COLUMBIA'S EXPO Design Center - a Home Depot off-shoot specializing in high-end, custom home improvement - is 91,000 square feet of granite and steel, Corian and wool, imported tile and inlaid wood, with price tags to match. It's just the place to find that $13,000 Swedish stove, that $5,000 stainless steel refrigerator, that $8,800 home sauna, or maybe just a $400 shower head.

The chain chose Howard County for its 52nd outlet for obvious reasons: With a median household income of about $75,000 a year, Howard is the nation's 10th-richest county, a place where upscale housing is a widely shared obsession. "We look for an economy that's dynamic and where there are lots of homeowners continuously remodeling," says national spokeswoman Karen Powers, "and Howard County certainly fills that bill."

And since the design center opened in October, business has been even better than projected - "overwhelming," says store manager Ira Barnett. These pre-Christmas weekends, the store's parking lot is crammed with SUVs; its aisles are jammed; there's little sign of the nation's rising unemployment. "I can't tell you how many times people don't even ask me about the price of things," says one of the store's salesmen. "They just say, 'I want it.'"

A few miles away on the other side of Columbia is a sharp counterpoint to this display of Howard's plenty: the Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center, where 32 beds for the homeless have been full for so long that workers are accustomed to turning away five to 10 pleas for help every day, more than 250 a month. Many nights, a family ends up camped in its lobby.

Homelessness - said to be rising across the country in recent times - is most visible in cities like Baltimore. But in Howard and other wealthy suburbs, "it's really nothing new," says Andrea Ingram, Grassroots' executive director. "That's hard for people to grasp. You may not see people sleeping on the streets, but the situation is pretty appalling."

The disparity - of homelessness in a place with enough disposable income to support the new design center - suggests the broader polarization of American society that was only aggravated by the '90s boom, in which the very well-off got ahead the most. Since 1970, real income for the top quintile of earners has risen but everyone else has been treading water or sinking after accounting for inflation.

President Bush has long said one of the ways that these poles ought to be bridged is through charity, and there absolutely ought to be no implication here that Howard Countians (and Home Depot) aren't charitable. This time of year, Grassroots, for example, receives all sorts of donations of household and children's goods. Though a newcomer, the design center already has adopted "Our House," an Ellicott City home and school for disadvantaged young men, for which it's staging a benefit in January.

But charity, seasonal and otherwise, takes many forms. And in Grassroots' case, its need to expand has been repeatedly thwarted in recent years by several Howard neighborhoods that wouldn't welcome a new and bigger shelter. Now the center wants to add 18 beds at its current site, but even there it's running into opposition from one of its neighbors.

"People in Howard County are generous," Ms. Ingram says, "but they aren't always comfortable with close-up generosity. They should expand their thinking and recognize that people at all income levels belong in their communities - making wherever they are more inclusive places to live."

This time of year, that's a hope worth highlighting.