MAKING HIS WAY FROM PUBLIC SQUARE, through a blossoming park next to the County Courthouse, the tall homeless man in the red "Rise Up" Cavs T-shirt bounds down some steps and onto a ramp that looks like a miniature football field from above. Overhead, the constant hum of the Shoreway. Ahead, cars whipping by, the half-billion-dollar Browns Stadium hulking impressively beyond. Below, two busy train tracks and a tiny fenced-in city parking lot. Mark's home.

The 40-year-old hops a short railing. A sign there reads: "Homeless Being Evicted by the City of Cleveland over a Sporting Event. We Need Help from Anyone." Directly under the ramp, a shirtless man and a frail woman are tweaking out. "Don't you take no fucking pictures over here," the man says, pacing the perimeter of his tent like a pit bull. "You paying us to talk? You got five bucks for us to talk? Anything. We're hungry."

Mark rolls his eyes, ambles over to the tidier section of the camp, the side he jokingly refers to as "the suburbs," where charcoal in a small grill is just going gray next to a neat row of five red tents. His is on the end.

"We was staying over in an alley behind the 55 building [on Public Square] until 'bout Christmas," says Mark, who's been on the streets for five years, battling addiction and a job market largely closed to ex-cons. "These kids from Wooster, a church group or something, they come around and give us these tents. So I put mine up right then and the police, they was like, "Uh-uh, no way.' So we just come on down here."

A tent city was born. There are about a dozen spread through the lot, sometimes more. A milk crate mounted to a railing serves as a makeshift basketball net. Everyone's got a lawn chair. They pee down a sewer grate, hop the tall chain-link fence and trot off into the underbrush near the tracks for serious business. Some say it's as comfy as they've been in years.

"We like it better down here," says 55-year-old Tim, a Vietnam vet who's turning chicken on the grill brought down by his cousin who donates food a few times a week. "It's peaceful. At the shelters, it's like checking into the jail. Out here, you can clear your head, breath some fresh air." He takes a big whiff of the city. "All we do is drink beer down here, kick back a little. Botherin' nobody. Over there," pointing to the hovels under the ramp, "they get into all other sorts of things, but keep it away from me, you know? We get less hassles from the police because we're not in the public eye. That was the big problem with being out on Public Square."

And then it became a problem under the highway, too.

IN 1994, FOUR HOMELESS MEN successfully sued then-Mayor Mike White and the city for ushering Public Square panhandlers into squad cars and relocating them to the outskirts of the city or the Metroparks.

"So the city ends up agreeing to say, "Not that we did this, but we won't do it again,'" says Gary Daniels, litigation coordinator at the ACLU of Ohio and a board member of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH).

That narrowed the line city leaders have to walk, between rebranding Cleveland as "a city of choice," and providing for those who serve as reminders of Cleveland's failures. Tim and Mark, along with the five others in their little family, say police and bike patrols from the Downtown Cleveland Alliance continue to make downtown, where social services and free meals are most prevalent, inhospitable. They're used to the drill.

In recent years, the city has told homeless not to sleep in a lot of places: the airport, outside City Hall, at the convention center, at the rapid stations. Now, it's this lot, leased by the city to the Browns, who claim ignorance of the city's decision to give the squatters the boot last weekend.

"They gonna keep moving us on, moving us on," Mark says. "They doing it again Sunday [June 10] 'cause they got some soccer game they gonna charge people to park here for. They gonna make $500 at $20 bucks a space. We ain't worth $500 to them. They wanted us off Public Square, we came here. Now they want us out of here."

But money's not the concern, Mayor Frank Jackson's staffers claim, nor is the fear of bad publicity from media covering the national women's soccer team game on June 16 at the stadium, as homeless advocates have also alleged.

"It's important for the city to take a position on quality of life," says Natoya Walker, a Jackson spokeswoman. "Quality of life is important for every Clevelander, including homeless persons, and it's potentially unsafe, as far as cleanliness or personal hygiene or whatever, for a person to be out there in a tent. So our goal is to refer them to the homeless network."

Besides, she says, "That tent city is a city-owned parking lot. It's inappropriate for housing, or for someone to live there temporarily in a tent."

And what would the tailgaters think of those homeless people with the prime spots? "It's easy for someone to walk by a person sleeping in a doorway," says David Coffman, a civil rights organizer for the National Coalition for the Homeless. "But when you see a tent city by Browns Stadium, that's not so easy to ignore. That becomes a problem."

