It had been 14 years since Frank had been homeless. Though the 49-year-old had spent years drifting between detox clinics and sleeping on the streets of the Bowery, he had taken control of his life again in 1991, when he married, moved to a trailer park in Delaware and began working a steady job for Proctor & Gamble.

That life could have lasted a long time. If Frank was still at P&G today, he’d be “wearing the gold watch,” he says.

But Frank lost his grip on that life of stability a year and a half ago, the day he came home from work early to find his wife in bed with another man.

The “gruesome” divorce that ensued stripped Frank of almost everything, even custody of his daughter. All he had left was his pickup trick—and before long, that was gone, too. The alcoholism and drug habits he had barely kept at bay in his Delaware days threatened to consume his life yet again, as they had for over 32 years.

Frank knew he needed help. So he headed straight for his native New York, a place he knew from experience could help a homeless man. When he knocked on the door of the New York City Rescue Mission on Lafayette Street, he was just looking for a two-week break to gather his strength and “go back out there,” as he says, to get a job so he could afford booze and drugs.

Yet 10 months later, Frank, who could not legally provide his last name, is still at the mission. Two hospital stays and a religious awakening helped him kick his alcohol and drug addictions. As a member of its Residential Recovery Program, he works at the Mission, sitting at the front desk and helping with maintenance. “I have a totally different outlook,” Frank says, sitting on a folding chair in the mission’s chapel, a large, plain room lined with garbage bags of clothing and fold-up cots. And in the next few months, he’ll be graduating from the mission’s program and heading out into the world to find a place of his own to live.

He’s nervous, sure, he says. He’ll miss his friends, of course, who helped him turn his life around, but he realizes that the cost of living in New York today is only going up. He may have to seek a job elsewhere after he leaves the mission. “You’re not gonna live on an $8 per hour salary” in New York, Frank says.

Frank’s story is a parable for the classic dilemma of a government trying to end homelessness. The city can offer all the help it wants, but even if the homeless embrace that help, rising rents and living expenses may push them back into the vicious cycle of poverty that has kept many families at the brink of homelessness for generations. Perhaps this is why the fastest growing demographic in the homeless population is families—particularly families with children.

So the mayor is announcing a new policy of prevention, pouring money into strategies to stop evictions and end reliance on the expensive shelter system. The plan has met with success so far. But no one—not the mayor, not the shelters, not Frank—knows how to end homelessness in a new New York where the buzzword is “gentrify.”

A study released last week by the National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that out of a nationwide total of 744,000, New York State has 61,094 homeless individuals. More than half live in New York City.

Contrary to popular belief, this number is not lower than it was throughout the ’90s. The vagrant on the street corner may have disappeared along with the Bowery slums, but he’s been replaced by a teen mother with two hungry children. Is it the rising rents? Or maybe the 2001 to 2002 recession? Whatever the reason, the DHS shelter population is an estimated 40 percent larger today than it was 10 years ago.

Responding to the dramatic increase in the homeless population in 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced in 2004 his Five Year Plan to end homelessness, which has made some gains. The coalition formed under the plan, “Uniting for Solutions Beyond Shelter” has a two-fold goal: to eliminate chronic or long-term homelessness and to reduce the entire homeless population by two-thirds by 2009.

The plan focuses DHS tactics on prevention. It established regional centers to help those in high-risk neighborhoods before the fatal eviction notice is served. It has created tighter links between a number of non-profit and governmental agencies to coordinate homelessness prevention activities at every level—on the street, in the shelters and in court.

The largest piece of the plan is the creation of supportive housing, an alternative to shelters that is widely hailed as more efficient and cost-effective. Mayor Bloomberg pledged to create 12,000 units of supportive housing as part of the Five Year Plan. Albany offered to lend a hand in a 2005 “New York New York” agreement in which the state pledged to help fund 9000 units of supportive housing.

Is it working? Yes, though perhaps not at such a rate that the homeless population will be down two-thirds two years from now. Between 2005 and 2006, the number of homeless on the street dropped 13 percent. Between 2003 and 2006, the number of homeless individuals dropped 20 percent and the number of homeless children 30 percent. And last November, the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) was able to close Camp LaGuardia, the city’s largest shelter for single adults, freeing $19 million that will now fund Five Year Plan alternatives like supportive housing.

Another key piece of the plan involves getting to know those whom the plan is serving. This means keeping tabs on how many people are in the shelters—and also keeping tabs on who is on the street. Hence the expansion of HOPE, the Homeless Outreach Population Estimate, a city-wide census of the street population that began in Manhattan in 2003; all five boroughs were counted beginning in 2005. “That population historically was not counted,” says Maryanne Schretzman, Deputy Commissioner of Policy and Planning, “and we decided that in order to solve the problem of homelessness, we need to understand it, and we need to know how many people are out there.”

Since it is potentially inaccurate to use extrapolation techniques for this survey, thousands of volunteer New Yorkers actually count the street population one by one. Even more fascinating is the system’s built-in quality control measure: The DHS plants decoys to ensure that volunteers are actually asking suspected homeless if they are, in fact, without a home. “We don’t want volunteers to make assumptions,” Schretzman said. Volunteers counted 85 percent of the decoys last year. The approach has earned HOPE federal recognition for its standards of accuracy.

This year’s count will take place on Jan. 29, and will need an estimated 2,500 volunteers.

