A Place of Their Own

Tom Dunning's homeless task force learns an old lesson: If at first you don't succeed, try again.

Comments (0) By Zac Crain Thursday, Mar 24 2005

...continued from page 7

Hal Samples

Sporty doesn't want to lead the homeless camp where he lives. He wants to leave it behind.

Mark Graham

Tom Dunning's second effort to guide the city to a solution for chronic homelessness resembled his first--only this time things were worse.

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"What do we have to lose?" Larry James asks. "Might as well give it a shot. The fact is, it doesn't smell like urine in downtown because people pee on the street. It smells like urine because nobody cares to clean up anything. Nobody's down there. Nobody cares. No one cares. I could go on forever talking about that, but all we do is talk. What we need is a combination of philanthropic heart and entrepreneurial spirit. I think that a well-funded SRO development strategy with a solid business plan that included security, the presence of more than adequate services, that would be...talk about a breath of fresh air. It'd work." He laughs, both because it's obvious and because it's not. "Shoot, it'd work."