe in giving handouts. But even those who once unfailingly reached out to any outstretched palm now find themselves overwhelmed and unsure: To give or not to give? In Manhattan, where the beggars are legion, the sheer weight of their number and the volume of their appeals have set the city on edge. "New Yorkers feel besieged by the city's dirt, by noise, by heat," says Robert Levy of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "Now they also feel besieged by panhandlers."

So do many other Americans. There are people who will no longer ride the subways of the big cities, others who have changed their route to work to avoid the confrontation. In Los Angeles a pedestrian can be approached six times on one block. In El Paso panhandlers congregate at the busiest intersections, hauling children into traffic to tap on the windows of trapped cars. In Chicago they roam the churches, taking their own collections. In Seattle, where a law has been passed banning "aggressive begging," a man was beaten to death in June after allegedly rebuffing a panhandler.

In the last days of a steamy summer, as pity runs thin, a backlash against beggars is smoldering across the country. Its chief spokesman is New York Mayor Ed Koch, who is urging people to help banish the panhandlers by refusing to give them anything. Koch avers that "many people who panhandle just don't want to work for a living." They are, he insists, addicts, alcoholics and con artists, and those who give them money are easy marks. Sympathetic people would do better to give to established charities, the mayor advises, to ensure that the money be used to help people in need "and not go simply for booze and drugs."

Koch has now extended his crusade to include the ever industrious "squeegees," or windshield wipers, who swarm around cars when they stop at lights or intersections, often slopping dirty water on the window. "If you don't give them a quarter, they smack your windshield," said Koch on a radio talk show. "And in one case the windshield cracked. It's outrageous! It's threatening!"

As so often happens with the incendiary mayor, his pronouncements have fueled an impassioned debate. It has swiftly spread to the editorial pages, the dining-room tables, the talk shows and the pulpits of cities from coast to coast. Many city dwellers, fed up with the relentless appeals on the street, applaud Koch's blunt response -- as did some people who work with the homeless. "I agree wholeheartedly with the mayor," said Jane Bryan, who volunteers in the soup kitchen at Manhattan's St. James' Episcopal Church. "There are programs to help these people. Maybe one in a hundred may truly need the money for a legitimate reason."

Many social workers in other cities were equally supportive. "I am absolutely convinced that if people didn't give money to panhandlers, the matter of panhandling would be drastically reduced," declared Jean DeMaster, executive director of the Burnside Projects, which runs a shelter in Portland, Ore. "More people would then be forced to come in for alcohol and drug treatment."

But this hardened view of the panhandlers has also evoked howls of outrage and charges of insensitivity, even cruelty. "Hating the homeless is an old tradition, but it's being given new meaning by Mayor Koch," says Social Critic Jonathan Kozol, author of Rachel and Her Children, a grim account of life in a New York welfare hotel. "This business of walk past the poor and write a check when you get home is a yuppie transaction of the cleanest kind. It lets us anesthetize our conscience."

Other critics were equally harsh. "People beg because they need money. Period," argued Carol Fennelly of the Community for Creative Non-Violence in Washington. "You can't get rich begging, you can't even get comfortable." Some New York panhandlers found their income cut in half in the days following Koch's volley. "The mayor," said Robert Samon, who sits in his wheelchair on Madison Avenue, "has no heart." Many resented being classed as drunks or thugs. "I don't make up stories, and I don't threaten anybody," says Eddie Melendez, 27, whose territory is Manhattan's Upper West Side. "I am embarrassed to do this, but I have to in order to get along."

Behind this furious debate, the chemistry of charity is changing. Handing out pocket change to anyone who asks was once a reflex of many passersby, a raw bit of philanthropy that required no receipt, no reward, no second thought. In an era of checkbook charity, when people are asked for money at every turn -- at the office, in the mail, over the phone, over the canapes -- it is the one time the gesture is not sanitized. People give to the person in need. There but for the grace of God . . .

But what used to be for some a simple gesture with a noble motive has now become a complex calculation: Are the beggars what they say they are? Is the change going for coffee or whiskey? Would the money be better used elsewhere? "Half of me worries that giving is a waste of time," says Ann Duffy, 32, a lawyer in New York, "but the other half of me insists it is a good thing."

To give or not to give?

