Why? For much the same reason that Pastor Graham Long, at the Wayside Chapel, is suddenly fighting for the survival of his charities. And for much the same reason that florists report fewer men stopping on the way home to buy flowers for their wives.

The hard times are here, for the top end of town and the bottom. People are spending less. They are a little less kind - or, at least, they can ill-afford spontaneous gestures of generosity.

Long knows this better than most. From his chapel in Kings Cross it would be a short stroll to the harbour this morning to watch the yachting architects who are confronting their own hardship amid a building slump and a battered state economy. But Long will not have the time. He will be too busy, as he puts it, trying to "stay afloat".

"I think we're the canary in the coalmine," he says. "Almost the minute there was the mere rumour or fright of a financial crisis - before it had really hit - our donations dropped [by] about 50 per cent. July, August, September - to the point that we now have a $200,000 hole in our budget. Our staff are under no illusion that jobs will go - we'll lose about 50 per cent - if we cannot turn it around by February."

Until now many of the Wayside Chapel's regular donations came from the top end of town: investors, with dollars to spare, who were happy to fund its work with vulnerable youth, the mentally ill and the downright desperate. They knew their donations made the difference, almost daily, between life and death. They were the lifeblood of a charity which, unusually, gets 70 per cent of its funding from private donors.

But then the markets crashed and these donors' dollars dried up.

"All of them were in a terrible way," Long says. "There are people you wouldn't even think of asking for help in the next year … There were some big names there."

Long has a plan to fight back. But first, we cross to another barometer of Sydney's kindness deficit: the florists. Is the downturn hurting?

"The answer is yes," says David Ash, the owner of the Flower Factory, which has eight shops around Sydney. "Until the end of September, trade was on par with last year. But from October trade has been down about 10 per cent. There's a certain element of bravado in not wanting to be the first to admit things aren't so good but if I look at the car park at Flemington Markets the industry is down well beyond that 10 per cent."

The core of the business - births, deaths, marriages - is not suffering but he puts the lost trade down to more discretionary spending, such as husbands picking up flowers on the way home from work.

At the Flower Factory at Neutral Bay, Clara Jane Duncan was in to buy for a friend but she admitted she and her husband had stopped spending on flowers for their home.

Beyond florists, the bravado of real estate investors is being challenged.

A city waterfront property sold in recent weeks for $2.3 million on a Thursday night. The vendor and buyer went home happy. At 7am the next day, the buyer called the agent with bad news. The markets had crashed overnight in New York. He had lost $300,000. The deal was off, he said, unless they wanted to sell for $2 million. Deal or no deal? No deal.

At Rose Bay, a buyer paid $2.45 million for a home and, as required, put down $245,000 as a deposit. One problem: the finance had not yet been secured. Too late, the buyer learnt the harsh reality of the credit squeeze. The banks were unwilling to lend the money and the property - and the deposit - were lost.

A Herald /Nielsen poll this week found 53 per cent of Australians were optimistic about the economy over the next few years. A Sydney architect, Chris Haughton, counts himself among the optimists but says: "Six months ago I was turning away work. I couldn't get staff. Suddenly that has stopped. It's the most abrupt halt to business I've witnessed in 20 years. Now I've got people banging on my door wanting work but it just isn't there."

Companies are cancelling Christmas parties and 60 per cent of business owners will force staff to take a summer break, according to a SmartCompany poll of 122 firms. As borrowers cheer falling interest rates, self-funded retirees fret over lost earnings. The weak Australian dollar has forced the cancellation of overseas holidays.

Graham Long does not scoff at such degrees of hardship - the degrees of separation. When the better-off are forced to make sacrifices, the Wayside Chapel is sacrificed too.

But he has a plan. It costs just $550 a day for the chapel to keep its youth centre open. It provides the only safe, drug-free drop-in centre for youth in Kings Cross and the only "street sweep" service that goes out looking for vulnerable young people on the street or "sleeping under a bush". The $200,000 already lost in donations is almost a year's funding for the youth centre.

So Long has launched an appeal, Friends of Wayside. For $42 a month, one donor's annual contribution will keep the centre open for one day. He has 30 donors so far. He needs 200 by January and 400 within 12 months. It should not rely on the toppling end of town.

"If we don't get the 200 by January, then we'll be looking at the 50 per cent staff cutback by February."

Among them could be Michael Crowe, 50, who works as a driver for the Wayside Chapel but first went there for help when he was 17. He returned as a homeless man about five years ago.

His first memory was walking into a room, barely three years old, to find his father with a rifle between his legs. "I love you, Michael," he said, before pulling the trigger. Michael's mother committed suicide about three years later. His adoptive parents died before he was 13. Four years ago he was reunited with his childhood sweetheart and they married at the Wayside Chapel a year later. "This is where I found myself," he said yesterday.

His colleague, Gary, 40, joined the chapel's long-term mental health program as a client a year ago. Now he is on the payroll, having studied aged care, and he runs the anti-smoking program while he strives to kick the habit himself. "My life has a meaning now," he says. And if he lost the job? "I don't even want to think about it."

This week Crowe and Gary took a group of homeless people for a tour of the Conservatorium of Music.

If Long gets his donors, these men will keep their jobs. And the chapel might approach something like plain sailing.

Or staying afloat.