If you live, work or study near MARTA's Five Points station, you don't need a survey to tell you that downtown Atlanta has a severe problem with panhandlers. You're greeted by derelicts and hustlers every time you go out onto the street.

Working a few blocks from the station, I run a gantlet of panhandlers, street preachers, lunatics and "salesmen" just to get to a lunchtime eatery. I have acquired a catalog of crude putdowns and warnings to keep them away, but they don't always work. Sometimes a beggar follows, cursing me for refusing his entreaties.

The Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau recently commissioned a study to find out what tourists say were the biggest disappointments during their visits. No. 1 was a no-brainer: traffic. No. 2? Panhandling. Some visitors believe Atlanta has more moochers than much bigger cities like New York, Houston or Chicago.

Atlanta's anti-panhandling ordinance is widely ignored. In 2005, the City Council passed an ordinance to crack down on "aggressive" panhandling in a so-called tourist triangle that encompasses the greater downtown area. Mayor Shirley Franklin pledged that vagrants would all but disappear, and downtown revivalists celebrated a victory.

Since then, panhandling may have grown worse. Certainly, arrests are down. From Jan. 1 to March 31, 2007, 250 people were arrested for "accosting or soliciting by force," according to Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters Christian Boone and Leon Stafford, who gathered Atlanta police statistics.

Each successive quarter saw a drop in arrests, with just 64 arrests in the first quarter of this year, Boone and Stafford wrote last week. As a result, downtown Atlanta is a haven for beggars —- black and white, male and female, young and old, handicapped and able-bodied.

Much of the problem lies in the ordinance itself, which is too weak to combat the problem. Intimidated by threats from advocates of free speech and activists for the homeless, the council adopted an approach that blesses begging done "passively" (whatever that means) and mandates no sanctions for the first two offenses. As a result, overworked police officers have all but given up arresting violators.

Atlanta can do better. While the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue the city over a tougher ordinance, the council should have stared them down. Other cities have somehow managed to craft laws that curb panhandling, and those cities answer to the same U.S. Constitution.

So does the Georgia World Congress Center Authority, which polices Centennial Olympic Park. Unlike downtown's Woodruff Park, a urine-drenched squatter's camp, Centennial Olympic Park, a few blocks away, remains a clean and vibrant attraction, with nary a beggar in sight. If the Congress Center can figure out how to get this done, why can't the city of Atlanta?

It's not as though letting the impoverished beg on the streets is a noble or nurturing way to treat them. Atlanta's political and civic leaders do the hungry, the addled and the addicted no favors by allowing them to panhandle passers-by and sleep in alleys and doorways. (Actually, it's not clear that all of downtown's beggars are homeless. Some of them look clean and well-groomed, as if begging is just a job like any other.)

Downtown Atlanta is at a critical juncture, with Georgia State University and its students adding a life and vitality it has not seen in decades. Finally, after years of planning and dreaming by its boosters, the area seems ready to accommodate a cosmopolitan mix of residences, shops, clubs and restaurants.

But panhandlers can blow up that plan before it leaves the drawing board. Not many people are hardy enough to want to live under the constant haranguing and harassment of vagrants, ever more clever with their come-ons. (A colleague of mine, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, gave a guy a buck the other day because of this line: "Every man needs a roll of duct tape." Yes, the guy was actually selling a new roll of duct tape, provenance unknown. The tape now sits on my colleague's desk.)

If other cities can get a grip on this plague of panhandling, surely Atlanta can, too.

> Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays.

cynthia@ajc.com