There are scores of people for whom the decision is easy. For those who take their Scriptures seriously, there are Jesus' instructions to his followers: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." The Talmud teaches that "when a beggar comes, hand him bread, so that the same may be done to your children." Likewise, Muhammad taught that "the mercy of Allah is near to those who do good." And since all good things come from Almighty God, he held, one never really gives; one only gives back.

On the other side are those who feel just as strongly that one should never help support a beggar. To do so mocks the work ethic, fosters dependence, corrodes individual dignity and compounds the problem: the more handouts, the more hands are out. No less a person than Martin Luther deplored the fact that "there are plenty of people roaming around the country nowadays, ((having)) a good time with other people's possessions." The anti-handout convictions too are often born of careful thought and high ideals. "I have never given a red cent to a panhandler, and I never will," declares Businessman Wade Lewis, 47, of Greenville, N.C. "I won't give anybody anything, but I will help somebody go through a trash can to pull out cans and claim the nickel deposit. People need to know that they have to work to get what they need."

Somewhere in the middle, torn by good intentions and unintended consequences, fall the vast majority of people who confront the panhandlers day after day. The encounter is often frightening, always discomfiting, for Americans live in cities full of appalling contrasts: the verminous tenements rub up beside the million-dollar developments; the high-rises tower over the ghettos. It is hard for those who trip on a beggar as they leave a restaurant, where they may have just spent more on a meal than some people earn in a week, to claim that they cannot spare some change. The question, rather, is, Should they?

There are many considerations, ranging from the practical to the high- minded. For one thing, it does little good to tell panhandlers to go get jobs that do not exist or for which they are not suited, or urge them to use services that are either inadequate or actively feared. Moreover, walking away from a beggar can be a risky proposition; the back turner must worry not only about what will happen to the panhandler but also about whether his own conscience will become calloused. Every time someone walks away from an importuning hand, he risks becoming a little harder, a little tougher, a little less like the person he should be.

Particularly for city folks, who pride themselves on their survival instincts and their street smarts, the dilemma is often more practical than moral: they are afraid of being conned. While willing to help those who are truly in need, they are suspicious that many panhandlers are actually hustlers. "I've come to the point where they're all pros until proved otherwise," says the Rev. Chuck Faso of St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church in Chicago. "We have been taken so many times. They come in here with tears in their eyes and ask for exactly $82.33 for bus fare because their father is dying. I automatically call the bus station and find out it's one big story. I just tell them to get out."

Not surprisingly, it is the truly needy who are the first to resent the invasion of the con men. Jerome, 41, has seen them all. He lost a leg driving an ambulance in Viet Nam. He says the Veterans Administration has promised to find him an apartment. In the meantime, he holds a tissue box with the label I AM A PROUD VIET NAM VETERAN. HELP ME. Now he sits in his uniform near an escalator in Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station, a boiling arena of con men and scams. "Most panhandlers are phonies," he says. "They're drug addicts, drunks, bums or punks who don't want to work." Not far away, Bob, 29, asks commuters for 85 cents so he can catch his train back to Kings Park, on Long Island. "I somehow allowed myself to run out of cash," he says sheepishly. "The train leaves in five minutes. Please, help me." Over the next 45 minutes he scores six times, a total take of $5.10. He never goes near a train.

Meanwhile, at the Roosevelt Field Shopping Center on Long Island, two men in their 20s, one white and the other black, display albums of color photographs of children. "We feed these children," one tells passersby. "You can sponsor any one of them you want. We'll send you reports every month on how your child is doing." He calls his organization the Children's Protection Fund, but there is no brochure, no literature, no phone number. "What's more important than these angelic faces I am showing you?"

Even more brazen was the scam perpetrated in Los Angeles by the "Yuppie Panhandlers," Jeffrey Allman, 31, and Tracy Hartland, 24. Arrested in early August on 22 counts of petty theft, the pair had allegedly been wringing tears and money -- up to $200 an hour -- from people in supermarket parking lots and service stations for the past three years. Their standard line was that Hartland was pregnant and that all their money had been stolen from their car. In reality, say police, Allman and Hartland are aspiring actors who were managing a West Hollywood building and living rent-free in a $776-a-month apartment.

