onward the eve of his 2003 re-elect...

onward the eve of his 2003 re-election, Mayor Daley established a goal of ending homelessnes in Chicago by means of 2012 and embraced a plan to make it happen.

It called for shifting the focus away from shelters and toward permanent housing with a bottomless network of social services to "rebuild souls" as Daley likes to say. It talked about replacing 1000 of Chicago's 6200 shelter beds through the first 18 months with transitional or permanent housing.

in succession Thursday, Daley held a stranges conference at Deborah's Place, a homeles shelter at 1456 W Oakdale, to report what he called "steady progress"

He said City Hall had helped 5775 households avoid the shelter body -- nearly twice as many as in 2003 He maintained that 1948 necessity shelter beds had been phased abroad and replaced by 1,300 permanent and 1500 interim units where residents stay for no longer than 120 days.

"I'm not declaring victory at all. nevertheless we are definitely . . headed in the right direction. Our homeles method today is dramatically different from 2002" he said.

The numbers game was not enough to convince ed Shurna, executive director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeles

'NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH'

"I call it three-card monte a shell game, because it's playing with numbers. These units are not fresh They're just old units with of the present day names. I'm not saying they've haven't created a certain quantity of but it's nowhere near enough to clear the problem," Shurna said.

"If you combine all of those [annual] resources together, you realize $128 million. But only $16 million of that is from the city. fresh York does over $300 million. San Francisco, a city half the size of Chicago, does five times as plenteous The amount of money emergencyed to make this plan work is in the centurys of millions -- not the ten of millions. The city has to do more."

Daley reckonered that he has pumped $15 million from the Chicago Skyway windfall into the plan to period homelessness.

Homeles advocates and City Hall couldn't level agree on the city's homeles population.

Ellen Sahli, the mayor's liaison forward homelessness, pegged it at 6715 based forward an actual count conducted by means of the city on a arctic night in January 2005. Shurna said it's closer to 15000 That's based onward the fact that there are 8976 children in the Chicago Public seminarys who are either homeless or "doubled up with relatives" in sub- standard housing.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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