With thousands of homeless men and women sleeping nightly on streets and subways and in bus and rail stations, New York City officials say they lack the means to coax or compel them to move to city shelters or to accept other help.
While the city has set up a huge shelter system, a network of daytime drop-in centers and teams of workers to go into the streets offering assistance, many homeless people have declined to accept help voluntarily.
As a result, in the midst of the first cold wave of the winter, it appears likely that the panhandlers on city street corners, bag ladies huddled in railroad stations and the increasing numbers of men and women who sleep on subway cars at night will be part of the urban landscape for the foreseeable future.
''We have come to the conclusion as a society that it is better to tolerate some of this than take away people's rights,'' said William J. Grinker, the city's Human Resources Administrator. ''Even if you could do something, the courts are clogged and the police overworked with serious crimes.''
Many of those who stay away from shelters cite petty thefts, fights and an atmosphere of danger. Others say they object to the regimentation and rules in the shelters. Still others are clearly mentally ill and simply want to be left alone. Erosion in Human Concern
City officials say that while there are bound to be petty thefts, they have increased the pay and training of shelter guards, reduced the number of serious incidents and made the shelters far safer for the homeless than life on the streets.
There have always been beggars and vagrants in New York. But the surge in the number of street people over the last few years has made many New Yorkers uneasy and has shocked visitors to the city. Their presence has defined, for many, an erosion in the quality of life and in concern for others.
Homeless advocates say many other cities are as burdened by the homeless as New York. They say that Los Angeles and Chicago may have proportionately as many homeless as New York, and that complaints about safety in huge government-run shelters can be heard elsewhere in the country as well. Part of New York Life
But the problem is particularly visible in New York, where the homeless have settled in the midst of a dense downtown area and have become a part of the daily routine. In other, more sprawling cities the homeless are less visible, seen more often on television news programs than in the streets.
In New York City, loitering laws, once used to remove the homeless from the streets, have been struck down by the courts and not replaced. Laws against panhandling, littering, public nuisances and turnstile-jumping are rarely enforced against the homeless.
Mayor Koch said he has ruled out using the criminal laws, the courts and the police to deal with the homeless except in extreme situations. ''There are other priorities in this town,'' he said in an interview. 'Compassionate Response'
He said that a second reason not to turn to the criminal justice system was that it would not provide the ''compassionate response'' that residents expect from their government.
''I believe that New Yorkers, like all Americans, have compassion at heart and want a compassionate response,'' Mr. Koch said. ''You cannot use police powers. They have nothing to do with the shelter system.''
The few Koch administration programs that use coercion - to prevent people from freezing to death or to hospitalize those disabled by severe mental illness - have reached only a tiny fraction of those on the streets.
Many of those on the streets are suffering from mental illness; others are alcoholics - the derelicts who used to confine themselves to the Bowery. Another growing group are crack users, young men and women who beg and hustle to raise money to support their addiction.
Many of the homeless and their advocates have long cited the conditions of the city's shelters as the reason they prefer the streets. And some advocates for the homeless say that they could support increased police enforcement against violations by the homeless if the city provided a safer and more humane alternative to the current system.
''Where there are no resources behind the law enforcement, there will not be sufficient police or jail cells for tens of thousands of people,'' said Robert Hayes, counsel to the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group. ''Once options are in place, then law-enforcement means can be humane and reasonable.'' Vagrancy Laws Overturned by Courts State and Federal court decisions have struck down many vagrancy and loitering laws that were found to have been vague and used in discriminatory ways against unpopular groups.
Earlier this year, for example, New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals, struck down a statute that made it a crime for anyone to loiter or sleep in a transportation center who was ''unable to give a satisfactory explanation of his presence.'' Such laws were often used against disheveled homeless people standing in stations but not against well-groomed people standing nearby.
The courts, however, have not ruled out laws based on conduct rather than a person's status. For example, laws that would ban someone from smoking in a nonsmoking area or sleeping in the middle of a crowded platform in a train station would be permissible.
Since the Court of Appeals ruling, with city officials from Mayor Koch on down opposed to the use of police powers, the city has made no effort to adopt new laws that might meet constitutional tests and help control the quality of life on the streets. The Mayor said in the interview that there had been no thought given to using the criminal laws as a way to get help for some street people.
In 1972 the United States Supreme Court set the limits on what goverments can do about such problems when it struck down a vagrancy ordinance in Jacksonville, Fla.. The ordinance had, among other things, outlawed ''rogues and vagabonds,'' ''habitual loafers,'' ''common night walkers'' and jugglers.