It takes only a few obvious frauds like these to snap the compassion of skeptical marks and cut off their charity completely. "I hear so many different stories from panhandlers, and I ask myself whether giving them change is really doing them a favor," says Scott O'Toole, 34, a Seattle lawyer. "Are they using the money to buy a sandwich or coffee, like they say they will? Or will they use it to buy drugs or alcohol?"

This sense that there are two kinds of beggars -- the truly helpless and the merely shiftless -- helps crystallize the decision about whether to give: just make a judgment call. But the choice is rarely that simple, since the truth is that neither the mayor of New York nor the stoutest champions of the poor can possibly know exactly who the beggars are, where they come from and what they really need. The population of panhandlers reveals the myriad scars of the underclass: they are victims of broken and abusive homes, or were squeezed between rising prices and stagnant wages, or were forgotten by an impenetrable bureaucracy. Changes in the treatment of the mentally ill during the 1960s and '70s left thousands of deinstitutionalized patients on the streets. No one even knows how many beggars there are, though estimates run as high as 5,000 in New York City, 1,500 in Chicago.

The single greatest reason for the growing ranks of panhandlers, many experts agree, is the desperate shortage of affordable housing. In eight years the federal housing budget has plunged from $33 billion to about $13 billion. "Forced to choose between housing and food, many of these families were soon driven to the streets," explains Writer Kozol. Six million households now pay at least half of their incomes for rent; for many of them, homelessness is just one paycheck away. Says Joe Carreras, a senior housing planner with the Southern California Association of Governments: "Once you fall out of the housing market, you're sliding down a greased pole."

But beyond that there is no consensus. It is true that many panhandlers do not want to work and disdain whatever minimum-wage jobs are available. "There are charities and agencies that will take care of them," says Jennifer Hassan of the Red Cross. "Yet most won't even go near these organizations because they know they have no excuse for not working." But others are disabled and cannot work; still others are eager to carry a bag, wash a window, weed a yard, pump some gas, for whatever they can earn. William Harris, 50, works the parking lot of a Ralphs supermarket in Hollywood. Wearing a gray pinstripe vest, tuxedo shirt, vermilion shoes and blue Yankees cap, he asks customers if he can take their shopping carts back to the rack. Each cart returned brings Harris an automatic 25 cents. "I don't feel sorry for people who say they're hungry," he says. "You just go out and hustle. Nobody owes you anything."

Louis Lopez, 47, leans on crutches against a newspaper kiosk on upper Broadway in Manhattan. He used to be a TV repairman, until he got caught in the cross fire of a gang shoot-out 18 months ago. He collects $370 a month in disability benefits. "How can I live on that? I am a good technician. But as you see, I can't work." Does he drink, use drugs? "No. I can hardly crawl around when I am sober."

Yet it is also true that many, though no one knows how many, are alcoholics and drug abusers. "Over the past two years, the number of multiply addicted homeless has grown at a tremendous rate," says Anita Beaty, director of the Task Force for the Homeless in Atlanta. "People don't choose to panhandle because they want to abandon their responsibilities; other causes come first." In New York, particularly, many residents consider crack to be one reason for the sudden appearance of so many young, angry, able-bodied panhandlers all over town. The most aggressive and abusive of the city's beggars often appear to be strung out on drugs; pedestrians hand over money in order to pass by in safety, a kind of street toll that comes at the expense of the genuinely needy.

Yet even if they seek help, many addicts find that the waiting time for drug-treatment centers can be as long as ten months. Those alcoholics and drug users who successfully break their addiction all too often find that staying clean is impossible in an environment of despair. Without adequate housing and a chance for steady work, advocates for the homeless insist, the cycle of addiction and dependence will not be broken. "If I had my own way," says Cynthia Reynolds-Cain, who runs Detroit Health Care for the Homeless, "I would like to see those who want to be employed given the skills to make an honest living."

And while some beggars are certainly con artists of sorts, even they are operating out of acute and undeniable needs. To the Rev. Calvin Butts, executive minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, it makes little difference whether the panhandler tells an incredible tale of woe or whether the money may be used for food, drugs or alcohol. "It is very hard to tell why someone wants money," he says. "If someone who is strung out on crack comes to me and asks for money so he can eat, maybe he will use it to eat. No one knows."

