Enforcing Civility
Handling homelessness.

ew York City is appealing a judge's ruling that forbids the police from picking up homeless people sleeping on the steps of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in midtown. Before working up a righteous indignation at the city's Scrooge act, I ask you to consider the following scenes from midtown Manhattan, circa late fall, early Winter 2001: Strolling down Broadway, 8:15, on a Wednesday night, I pass a man leaning into a green trash bin. His two feet are off the ground. He's flinging trash out behind him, onto the sidewalk, scouring the refuse for bottles and cans. He stops long enough to ask if I can help him out, and when I say "Sorry," he returns at once to his search. In the distance, half a dozen black garbage bags are torn open, their contents strewn from the curb to the plaza of the high-rise office tower.

Rushing to catch the N Train at 34th Street, 4:30, on a Sunday afternoon, I'm halted by a crowd jammed back six deep at the subway entrance. The stairwell is divided by a metal banister; it's supposed to separate commuters exiting from commuters entering the station, but the entire right half of the stairwell is taken up by a woman lying across the third step from the bottom, holding out a paper cup for change, moaning, "Pleeeeeease."

Stopping for cash at a bank on Madison Avenue, 10:15, on a Tuesday night, I'm let inside by a disheveled man; he half-heartedly asks for change but then hustles past me before I can even shake my head. The reason for his haste becomes immediately apparent. He's defecated in front of the first ATM machine.

Now of course it's considered bad form to criticize people down on their luck — though the very phrase "down on their luck" assigns a far greater role to chance than the evidence bears out. Even the Coalition for the Homeless, who for years insisted that you and I were only one missed paycheck away from living on the streets, now concedes that 40% of their clientele are mentally ill; according to the Doe Foundation, another advocacy group, at least 70% of the homeless suffer from drug or alcohol dependency. This isn't the Great Depression. People who've been reduced to panhandling . . . well, they're not just like you and me.

The question must therefore be asked: What rational purpose is served in permitting such people to "support" themselves by inconveniencing, intimidating, and even appalling the rest of us?

It's the ultimate politically incorrect question. You're liable to be called a fascist just for asking it, or confronted with rhetoric along the lines of: So what should we do? Put them to death? The more temperate reply is that all people have a right to use public spaces as long as they're not harming themselves or others.

Perhaps.

But harm can be psychological as well as physical. The courts, for instance, recognize mental anguish as a rationale for second trimester abortions. The Internal Revenue Service lets us deduct psychotherapy bills from our taxes. Insurance companies cover antidepressant drugs. Yet the reality of psychological harm seems to evaporate, at least in many people's minds, when weighing the rights of the public versus the rights of public nuisances. Even granting that only one in a thousand panhandlers would ever, say, crush the skull of a passerby with a brick, the possibility that the obscenity-muttering, filth-encrusted guy on the corner might just be that one is a source of palpable tension.

Civil society, moreover, is founded on the principle of reciprocal obligations. In exchange for the benefits and protections of the state, individuals surrender certain liberties to the collective good. For example, though on occasion I might want to drive 100 miles per hour, I know I cannot — the loss of this liberty is compensated by my not being endangered by other people driving 100 miles per hour.

Likewise, my liberty to use a public space is contingent on my not unduly hindering the use of the space by others. Thus, I'm perfectly free to sell my wristwatch on the corner because the inconvenience to passersby is minimal; I cannot, however, drag my sofa onto the sidewalk and auction it off because I'd drastically obstruct pedestrian traffic.

Panhandlers, no more or less than mailroom clerks or corporate executives, are implicitly bound to observe common-sense standards of conduct in public spaces. The argument that they cannot recognize such standards owing to their diminished capacity is, in effect, an argument for their forcible removal — and, in any event, the suggestion that they shouldn't be blamed for behavior that would be blameworthy in housebroken pets serves only to dehumanize them further.

It's time for civil society to demand civility.