Where the little red city blossoms next is anyone's guess. "You got a parking lot over there at the Free Times?" jokes Tim. "We'll see ya Sunday."

COUNCILMAN JOE CIMPERMAN has been the leader of downtown's Ward 13 for a decade. Before that, at John Carroll University, while serving as student council president, he founded Project GOLD, a group that served homeless families. His early career was spent coordinating volunteers or as an outreach worker at Cleveland's West Side Catholic Center.

Mark - On the streets five years.

But serving the poor makes up a small piece of his puzzle today. Though he went public in 2002 to lobby against the federal government continuing its cuts to affordable housing programs, Cimperman, like many of his colleagues, is beholden to a broader range of influences, especially now that he's chairman of Council's Planning Committee and vice-chairman of Community and Economic Development.

In March, during Council's budget hearings, Cimperman asked the city's parks superintendent to get a ruling on whether Public Square could be designated a city park. If so, then police could legally tell homeless to move along at 9 p.m. like they do in other parks. He didn't want to talk about the request then, and numerous attempts to reach him in recent weeks were unsuccessful.

"Money and the pressure to get reelected seem to turn nearly everyone away from the constituency that got them elected in the first place," is how Brian Davis sees it. But he's executive director of NEOCH.

Davis says the city's law department ruled that Public Square couldn't be designated a city park since some of the property there is privately owned. The plan fizzled. At least that one.

"There's no concerted effort on our part to address street people in Public Square or near Browns Stadium," says Cleveland Police Lt. Tom Stacho. "That's not to say individual officers didn't have interactions with an individual or a group and maybe that was taken as some sort of official policy or attitude to the homeless."

Davis has a theory: "The yellow-and- blue shirt crew seems to have gone about solving this problem on their own," referring to the Block by Block group subcontracted by the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, hired last year by downtown building owners to clean up the sidewalks, trash and all.

The need was clearly there.

In late 2005, the Project for Public Spaces ranked Cleveland's Public Square seventh on its international list of "The 16 Squares Most Dramatically in Need of Improvement." A Plain Dealer story that exposed the designation used the occasion to explore the options for when the Euclid Corridor and streetscaping are finally wrapped up. A few city planners envisioned a more commercial-friendly future. Ann Zoller, leader of the nonprofit ParkWorks Inc., said, "You get people into public spaces, and the [homeless] problem takes care of itself." In the story, Cimperman called Public Square "a sleeping giant" in terms of development possibilities.

Ted Hissam, operations manager at Block by Block, doesn't deny that his workers try to interact with homeless and push them toward available social services. But no one is moved forcibly unless they violate the law, he says. Hissam and his cyclists field call after call and do what they can to leave a clean spot behind.

"A week ago, some college folks brought down some mattresses to hand out," he recalls. "And many of them were left on corners where homeless people had to store them. So we worked with them in picking this stuff up."

Two separate homeless men in the tent city say Block by Block cyclists have come up and parked on either side of them while they squatted on a sidewalk downtown. "And they'll tell you," says one of the men, Wayne Hoyne, 45, "there's nothing illegal about us coming up and just hanging out by you."

Hissam insists his group isn't the enemy. He talked about cracking down on aggressive panhandling and how the group has a paid police officer to handle criminal complaints. The group even has a social worker who guides homeless toward services. Just last week, a new worker started who was recruited off the streets.

"Their sleeping arrangements are very problematic," Hissam says, "and everyone sympathizes with their plights."

Helena Miller, DCA's social worker, claims many of the people her group encounters are perfectly happy living as they do.

"A lot of them, they're quite content being where they are and doing what they're doing because living on the street is pretty inexpensive. People take care of you, feed you, supply you with your needs. So it's a pretty economical arrangement."

She speaks of prodding along the homeless with an aim to better their lives: "In terms of people actually living on the streets, it's not appropriate, especially with the weather we have here."

The problem in Miller's eyes is how America's safety net has dropped precariously close to the ground. And until more is done to properly house all people, she doesn't see the problem with homeless using tents and creating some form of a tent city, maybe at a place like Edgewater Park, conveniently located outside the group's boundary of operation. The alternative, she says, is to continue letting people slip further under the radar and into harm's way.

"Every person has an individual story," she says, "and most are more than any one person could bear. There's little wonder they're homeless."

