When Thomas Gilliam lost his job and his home, he bounced around homeless shelters, rehabilitation programs and friends' homes for three years before he found a permanent place to live.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Thomas Gilliam has been in his own apartment in Lawrenceville since 2001, when he was placed there by a program operated by North Side Common Ministries. Click photo for larger image.

Since moving into his Lawrenceville apartment in November 2001, however, Gilliam has finished an associate's degree and landed a full-time job.

Gilliam, 49, who has struggled with drug abuse, said having both a home and staff assistance from Northside Common Ministries has made him more stable.

"I can watch TV, eat, have my own privacy," he said.

The issue of moving more homeless people into permanent housing will be on the table tomorrow as Allegheny County begins to create a 10-year plan to end homelessness.

Philip Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, and county Chief Executive Dan Onorato are scheduled to open a three-day session that will begin to shape the plan.

More than 70 people, including housing developers, providers of services to homeless people and government representatives are expected to attend and help shape the plan, which is to be finished by the end of the year.

The plan will attempt to create a new vision for addressing -- and preventing -- homelessness in the community, according to Marilyn Sullivan, executive director of Bethlehem Haven, a local shelter for homeless women.

More than 150 other communities throughout the nation have completed plans or are developing them, according to the Interagency Council, which coordinates the responses of 20 federal agencies to the problems of homelessness.

Experts believe that chronically homeless people, in particular, may be helped by moving quickly into permanent, supportive housing, the type of housing that has benefited Gilliam. Supportive housing combines affordability with staff support and other services.

The Bush administration has spurred the creation of 10-year plans around the nation, in part by offering communities financial incentives.

Communities need to develop the 10-year plans "if they want to compete for federal dollars," said Rob Hess, Philadelphia's deputy managing director for special needs housing.

Push from HUD

Since last year, communities have had to specify their strategies for ending chronic homelessness in their applications to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for federal homeless assistance funding.

But Hess said other factors, including frustration among local officials with increased homelessness in their communities and research indicating that chronic homelessness can be solved, also have helped to create "a focus on homelessness I haven't seen in city halls across the country in the past 25 years."

While the response to developing plans has varied, "some cities have jumped in with both feet," he said. "I think it's phenomenal."

In Atlanta, $10 million from private sources already has been raised for a plan announced last year to create more permanent supportive housing, establish a 24-hour service center and increase funds for emergency rent and utility assistance.

Last month, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced time frames and targets for a five-year plan to reduce homelessness in the city by two-thirds, including the opening of six neighborhood homelessness prevention offices and $150 million in private sector investment for supportive housing.

In June, San Francisco officials unveiled a plan to address chronic homelessness that calls for creating 3,000 units of permanent supportive housing. Mayor Gavin Newsom is supporting a $200 million bond measure, to be decided by voters in November, that includes $90 million to house homeless and near-homeless persons.

"Some communities, such as San Francisco and New York, are taking this very, very seriously," Dennis Culhane, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in homeless issues, said of the move to develop 10-year plans.

Localities that give lip service to their plans' provisions will see little impact, he said. But if a community, "and most important, its key leadership, view this as an opportunity to bring together the agency chiefs who control the large budgets, then it can develop into a major initiative."

Whether communities across the nation will make the investment necessary to make their plans a reality remains to be seen, said Martha Burt, a researcher at the Urban Institute in Washington.

Some appear to be doing so, while others do not, she said.

The Bush administration also has sent mixed signals in its commitment to ending homelessness, Burt and other advocates said, providing a modest amount of funds for new initiatives even as it has proposed slashing funds for subsidized housing.

Some communities that have developed plans indicated that funding constraints have hindered their ability to move forward.

In January 2003, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley endorsed a 10-year plan calling for improved efforts to prevent homelessness in the city and to make more affordable housing units available.

Officials are working to implement the plan, but significant resources have not been identified, said Ellen Sahli, the mayor's liaison on homelessness and supportive housing. A bill that would have imposed a real estate document filing fee to provide rent subsidies for extremely low-income households -- the income group most likely to become homeless -- died in the Legislature earlier this year.

In Indianapolis, which completed a plan in 2002 calling for the development of 1,700 permanent supportive housing units in five years, 165 units have been created and at least another 120 are on the drawing board, said Dan Shepley, executive director of the Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention, a nonprofit in charge of implementing the plan.

"Progress is being made, but the reality is that city and state governments are going through budget woes," Shepley said. "The reality is, we're competing for resources."

While acknowledging that funding is an issue, Mangano prefers to emphasize the unprecedented interest in ending homelessness from community leaders around the nation.

Mangano, former leader of a coalition of groups serving homeless people in Massachusetts, said the widespread interest results, in part, from research indicating that chronic homelessness can be ended, and in a cost-effective manner.

Although the network of homeless shelters grew dramatically across the nation in the 1980s, homelessness has continued to increase. Researchers have concluded that a different approach, aimed at placing people in permanent housing with support as quickly as possible, is more effective than providing temporary shelter.

A program to do just that in Allegheny County has had marked success, with few participants falling back into homelessness, said Mac McMahon, a program director for Northside Common Ministries.

"If you put people in housing and start working with them, it's amazing how they turn around," said McMahon, adding that Gilliam probably could have been moved more quickly into a home of his own.

While the shelter system has been effective in helping many people rise from homelessness, many chronically homeless people essentially live in the system, said Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington. Though they make up only about 10 percent of homeless people, those who are chronically homeless use about half the system's resources.

The shelter system also has come to serve as a dumping ground for people discharged from various types of institutional care, including prisons, jails and the mental health system, she said.

Drawing on emerging research, the National Alliance announced a 10-year plan to end homelessness in July 2000. The time frame came from the belief that enough permanent supportive housing could be created in a decade to end chronic homelessness, Roman said.

After Mangano became executive director of the Interagency Council in 2002, he began promoting the development of 10-year plans around the nation, aided by endorsements from the Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties.

Mangano also has worked to develop state interagency councils on homelessness. Governors of 49 states and territories have created the councils, which are aimed at making more resources available to address homelessness, he said.

During his tenure, federal agencies on the Interagency Council have made $35 million in grants available to 11 communities. The Bush administration has asked Congress to double that amount.

Other funding for homeless services has been increased every year the administration has been in office, Mangano said. But he called the investments modest and added, "We know this is not enough to solve the whole problem."

While praising the council's efforts, advocates have been alarmed at the administration's proposal to slash $1.6 billion from the Section 8 subsidized housing program, a proposal Mangano did not initiate.

The proposed cuts, which have attracted little support in Congress, would undermine a component "essential to preventing homelessness," Burt said.

In a letter last month to the Interagency Council, a group of agencies urged the council to develop a 10-year federal plan to end homelessness that includes "specific commitments of the federal housing, services, and technical assistance resources necessary to do the job."