The decision, in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, found that the ordinance was too vague, outlawed conduct that would normally have been considered innocent and placed unfettered discriminatory power in the hands of the police. A Variety Of Local Ordinances Other cities have taken more aggressive steps to limit specific undesirable conduct.
In Atlanta, a city ordinance bars people from blocking streets or sidewalks. Those who fail to move on when directed to do so by a police officer can be arrested. In Portland, Ore., the police use trespassing regulations to direct homeless people sleeping under bridges to move on. Other cities force people to move on so that streets can be cleaned.
In Phoenix, the police routinely give summonses to homeless people for urinating in public. When homeless people fail to appear in court, they are arrested by the police, who go to shelters to make the arrests.
Louisa Stark, an advocate for the homeless in Phoenix and president of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said that in the course of a year, the Phoenix police made 252 arrests in one shelter, including 113 arrests for trespassing and six for urinating in public.
She worries that as a result of the enforcement effort, the mentally ill and those unable to care for themselves are being transferred from one set of institutions, the shelters, to another -jail. But she said that some homeless people find the jails more pleasant than the shelters and arrange to get arrested.
''They believe that the jail is more secure,'' she said. ''It is warmer. They prefer the food to that they can get elsewhere, and they can shower.''
''Sometimes,'' she said, ''a person will urinate in front of a police officer'' to get arrested.
Many quality-of-life laws that generally result in summonses and fines are rarely applied to homeless people, New York City officials say. There are laws barring the temporary obstruction of sidewalks or streets, as well as those barring public nuisances, littering, urinating in public, panhandling in the streets and trespassing.
Some of those laws, drafted in an era when people did not live on the streets, apply only to property-owners. Others can be applied against homeless people but are not, on the theory that a homeless person will not have the money to pay the fine.
''Certainly you are not going to issue a littering summons to homeless people,'' said James Hart, a Sanitation Department spokesman. ''If they are homeless and out of work, they aren't going to pay the fine anyway.''
Similarly, Al O'leary, a spokesman for the transit police, said that homeless people who jump turnstiles are usually treated more leniently than other turnstile-jumpers. They are told to leave a station rather than given summonses, he said. Similar Problems During the Depression The problems today are not that different from those that existed 50 years ago, when there were rising complaints about the homeless taking over business districts in New York City.
In a survey conducted in March 1936 during the Depression, 2,711 people were counted sleeping in the subways out of a total of 5,823 homeless people counted throughout the city.
Kim Hopper, a medical anthropologist at the City University Medical School, has noted that at various times in the last 150 years the number of vagrants in the city has risen and been followed by repressive measures by the police and other authorities.
In the middle of the Depression, beggars were arrested by the scores in sweeps of streets. The courts hired social workers and psychiatrists to screen those arrested and to refer some to social service agencies.
But many of those picked up were sentenced to six-month jail terms, making it difficult to determine whether that system was punitive. Press accounts at the time noted that some who were found to suffer from tuberculosis and other contagious diseases were sentenced to hospitals.
Today, advocates for the homeless say people refuse help because of dangerous and unsanitary conditions in barracks-style shelters where hundreds of men share a common room.
''The system is by definition inhumane,'' said Douglas Lasdon, the director of the Legal Action Center for the Homeless. ''Can you imagine putting a thousand lawyers in one room three feet apart? You would want to sleep holding your shoes.''
Norman Siegel, the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has sued for the right of the homeless to remain on the streets, agreed that laws that reasonably prohibited specific conduct and were applied to the homeless and nonhomeless alike could be found to be constitutional.
But he said that it would be a mistake to transform the homeless problem into a law-enforcement problem, and he noted that New York does not enforce laws already on the books, like one against urinating in public.
''Perhaps it is because the city administration feels responsible for this mess,'' he said. ''This is basically a social, political and economic problem, not a criminal justice matter.''
The officials who oversee the major transportation systems in New York are searching for compassionate ways - avoiding force where possible - to help the homeless and keep them out of the way of commuters and tourists.
Robert R. Kiley, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said that business groups, the city administration and not-for-profit groups have to start to work together. Shelter System to Cost $300 Million a Year The city's homeless problems have continued, and by some accounts worsened, despite the establishment of the largest and most expensive shelter system in the country.