Frank was once one of those street homeless. He lived in the Bowery in the mid-’80s, when the area was still called “Skid Row.” He slept on the streets and in the subway and scrounged in dumpsters for food. Most of the money he earned working in restaurant kitchens and at loading docks, or wherever the temp agencies sent him, fed his addictions. If the temp agencies had nothing, he panhandled.

“I was the guy walking up to people half-drunk and asking people for a dollar,” Frank says. “If they said no, I’d say, ‘Well, do you have five dollars?’”

It was a desperate time in his life, he says. Now 5’4” and 210 pounds, he weighed less than 160 during his heavy drug days. Police brought him to the Bellevue State Hospital after he spent four hours staring at a traffic light during an acid trip.

Frank’s experiences epitomize the homeless population in the ’80s, which, under the auspices of Mayor Ed Koch and President Ronald Reagan, spiraled upward through 1987. It was the first upward surge in the homeless population in New York City—from which some individuals have yet to recover.

But in the early ’90s, things began to change, both for Frank and the general homeless population of New York. This is when Frank got the job at P&G and moved to the trailer park with his extended family. Back in the city, the DHS shelter population, after shrinking in 1990, remained stable throughout the rest of the century.

Of course, so did the economy. Actually, the economy boomed. While many remember Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as the wielder of the fiery sword that drove the homeless from the streets and the addicts from the Bowery—and evidence suggests this may be true—it may also be possible to link the nationwide economic boom of the Clinton years with the drop in crime and stability of the homeless population. Unemployment rates in all five boroughs hit lows in 2000, with figures like 5.1 in Manhattan and Staten Island.

But in 2002, unemployment rose dramatically. Between 2000 and 2003, unemployment jumped an average of 2.52 percent in all five boroughs. At its worst, rates were 7.7 in Manhattan and 10.5 in the Bronx. An economic recession at least partially, if not fully, linked to 9/11 swept the city. And, accordingly, so did the homeless population at the DHS shelter, which peaked at 38,310 in 2003.

Yet the numbers show unemployment is clearly not the only factor at work. While the unemployment rate has not only recovered but also improved since the recession—it’s hovering right now around a low of 4.4—both the street and DHS shelter populations, relative to the economic gains, have shrunk only marginally.

So why hasn’t the homeless population bounced back?

Well, first, it’s easier for the economy to recover than it is for families without homes. Many adults without homes are still working, so the unemployment rate can fall without the number of homeless dropping.

But one specific reason the homeless aren’t recovering this time around may be related to a lack of affordable housing, according to some experts. “Families are strapped,” said Jo Gonsalves, Director of Affordable Housing and Homelessness Prevention for United Way of New York City. “At the end of the day, it’s how much of a rent burden families are having to take on.”

The rise of housing advocacy groups such as “Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn,” formed to opposed developer Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards plan, is just one sign of a population that is being increasingly marginalized by luxury housing. Even government incentives to create low-cost units are lacking. AM New York reported Jan. 15, that Queens is not included in a city law passed last month that gives tax breaks to developers who build affordable housing.

The statistics say it all. Gonsalves referred to a 2005 rent burden study conducted by Community Service Society (CSS) of New York that paints a dismal picture of housing for the poor. According to the report, between 2002 and 2005 citywide median rent increased 21 percent, from $700 to $850, a jump the report calls “the steepest triennial increase ... since 1993.” During the same time period, the median annual income of renters rose only 6 percent.

Much higher rents and only marginally higher wages add up to a crushing rent burden for many of New York’s poorest. In 1996, low-income renters were paying an average of 39 percent of their household income. In 2005, it was 44 percent. The poorest renters paid an average 55 percent in 2005, leaving them with an average of $32 per week for each family member after rent was paid.

This is a second reason that families are finding themselves on the streets—they are economically extremely fragile, infinitely more susceptible to events beyond their control than the middle class and the wealthy. As the CSS study notes, quoting a Joint Center for Housing Studies report: “Working within these tight budgets, lowest-income families have little margin for emergencies. One unexpected bill, one spell of unemployment or even a minor health problem may make it impossible to pay the rent.”

That’s exactly what happened to Frank after his divorce. But, he acknowledges, homelessness has two sources: external and internal. Some of the circumstances of his life were beyond his control; others, like his addictions, were not. There were times in his life when he pawned half of his belongings to feed his addictions, especially his cocaine habit. “It’s a sickness,” Frank says. “When you’re on cocaine, it’s a general that wakes you up at 3 a.m. and says, ‘Let’s march.’”

So, Frank says, neither affordable housing, nor decreased purchasing power nor a spike in unemployment can be wholly blamed for causing homelessness. Though public policy, activism and especially the mayor’s plan may “make a considerable dent,” as the Mission’s Public Relations Manager Joe Little says, the homeless must meet the Mayor halfway. “Bloomberg cannot change people’s hearts,” he says.

Frank agrees, pointing to his own three-decade refusal to face his addictions and stay in rehab. “The city can only do so much,” Frank says. “Help is here, but you gotta want it.”

Frank is taking his GED today, 34 years after leaving high school. His addictions to alcohol and drugs are long behind him. In a few weeks, he will graduate from the Mission’s program. And then? “I want to go into this line of work,” he says. The Mission’s executive director, James VarnHagen, is helping Frank look for a job working in another mission. He has taken to heart the motto taped to one of the Mission’s office doors: “You have two hands: one to help yourself, and one to help others.”

“I can’t distance myself,” Frank says, “because I was there.”