THE CITY CLAIMS to be doing what it can with what it has. After the FAA announced that November 1, 2007 would be the end of the city's overflow shelter at Aviation High, Jackson and other leaders worked to find a solution. The city is currently in the process of acquiring the 88-bed North Point Inn on Euclid as a replacement, as well as selecting a service provider. Beyond that, Walker, Jackson's spokeswoman, doesn't know what else the city could afford to do.

Marie - Another tent city resident.

"Homelessness is a national problem, not a city problem," she says.

It's an easily illustrated one, too. A 2004 CSU study found that about 20,000 people are homeless throughout the year in Cleveland, as many as 4,000 a night - far more than the 2,000 or so shelter beds available. A 2005 federal report provides a good snapshot of those people: More than 60 percent suffered from chronic substance abuse; about half were chronically homeless; about a quarter were severely mentally ill; one-fifth were veterans; about 10 percent were victims of domestic violence.

And the numbers have risen steadily for two decades, Davis says, as services and affordable housing options dwindle. According to the county's Office of Homeless Services, the county needs at least 3,384 more shelter beds, as well as 170 more beds for homeless families - a daunting expense.

The alternative is having more people exposed to the violent streets.

Coffman, with the National Coalition for the Homeless, says hate crimes against the homeless increased about 65 percent between 2005 and 2006, and 68 percent of that spike can be attributed to teenage boys. In Cleveland, advocates have documented at least six hate crimes since February. In May alone, two homeless men were murdered; no suspects have been named.

But Cleveland Police's Lt. Stacho says that only one of those alleged hate crimes - a series of assaults by a large group on a homeless couple in the Flats - is on file with police. That one involved the sale of their dog to customers upset about the terms, Stacho says - and that's not a hate crime. He doesn't know about the other cases; they weren't reported.

"If there is some targeting of street people, we definitely would address it," he insists.

Advocates have a different set of reports. Donna Kelly, a nurse with CARE Alliance who treats homeless patients where they wander, says she treated most of those other victims and insists their blood ran red like the rest of us.

"Some of them were beaten to the head, had black eyes, some had cuts to their legs from broken bottles," she recalls. "In the last month alone I've had five. It's more than six since February."

Some of the victims told advocates that they were beaten by bands of roving youngsters resembling skinheads, with pipes and other makeshift weapons. They likely didn't want to report the crimes to police, Davis says, because of fear of having a warrant or a general disdain for the uniform. Still, he worries police may be downplaying or not grasping the seriousness. Stacho should know about at least one other attack, Davis adds, because 2nd District Commander Charles Boddy himself responded to it in April outside Franklin Circle Church, a case in which a homeless man was attacked, again, by a large group of skinhead-looking ruffians.

"They took him in an alley and beat him up," Davis says. "But he didn't want to be interviewed."

And these types of crimes aren't contained to the fringes of the city. Four summers ago, teens were sneaking up on the homeless right on Public Square with stun guns and video cameras, filming their assaults. Two years later, two more assaults on Public Square. But nothing like the current wave. Last year, Davis says, there were just two hate crimes reported to advocates in the entire state.

The National Coalition's Coffman believes that as cities across the nation criminalize the homeless, they become easier targets. He points to a strong correlation between cities with the strictest panhandling laws and their levels of homeless attacks.

That's one of many reasons homeless advocates want to see a 24-hour shelter opened downtown to coordinate charitable services away from Public Square. Still, Cimperman and the Downtown Cleveland Alliance have expressed distaste for the plan.

"They've been resistant to having that anywhere near existence," Davis says. "It would be a white elephant in the middle of nowhere."

And so everyone waits for the federal government to return to the table.

"We ended national housing policy back during the Reagan administration, and so we need so much housing now that's affordable that it's beyond any city's ability to do that," says Davis, noting how Jackson has been the first mayor in his memory who truly seems concerned with the issue and even campaigned in the shelters. "It has to be a national priority."

BACK DOWN IN THE TENT CITY, a place referred to by the residents as "Browns Town" or "The Freeway Hilton," 38-year-old Richard Benson sits along the chain-link fence, scanning the highway. He says he's got a seriously prohibitive rap sheet, including a seven-year stint for felonious assault. He wonders, How's a man like me gonna pay for life? Mark pipes in that McDonald's just turned his application down.

"So we got this temp work thing and it gets us through 'til tomorrow," Benson says. "Or we go scrappin'. They gon' move us out again and you know what? It don't even matter. They just waiting for us to burn ourselves down to nothing."