Jason sat on a concrete bench on the corner of Fifth Street, waiting for his bus to arrive and watching an old homeless man begging for money across the street. Most passerbies didn’t bother to glance at the man. The few who did would dart their eyes away before they allowed themselves to feel sorry for him.

Many of those who walked through Fifth Street were professional, upper-middleclass men and women, raised to be competitive and taught to scoff at those who would not earn their living.

Jason wondered if he himself would be willing to give the old man a dollar. That’s if he had a dollar to spare. Jason’s mother had always told him that the only things homeless men spent money on was booze and drugs, or some other ungodly

I think it's good that it's briefly noted that Jason doesn't have a dollar to spare, as this helps define his status among those in this scene. I also feel that section could be tightened up for better effect. I think I'd like to know where Jason is taking a bus to before the final paragraph's introspection. Finally, in my opinion, a little foreshadowing of impending conflict in the opening paragraph would really do wonders for keeping me interested.

Overall, I'm not particularly engaged, but I'm not hating it either. I would not stop reading based on this fragment.

Just a nit: passerbies should be passers-by (hyphen optional depending on preference).

Isn't it passersby not passerbies?

Hmmm...what I"m thinking is that what you seem to really be trying to do would be better handled as a pargraph of two of philosophical comment on the advisability of giving to a homeless man in light of mom's teachings. Then open with him feeling in his pocket or something and trying to decide whether to or not to.

I see this philosophical type of opening a lot. It works. You don't have to open with live action. An entertainingly phrased musing on the subject can work.

Take the opening to Harlan Corben's JUST ONE LOOK

There are sudden rips. There are tears in your life, deep knife wounds that slash through your flesh. Your life is one thing, then it is shredded into another. It comes apart as though gutted in a belly slit. And then there are those moments when your life simply unravels. A loose thread is pulled. A seam gives way. The change is slow at first, nearly imperceptible.

For Grace Lawson, the unraveling began at the Photomat.

She was about to enter the....

Well, "I" found this an interesting opening. I bought the book. Hardback. The philopsophizing is about what is going to happen. It gives me, as reader, an idea of what I'm going to see happen. Like telling me there is a bomb under the conference table. I read on, curious to see what happens. For me, this was far more interesting than merely showing Grace going into the Photomat.

I've seen where riffs like this can give a lot of backstory in an intriguing way.

Like the opening of CHAIN OF COMMAND by Casper Weinberger and Peter Schweizer

Michael Delaney sometimes had his doubts about people. But a gun? No doubts there. A gun would never lie to you, would never tell you it loved you and then leave you for somebody else, would never take your kids away, would never flatter you and then stab you in the back. You treated a gun right and it would be your friend forever.

Back in his drinking days, Delaney used to riff on this particular subject after he'd gotten eight or ten fingers of single malt in him. It had been kind of a joke, but kind of not.

But not now. Right now it was not funny at all.

Once you made friends with a gun, you knew that gun better than you knew your brother. And the gun in his hand was a stranger.

Now I thought that was a pretty classy way of telling me about this Delaney and then sliding into the problem at hand.

Jason sat on a concrete bench on the corner of Fifth Street, waiting for his bus to arrive and watching an old homeless man begging for money across the street. Most PASSERS-BY didn’t bother to glance at the man.

[SKIPPING THE FIFTH-STREET PARAGRAPH; WE ALREADY KNOW THOSE OTHER PEOPLE AREN'T LOOKING.]

MOTHER WOULDN'T. SHE had always told him that the only things homeless men spent money on was booze and drugs, or some other ungodly sin. Yes, she had always been a woman of God, and so she was able to properly judge homeless men (like the one who was now sitting in the corner across the street) and save herself some money as well.

That's if Mother is important to the story. And if she is, maybe she should be in paragraph 1 instead of the homeless man. If not, we could get to the interaction between homeless man and Jason.

Does that make sense? Things that are very common are only interesting if you show them in some new and different light, or introduce some element to make them uncommon. Right now there's nothing to distinguish this street scene from any other going on in a city right now.

I like this opening. We get a solid grounding both in the physical reality and the internal reality of the POV character. You also raise several interesting conflicts, the main conflict being Jason's meditations on the different attitudes that kept this homeless guy from getting a dollar from anyone.

Someone expressed confusion over the location, thinking it must be a residential area. A word associating the businessfolk with the surrounding office buildings would probably fix that, though honestly I didn't feel it was a problem myself.