But as he sat in a park at 65th and University a year ago September, not knowing where he and his fiance and three children could spend the night, the Iraqi War veteran certainly considered himself homeless.
Out of work and money, out of patience from landlords and newly kicked out of his retired mother’s home, Wade was smacked with a sense of hopelessness similar to what he says he felt in Iraq.
“I don’t ever want to feel like that again,” Wade, 26, told me this week from the comfort of Hope Manor II, a newly-built supportive housing development for veterans and their families at 60th and Halsted where his family now lives.
The 73-unit Hope Manor campus, a collaboration between Volunteers of America and Chicago Housing Authority, has helped Wade put himself back on a path that should save him from that predicament.
Such housing initiatives are also among the reasons Mayor Rahm Emanuel confidently has committed the city to President Barack Obama’s ambitious goal of ending veteran homelessness by the end of 2015.