As more and more people are forced to scavenge or beg for their livelihood, the panhandlers are refining their tactics. Some play on pity, or humor, or simply blatant demands. "The other day this guy came up and asked for money," says Atlanta Arts Administrator Gary Kaupman. "I told him I had only 13 cents and a $50 bill, and that I was sorry. But he said, 'Well, here's a store. Go in and get change for the $50.'

The grievously handicapped and women with small children are often the most successful in inspiring passersby to give. They can earn as much as $70 to $150 in a day, much more than the typical $5 to $30. "I only give to beggars if a guy's disabled," says Chicago Lawyer Steven Buckman, 30. "I am more . willing to give to someone who looks like they'd really have trouble finding a job. If they're physically fit, forget it."

There are also many people who say they cannot pass by a hungry-looking child. "I have a hierarchy of need that I try to follow," says the Civil Liberties Union's Levy. "If I see someone with a child, I will be quicker to give money." But others have the opposite reaction. "I hate it when they take out their kids and beg," says Buckman. "No way is it healthy to have a child on a corner sucking bus fumes all day." Marketing Manager Suzanne Feinberg, 33, encounters whole families of beggars at her Manhattan subway stop, which is on the same block as a welfare hotel. "I am infuriated by people who use their children," she says. "It teaches children to beg, not work, and sometimes the children are abused if they don't beg properly."

Like the most sophisticated fund raisers, many panhandlers have learned how to target their appeals. "Blacks are generous, young women are generous," observes Washington Panhandler Lawrence Friedman, 35, who finds that he does his best business in the wintertime, when the weather is most pitiless. "It's almost like a dance, the dynamic that goes on with the eyes," says Merna McMillan, deputy director of mental-health services for California's Santa Barbara County. In general, women seem to be more receptive than men. "When these panhandlers come through the subway cars," says New York Psychiatrist Ester Levin, 39, "the men on the train seem to say, 'You've got to help yourself, pal,' while the women tend to identify with them." And according to one landmark Manhattan panhandler, Frank Henderson, 56, who has stood with his guide dog on Fifth Avenue for 21 years, tourists give less than New Yorkers. "Tourists have a hard enough time making ends meet here."

In a biblically sound observation, many panhandlers find that the poor are more generous than the rich. Norrell, 24, keeps her 18-month-old son John on a leather harness when they beg in front of a Ralphs supermarket in West Los Angeles. "I'll do anything for my son," she says, and she knows whom to turn to for help. "People driving Jaguars, they give you 50 cents and tell you not to buy booze," she says quietly. "You go to a black neighborhood, it's no big deal for them to give you $2, $3, $5, or $20 for that matter. They're more receptive to being poor."

Yet even the most generous givers may be running out of patience -- and | money. Already many panhandlers sense that sympathy is giving way to cynicism. "Getting money is rough," says Maryann Joyner, 44, who sits on a ledge on a Manhattan street corner, "because the crackheads are taking over and making people suspicious about giving." She is trying to collect the $3 she needs to buy a pack of cigarettes plus a subway ride to a women's shelter in the Bronx. "People are being very frugal," agrees Christina, 76, once a bit actress, who now sells pencils at Santa Monica Pier in California. "They see so many homeless, they just don't give."

Though some passersby are impressed by clever stories and enterprising appeals, more and more are rebelling against the fear and intimidation that have become part of the panhandler's arsenal. "There's a whole pervasive fear of the stranger that didn't exist before," says McMillan. Where once the beggars were viewed as largely helpless and harmless, their growing number and confrontational tactics have put many city dwellers on the defensive. Women, particularly, feel intimidated when they encounter aggressive panhandlers while walking alone at night.

The sense of threat is strongest of all in the subway, the city's roaring underworld, where beggars play off the tight, visceral fear of riding the trains. On the downtown N train to Brooklyn, a lanky, sallow-faced man in his early 30s sends a shudder through the car as he grabs for the vertical bars to steady himself. "I have AIDS and nobody helps me," he hectors the wincing riders. "I have no protection at all. My insurance has run out. Nobody will hire me. Please, help me!" On a crowded car there is no way out, and passengers often feel trapped into giving. "People who beg on the subway thoroughly intimidate me," says Carole Kraus, 37, who moved to New York from Kentucky eight years ago. "I don't believe their stories, and some of them appear to be able-bodied and capable, if only they were not on drugs."

