The article says he’s ‘sleeping rough’, that is to say on a park bench in the winter. If he were really a successful beggar, he could afford to rent a room.
Maybe you missed the first two paragraphs of the article. He does rent a home, hundreds of miles away. He does the “sleeping rough” technique to make it look like he’s really a beggar to the tourists in the area.
***A professional beggar who travels hundreds of miles from his home in Lancashire to London’s Mayfair has been using a credit card reader to accept payments from wealthy tourists.
Damien Preston-Booth, 37, commutes from his rented home in the north-west, but pretends to be homeless when he asks passers-by for money on the streets of London.***