"How are you, Peter?" the man asks.

"Lloyd," Schmeidler politely corrects him, then asks the man his name and how he's doing.

"Maintaining," he replies.

"That's what we gotta do," Schmeidler nods.

It happens now and again. Someone remembers Schmeidler, if not his name, from his days running Urban Ministries.

He came to Durham 10 years ago to head the St. Philip's Soup Kitchen. In 2001 he helped merge it, the Community Shelter for Hope and United Methodist Mission Society, into Urban Ministries.

Then in October he suddenly resigned. All he'll say is his evaluations had been good. A long glance down at his coffee mug shows it still hurts.

It also gave him a keener sense of living with uncertainty.

"If this job hadn't come along I would have been selling insurance for a year and seeing if I could have made it," he says.

"This job," it turned out, is community education specialist for Durham's 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness. It's a fortuitous fit for Schmeidler, a soft spoken man with strong convictions.

More people in Durham live closer to uncertainty than in most cities, he says. About one in four Durham County home owners, 27.3 percent, spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. For county renters, it's nearly half: 47 percent.

Schmeidler calls that "housing insecurity." People living a couple of paychecks, one catastrophic illness or disagreement with management away from a steady income.

Last week, advocates came together at Project Homeless Connect to help people get the services they need.

Schmeidler's new job goes further, trying to change the model of how communities respond to homelessness.

It's called Housing First, and in a nutshell it says give people somewhere to live and then the services to help them stay there. Over time, supporters say this model will save money by reducing hospital stays, drug and alcohol relapses and other problems that worsen without a safe place to live.

"It's a hard sell," Schmeidler concedes, "because it changes the paradigm. We've had a paradigm that says housing is a reward for good behavior. The new paradigm says even if you're not completely compliant we're going to provide you some housing."

It doesn't always work, but advocates are hopeful.

"We need to give people chances," Schmeidler says.

"The public perception has been it's their own fault and I don't have to worry," he says. "The other story is how fragile everyone's situation is because of health care, because of the cost of housing. Homelessness is really the canary in the coal mine as far as the economic struggles of people."

"We have to look at how we can make this economy work, not just for bankers, not just for business people, but for labor, for low-wage workers. We need people to pick up the garbage. We need an economy that works for everybody."