The fear factor works both ways. Since 1984, when Bernhard Goetz shot four teenagers on a Manhattan subway car after they approached him for money, many beggars have learned to be more cautious about their tactics. "Now beggars hold paper cups, a kind of white flag that says, 'Don't shoot! I'm not a mugger,' " says Parviz Moazzam, a Manhattan restaurant manager. "You must be suicidal to walk over to someone and ask for money without first identifying yourself as a beggar."

Sensing a shift in public mood, policymakers and civic leaders are moving ! in. Some remedies are humane, such as New York's Project Help, which sends two vans out to provide food, clothing, rides to shelters and medical care to the mentally ill homeless. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley has introduced a pilot program to provide job counseling, health care and legal assistance from mobile offices.

Other proposals, however, are vicious, born more of desperation and frustration. In Fort Lauderdale a city commissioner suggested rat poison as a topping for local garbage to discourage foraging. A member of the Los Angeles County board of supervisors advocated placing the homeless on a barge in Los Angeles Harbor. In El Paso last month, four billboards of unknown sponsorship sprang up: PLEASE DON'T GIVE TO BEGGARS -- THEY CAUSE TRAFFIC PROBLEMS. El Paso City Representative Ed Elsey has received complaints that some panhandlers scratch cars with rocks or spit on the windshields if drivers refuse to give. "They are becoming more aggressive," says Elsey. "It is time for the city to get involved."

Many cities are doing just that. Portland and Seattle are at the forefront of the national anti-panhandling movement. As Seattle Mayor Charles Royer conceded last year, "It became clear that while we have some people who are hurting, there are some who are hurting us." The city passed an ordinance last fall making "aggressive begging" punishable by as much as 90 days in jail and a $500 fine. Minneapolis lawmakers followed suit in February, ruling that no person shall "grab, follow, or engage in conduct which reasonably tends to arouse alarm or anger in others." Portland has also passed a "pedestrian-interference" law. Some officials admit that the ordinances are hard to enforce but are useful as a threat. Says Seattle Police Captain Jim Deschane, who counts about 150 arrests since his city's measure was passed: "We still have some incidents, but the number and the amount of aggression and intimidation are way down from last year."

But in most cities the police are too busy to spend their time and manpower hustling panhandlers out of sight. It is left to individuals to decide in private how they are going to confront the inevitable challenge to their daily routines when a beggar crosses their paths, interrupts their reveries or places their subway cars under siege. And for more and more, the decision is no longer automatic. "A lot of people go through a great internal debate every time they're approached for money," says Bob Prentice, San Francisco's ) homeless coordinator. "The hostile people just want to get rid of them, and the sympathetic ones feel impotent. They know they can't transform people's lives with a quarter, but they still want to help."

No one on either side of the debate suggests that solutions will be easy to find. No matter what remedies are proposed or adopted, thousands will remain unemployed and unemployable, and for them the prospects are bleak. A strained federal budget may mean more cuts in benefits and greater demands on private agencies and churches to fill the gap. Mayor Koch and his followers have suggested an ad campaign listing reputable charities and government agencies where panhandlers can get help and concerned New Yorkers can send donations.

In the meantime, for those who live in the cities, the dilemma remains complex and immediate. There are beggars who yell at people when they do not give enough, and those whose benedictions remind passersby of how little they really ask. There are some who lie, some who are terrifying, and others whose very vulnerabilities inspire the onlooker to give them more. In such cases people often find that the best response is the simplest one. They give what they can when the spirit moves them, letting their innate sense of charity triumph over their skepticism and urge to judge: after all, that charity is best that asks least in return. For those who find the bare coin of the realm too crass -- or too easy -- it may be better to buy a hungry woman dinner or give a shivering man a blanket. And each can surely offer time and energy to whatever cause inspires him or her, sometimes out of guilt, sometimes chasing glamour, but often just out of a good old-fashioned sense of the opportunity to do a decent thing -- an open window in an airless city full of crying needs.

With reporting by Scott Brown/Los Angeles and Raji Samghabadi and Wayne Svoboda/New York