At the peak of this winter, the system is expected to serve more than 10,000 single men and women and 17,000 parents and children in 64 shelters and 40 hotels each night, at a cost of more than $300 million a year. All shelters for single men and women now have medical services and many also have mental health programs.
There are employment programs and special shelters for those with jobs, for released psychiatric patients, for people under treatment for tuberculosis and for veterans.
In addition, 106 churches and synagogues are providing 1,135 beds for homeless people this winter, according to the Partnership for the Homeless, which coordinates the effort.
The system includes drop-in centers that provide homeless people with places to stay during the day, bus service from transportation centers to city shelters, and outreach workers who go into the streets to check on the mentally ill homeless.
But many people refuse those services. Despite city efforts to improve security at its huge shelters, many say they feel unsafe there. Others say they object to the regimentation in the shelters. Still others are clearly mentally ill and simply want to be left alone.
Estimates of the number of additional homeless people on the streets vary widely. The Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group, puts the number in the tens of thousands.
Mayor Koch said the number is 3,000 to 4,000. He said his estimate is based on a census by the Transit Authority that found 1,300 homeless men and women who appeared to be sleeping in the subway system in October.
On a recent night at Grand Central Terminal, after the rush-hour surge subsided, 60 people were crowded on benches in a section of the waiting room where they would be permitted to stay until the building closed at 1:30 A.M. On the coldest nights, some homeless people are permitted to stay in a heated vestibule and frailer people are permitted to remain inside.
There were groups of young men, couples sitting and embracing, an old man complaining that he was cheated out of a pension, and a middle-aged women shouting at no one in particular, A team of city workers in red jackets went from bench to bench offering a ride to a city shelter. No one accepted. It was still early in the evening, they said, and they would not get on the bus until after the Coalition for the Homeless had distributed sandwiches.
The workers said they have counted 10 groups that provide services to the homeless at Grand Central, making life there easier for the homeless and also making it less likely that they will move to a city shelter.
''The majority of them are on drugs or alcohol - that is why they are here,'' said James Scarborough, an outreach worker. ''They can panhandle here and the average person is going to get at least $10.''
A man who gave his name as Lee Jones and his age as 25, agreed. He told of helping a visitor from Houston make some contacts to buy drugs the night before. ''I made and spent $300 last night,'' he said. ''You know where the money goes. It goes up in smoke.''
He and his friends said they would not go back to a city shelter because of the fights, threats of violence and open homosexuality that they saw in the Fort Washington Armory, one of the city's most troubled shelters. Instead, they planned to move on to the R train when the terminal closed.
Another young man seated next to him was asked what he would do if he were not allowed to sleep on the train.
''I am going to find some guy in a three-piece suit, hit him over his head and get some money for a room, for me and my genie,'' he said, using one of the many slang words for crack. Program to Help Homeless Mentally Ill Neither man would be a candidate for Mayor Koch's program to help the homeless who are often without any resources - the severely mentally ill. But the city's pioneering program to identify such people and take them to hospitals, against their will, is limited to a small number of people who are considered to be endangering their lives through neglect. During the program's first 13 months, 324 people were picked up, some more than once.
In about a third of the cases, the people needed immediate medical attention for ailments ranging from lice and scabies to pneumonia and tuberculosis.
On average, they stayed in an acute-care psychiatric unit at Bellevue Hospital for seven weeks before being transferred to state psychiatric institutions for long-term care or released.
In another effort, Mayor Koch has ordered the police to take homeless people in danger of freezing on the streets to city hospitals if they refuse a ride to a shelter. But because of protections in state law for the mentally ill, Mr. Koch has been unable to reach many people. Last winter, six people were taken to hospitals and 134 were given rides to shelters, the police said.
There have been efforts by other agencies. Last year the Port Authority, seeking to cope with hundreds of people sleeping in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, provided funds to set up a drop-in center across the street, where homeless people could get food, clothing, showers and other help.
The center enabled the Port Authority to shut down areas of the terminal that had been kept open at night in part of out of compassion for the homeless.
In city parks, where homeless people take up residence as the weather warms, the city tries to draw the line at the construction of temporary shelters and has on occasion removed wagonloads of personal belongings.
Henry Stern, the City Parks Commissioner, said the department was considering new measures for the spring when the homeless would return to the parks, to try to persuade them to go elsewhere.
photo of homeless people sleeping on floor of Ferry Terminal in Manhattan (NYT/Angel Franco) (pg. B10)
