IN JULY 2005, King County Executive Ron Sims, with a coalition of clergy, city officials, former governors, homeless advocates and providers, set out to end homelessness within a decade. The coalition included such business leaders as Dan Brettler of Car Toys, Dan Fulton of Weyerhaeuser Real Estate, Shahla Aly of Microsoft, and Blake Nordstrom. The group, called the Committee to End Homelessness in King County (CEHKC), hired Bill Block as program director to implement the ambitious plan.

The Bill Block who took on this seemingly Sisyphean task hasn't always been a bureaucrat answering his own phone in the Exchange Building, his current location. Today he works out of a modest room in a fluorescent-bright cubicle environment of white Formica and functional off-the-rack interiors - a decor best described as "county issue." Indeed, Block's habitat for the previous 15 years was the law offices of Buck & Gordon, ensconced with their commanding views of Elliott Bay in the posh fifth floor corner suites of the Market Place Tower. Block, 57, spent nearly 12 years doing land use, environmental, municipal and water law, real estate transactions, and civil litigation as a partner in the preeminent downtown Seattle law firm.

Negotiating not just everyday real estate deals, he also tackled big ones like the Starbucks Center lease for Starbucks, the Amazon Tower for Amazon.com, and the Uwajimaya complex for Lorig & Associates. He did most of the tenant leases for the Seattle Municipal Tower and construction contracts for the University of Washington's Spec Tech Building. And he handled shopping centers, suburban office parks and other large projects.

"He has a brilliant mind that's a repository for an awful lot of information and is incredibly creative,"says Peter Buck, Block's erstwhile law partner.

But while he was doing these high-powered downtown real estate deals, Block was also giving himself away. He was chair of the Seattle Housing Authority Board for eight years; president of AIDSHousing Washington; and chairman of the city's Low Income Housing Levy Oversight Committee. He has also served on the Allied Arts board and that of the Downtown Emergency Service Center, and he is still a member of the Seattle Center Advisory Committee.

But the project to which Block has now dedicated his full-time talents is bigger and thornier than anything he ever faced in the private sector. January's annual homeless count found nearly 4,000 people living in shelters or outdoors in King County. Rural and suburban areas of the county host increasing numbers of veterans living in the woods, kids living in parks and people sleeping in cars. The city of Seattle is spending $6.6 million this year funding those shelter mats that were all filled the night of the count.

The goal is 9,500 housing units with "wraparound" social services by 2015. In June, just 10 months in, CEHKC announced that government and private agencies have built or funded 1,300 new housing units in the plan's first year. The core idea of the 10-year plan is to get people into housing first and then bring in social services needed to keep them off the streets. "Right now, the homeless service system operates on shelter beds and transitional housing, neither of which is stable," says Block.

A polyglot of nonprofits and public agencies gives a mosaic of services that hold the line for this vulnerable population, but the fragmentation often means different agencies for different homeless subpopulations. A family may be served by many agencies in wide-ranging locations for different problems. What's more, no single entity has ever had the mandate, the political clout or the resources to pull everyone together.

Negotiating between these wide-ranging entities has called upon Block's skills as a mediator and facilitator. According to Joel Gordon, another principal in Block's old law firm, "Bill loves to negotiate - he's perceptive and understanding of people's positions and tries to get to the why of them instead of just being contrary or trying to stake out turf."

For example, a major bullet was dodged earlier this year after Block and the Rev. Robert Taylor of St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral sat down with City officials and SHARE/WHEEL (Seattle Housing and Resource Effort /Women's Housing Equality and Enhancement League), one of Seattle's largest emergency shelter providers, which is best known for its controversial tent cities.

SHARE/WHEEL had threatened to close its indoor shelters and replace them with more tent cities if the city insisted they comply with their Safe Harbors database, which would accurately count the homeless and collect personal data about them.

Block and Taylor were able to negotiate an agreement that installed safeguards, which satisfied the group's civil rights concerns and enabled the city to use their tracking.

At the outset, it was decided that CEHKC not become a new bureaucracy. Funded by the city, the county and United Way. "It's a very lean operation," says Block - "me, a full-time assistant and a half-time administrative assistant. But we oversee three governing boards, five committees, six task forces."  

King County Executive Ron Sims has estimated that the tab will run between $75 million and $100 million a year. A big piece of the 10-year plan is consolidating the services and the housing dollars going to private and public agencies already out there.

A selling point for both the government and the private sector is the ultimate cost saving to taxpayers. "It's very expensive to not take care of people," says Block. He points out that the jails now serve as social agencies and mental health facilities. "The King County Jail is the second largest mental health institution in the state, after Western State Hospital," he adds. The average stay for a prisoner in the general population is 18.6 days, according to Block. But for a mentally ill prisoner, it's 106 days at $300 a day. "Figure it out,"he says. "That's well above $40,000 per incident to deal with a crime that has to do more with mental illness than criminal intent. If you've got somebody out in mental health support and housing, you wouldn't be putting them in jail."

What motivated Block to give up income and prestige to tackle this seemingly intractable problem? "I grew up on the south side of Chicago around a lot of poverty and in a family that believed public service is what you did." The real story, he insists, "is not about me - some guy who comes in late from the private sector to jump into public service - the real story is about the people who got into it from day one of their employment life."

Michael Hood is a contributing editor at Washington CEO.