Is a CRACKDOWN the Answer.

• Author: NIEVES, EVELYN
• Position: Banning homless form public places

CITIES ARE BANNING THE HOMELESS FROM PUBLIC SPACES, BUT CRITICS SAY THAT WON'T MAKE HOMELESSNESS DISAPPEAR

When the police car pulled up, a dozen homeless men and women were sitting in a tired heap with 15 shopping carts and two dogs outside the Trinity Plaza Apartments on Market Street, in San Francisco, California.

Not an hour earlier, two officers had chased them from a park across the street, at the tourist-filled United Nations Plaza. Now, an officer was saying someone had complained about the group. Caesar Cruz, holding two $76 tickets for "camping in public" (sleeping in a doorway), worried about getting another summons. So he nodded again and again when the officer said he would like Cruz to "move along."

No one uttered a word in protest. Everyone scattered.

But it is not always that easy to make people who live on the streets disappear, as cities across the country are discovering. At the richest time in the nation's history, affordable housing is at an all-time low. With complaints growing about the numbers of beggars, bag ladies, and mumbling, stumbling vagrants, cities are fighting more than ever before to move homeless people out of public spaces.

In Sacramento, California, officials give homeless people one-way bus tickets out of town. In Atlanta, Georgia, a person asking for money more than twice from a passerby who ignores the request can be arrested. In Seattle, Washington, those caught sleeping in parks can be banned from them.

For many cities, the model is New York City, where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's quality-of-life initiative in the mid-1990s swept midtown Manhattan of panhandlers and squeegee men--homeless men who aggressively offered to clean motorists' car windshields for money. Thousands of homeless people were ticketed or often arrested for offenses like sleeping in parks or obstructing sidewalks.

Local laws aimed at people on the streets have increased markedly in the last five years, as the booming economy has brought real estate developers, tourists, and well-to-do home buyers back to downtowns. The scramble for space has made desirable neighborhoods out of once-overlooked areas, the kind where cheap, single-room-occupancy hotels thrived, and the very poor lived unnoticed. The catch is that the newly discovered neighborhoods must be scrubbed clean.

ILLEGAL TO SIT IN PUBLIC

The so-called quality-of-life laws help to drive away the homeless by making it illegal to sleep, lie down, and sometimes just to sit or...