In the spring of 2006, the City of Durham and Durham County adopted a "Ten Year Plan To End Homelessness," joining others across the country. In 2007, those charged with implementing the plan got down to work.

At the plan's Web site, www.durhamtenyearplan.com, a clock ticks off the passing time. Now 780 days into the project, those involved say it's coming along.

"From my perspective, I think we're making great progress in Durham," said Stan Holt of the Triangle United Way, which was hired to coordinate the plan. "I think we're on our way."

"It's going forward, not as fast as we would like," said Anita Oldham, who directs the Durham Affordable Housing Coalition. Her agency is contracted with United Way to "meet the measurable and time-bound deliverables."

If progress is being made, though, the numbers to show it are not readily available; and that illustrates some obstacles inherent in what Durham has set out to do.

And it led to some awkward minutes when Oldham and plan director Edy Thompson reported to local elected officials in January.

Mayor Bill Bell asked how many people who had been homeless and were not homeless any more.

"We don't have the capacity right now to do that," Oldham replied.

County Commissioner Becky Heron asked how many homeless children there are in Durham. Oldham couldn't say. Heron asked whether the plan was making progress; Oldham said she believed so.

"There have to be benchmarks," said City Councilman Eugene Brown. "It has been two years and we would hope and like to see some success stories."

Tangibly speaking, the Ten Year Plan is a 50-page document full of "outcomes," "indicators," and "strategies" meant to be conducted along the lines of Durham's "Results Based Accountability" standards. That means keeping quantitative track of how well the city and county are doing their jobs.

"When we started," Holt said, "we had some assumptions that we had the capacity [to collect] and integrate data. We didn't."

A lot of cities and counties, especially those with 10-Year plans, have a single "point of entry" where homeless connect with shelters and other services available to them. Durham doesn't. A large part of the plan involves coordinating Durham's myriad of shelters, halfway houses, financial advisers, clinics, umbrella organizations and government departments -- each with its own agenda, mandate, history, character and sets of numbers.

"Until we are able to move [to] a position where we have a single point of entry," plan director Edy Thompson said this week, "we have to deal."

Still, Thompson said she has success stories.

One, she said, is an arrangement by which homeless people can take free job-training courses at Durham Tech and get certified to work in some fields.

"That was a real coup," she said.

Another is a "care review" system through the Durham Center (the county's mental-health/substance-abuse coordinating agency) that brings all the relevant services together on individual cases -- doctors, dentists, alcohol treatment, job counseling -- rather than leaving a person to connect with them on his own.

Thompson and her colleagues have held two "Homeless Connects" expos where agencies make themselves available in one place at one time. The second, in September 2008, got medical attention for 167 people, job-hunting help for 159, substance-abuse and mental-health help for 130. The project raised about $40,000 in donations and grants in fiscal 2007-08.

One benchmark can be set in March, when numbers are announced from this year's "point-in-time" count. Each January, counters go out to the shelters and the streets on one night and take a census of the homeless they can find.

Over the past four years, the total number has ranged from 502 in 2006 to 590 last year; the "chronically homeless" -- individuals who are in and out of shelters, treatment centers, emergency rooms and jails year after year -- has ranged from 78 to 157.

The chronic cases represent a minority of the homeless but the great bulk of public expense: the salaries and resources of police officers, medics and caseworkers who have to treat them over and over. Getting and keeping those people off the streets and out of the shelters -- and into places they can live for keeps -- is what the 10-Year Plan aims for.

"We will not see overnight changes in homelessness," said Mayor Pro-Tem Cora Cole-McFadden, a member of the 10-Year Plan's executive committee.

"We need to monitor what is in our plan and measure against what's being asked," she said. But that's not easy: to change the face of homelessness means changing many public perceptions and many long-set ways of doing business.

"We have to look at our own policies, where we may be causing problems," Cole-McFadden said.

"Whenever there is a status quo in place and you start chipping away at it," she said, "people don't like it."