Throw the Bums Out: But do so with compassion -- Coolidge-style compassion.(dealing with homelessness in San Francisco, California)

On a recent business trip to San Francisco I decided to take a look at the new Asian Art Museum, which is in the old municipal library building, on one side of the downtown Civic Center Plaza. The museum is very impressive; but in making my way to it on foot across the downtown area, I acquired impressions of a different kind, which affected other senses beside the visual. I encountered San Francisco's appalling vagrancy problem.

It is in the downtown area that the problem is most obvious. I have never seen so many street people in one place. Crossing the plaza to the museum I found myself weaving my way through platoons, companies, battalions of them. Here a ragged, emaciated woman mumbling to herself and making complicated hand gestures like a Buddhist priest; there a huge black-bearded Rasputin of a man in a floor-length heavy overcoat, pushing a shopping cart piled high with filthy bundles; across the way a little knot of florid winos arguing loudly and ferociously about something; sitting on the sidewalk where I passed, a youngish black woman, gaunt and nearly bald, with some sort of horrid skin disease all over her face and scalp, croaking something at me I couldn't understand.

As I said, the Asian Art Museum is housed in the old municipal library. There is a $10 door fee, so the vagrants do not enter. On the other side of the plaza, however, is a spiffy new library, built at a cost of $137 million. It has practically been colonized by the street people. Defying the best efforts of a state-of-the-art air-conditioning system, the tang of unwashed bodies pervades the place. One row of computers (like all modern libraries, the new San Francisco municipal is long on computers and short on books -- Nicholson Baker has written very angrily about this) is occupied entirely by vagrants watching DVD movies. One of them has his feet, clad in filthy sneakers, up on the desk. I got chatting with a security guard, a fellow in the last weary stages of cynicism.

He took me to the security office and showed me their "gallery" -- an entire wall covered with polaroid snapshots of library patrons apprehended for various offenses. The snapshots were arranged by offense category, each category tagged with a three-digit police code. The guard interpreted the codes for me. "These are the assaults . . . here you have the substance abusers . . . these here were defacing the books . . ." I pointed to a block of 40 or 50 photographs he'd missed. What had their offense been? "Oh, those are the masturbators."

A block east of the museum is U.N. Plaza, boasting a modern-style fountain -- a sprawling arrangement of granite slabs and water jets, designed by a world-famous architect. This has naturally proved irresistible to the armies of vagrants. For years they urinated, defecated, and discarded drug paraphernalia there -- the last to such a degree that the water was dangerous with chemical contaminants, even if you could bring yourself to ignore the waste products. The city's Department of Public Works used to conduct a daily clean-up. Early this year, though, they decided that the cost was more than could be justified. In March, a chain-link fence was erected around the whole thing, in the teeth of, it goes without saying, vehement protests from "advocates for the homeless." (The word "homeless" is the current euphemism for vagrants, publicized by activist New York attorney Robert Hayes in the early 1980s.)

It is not too hard to figure out why San Francisco has so many vagrants. Indigent adults receive cash payments of $320 to $395 a month, with only a nominal work requirement for the able-bodied. Supplemented by a little panhandling, this is a tidy sum in the agreeable Northern California climate. When I wrote about the situation on this magazine's website, I got e-mails from people in neighboring towns and ...