After paying tribute to 16 of the region's less fortunate -- including a man found dead in the trash -- Roanoke Mayor Nelson Harris on Friday touted a 10-year regional plan to end homelessness.

"This is not a simple problem with simple, cookie-cutter solutions," Harris said of the city's homeless population, which has more than tripled over the past two decades.

The mayor's comments followed a controversy that erupted last month when some members of the Roanoke City Council said an overly generous support system of emergency shelters and soup kitchens is making the city a regional hub for the homeless.

Speaking after a memorial service for 16 homeless people who died in 2007, Harris advocated a plan that was developed last year by the Roanoke Valley Alleghany Regional Advisory Council on Homelessness.

The plan calls for better information sharing among nonprofit groups and ministries that serve the homeless, new ways to prevent homelessness, strategies to reduce the time people spend without a home, and better regional cooperation in dealing with the problem.

Titled "A Place to Call Home," the 40-page report sets a goal that is both ambitious and daunting: ending homelessness within the next 10 years.

"While we admit this is a lofty goal, it is one worth striving to achieve," said Pamela Kestner-Chappelear, president of the Council of Community Services, which prepared the report.

Although the homeless are perhaps most visible in downtown Roanoke, advocates of the plan stressed the importance of getting the entire region to address a problem that crosses jurisdictional lines.

Harris noted that seven surrounding localities -- Covington, Clifton Forge, Salem and the counties of Alleghany, Botetourt, Craig and Roanoke -- have all joined the city in endorsing the plan.

"If it is strictly perceived as just a city of Roanoke problem ... then we're going to find ourselves constantly moving uphill," Harris said.

Yet for the most part, Roanoke-based nonprofit organizations, volunteer groups and faith-based programs are tasked with implementing the plan's recommendations.

The plan includes no cost estimate for proposals that include creating a regional database of information on the homeless, opening a central clearinghouse for intake and screening, and setting up an array of training and awareness programs for service providers.

And as ambitious as the plan is, it comes 20 years after another task force released a report aimed at eliminating a homelessness problem that has only grown worse.

A news conference held Friday to promote the plan coincided with the memorial service at Greene Memorial United Methodist Church for Roanoke Valley residents who died this year after experiencing homelessness at some point in their lives.

As each name was read, a bell tolled. Harris and other members of the audience then approached the altar, where 16 candles had been lit, and laid red or white carnations beneath the tribute.

One of the 16 names was Todd Hoback, whose body was found Oct. 31 in an Amelia County landfill as a trash truck that had come through the Salem transfer station was dumping its load.

Some have speculated that Hoback, who at times was homeless, climbed into a trash bin to sleep and later wound up dead -- either from exposure or by being crushed in a trash compactor. But Virginia State Police have yet to say just how he died.

Others memorialized Friday included a man who committed suicide by overdosing on drugs and someone who was murdered in another city after his homelessness "put him in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Joy Sylvester-Johnson, director of the Roanoke Rescue Mission.

But many of the people who died this year don't fit the stereotypical image of an unshaven man standing on a street corner in tattered clothing.

More of the homeless today are women, Sylvester-Johnson said, and many of them are among the working poor. A survey conducted as part of the council's report found that 23 percent of the homeless were employed full time and another 44 percent were actively looking for work.

"If you went to a nice restaurant downtown recently, some of these people waited on you. Some of them bagged your groceries," Sylvester-Johnson said. "With some of these folks, you never would have known they were homeless unless you stopped to hear their stories."

Yet it is the chronic homeless -- those who often hang out on the Roanoke City Market -- who define the problem for too many people in an unfairly narrow way, advocates say.

Concerns about that population were evident in the council's report.

One recommendation, for a community housing resource center, specified that it be located "outside of, but convenient to, the downtown area."

Some advocates for the homeless have said the city seems most interested in driving the homeless from the downtown area, where more people are living in luxury condominiums and where projects such as the new art museum are expected to draw more visitors and their dollars.

The issue hit a flash point last month, when the Roanoke City Council discussed a report that found the city's homeless population to be 566 in January -- a 363 percent increase from 1987.

Council members worried that homeless shelters and service providers in Roanoke were being too generous, luring the problems of surrounding localities to the city. Those comments were perceived by some as lacking compassion.

Without mentioning the discussion, Harris appeared to touch on those concerns in his comments Friday.

"The day we cease to be caring and compassionate is the day we really cease, and I'm speaking theologically, to be a community," he said.

At a time when homelessness is on the rise, Friday's memorial service provided yet another indicator of the problem: Observers said the 16 names read at the annual service were nearly twice the normal number.

The service provided a somber reminder that behind all the task force reports, policy recommendations and news conferences are real people who lived with homelessness before dying this year:

William Barage. Daniel Brooks. Carolyn Carey. Tracie Crowder. Tammie Divers. Jeff Eavers. Veronica Einhellig. Todd Hoback. David Jones. Donald Martin. Virginia Moore. Juliet Nelson. Joseph Salisbury. Ricky Stallings. Jamie Stanfield. Johnny Walker.