Frisco is enjoying a golden period in its history. It has great schools, the North Platinum Corridor, a swelling tax base. The Dallas Cowboys are already there and a host of corporations seem like they are lined up to follow.

Is it any surprise Money magazine just ranked the town near the top of the tollway the best place to live in the U.S.?

But if you look a little deeper, you can see that Frisco might be at the start of another, more difficult, transition that doesn’t grab great headlines.

Katherine Rourke is a woman well known to Frisco officials and police officers. She spends her days in the library and nights sleeping in the town in her 18-year-old station wagon. Another woman, who will only give her name as Angela, marches each day up and down the sidewalks of northwest Frisco. She is easy to identify by the set of crutches she leans on. She sleeps at night on a well-lighted patch of cement.

This is not a homelessness crisis, nothing like what Dallas experiences. No more than a handful of people live on Frisco’s streets. But as neighboring Plano is painfully aware, boomburg success portends big-city challenges, and they are coming to Frisco.

Katherine and Angela, both of whom are surviving mostly on the consistent kindness of Frisco residents and police officers, aren’t causing problems. But their presence isn’t welcomed by all, and they are generating a conversation that few Frisco residents expected to be having in this bright and shiny city.

Katherine Rourke, who has been homeless since 2015, spends many of her days at the Frisco Public Library, especially when temperatures are more extreme. Often, she'll write emails to city leadership to advocate for the homeless population in Frisco. (Ryan Michalesko / Staff Photographer)

Angela walks from dawn to dusk, mostly along Teel or El Dorado parkways. Sometimes she treks along Main or Frisco streets. She doesn’t pay that much attention to her route — she’s too busy praying. She totes a large gray backpack, which only recently replaced big black garbage bags she tied together and threw over her shoulders.

Angela says she’s been homeless — she prefers “distinguishably displaced” — for many months in Collin County. At one point, she left the suburban streets for a downtown Dallas shelter. She describes that experience as a disaster, although she won’t say much more about it or talk about other details from her past life.

It took Angela three or four months to get back to Frisco this time and she doesn’t plan to leave. Repeatedly flicking aside the sweat pouring off her during our Tuesday afternoon conversation on an El Dorado sidewalk, she said, “Frisco is where God wants me to be,” as she “waits for the Lord to untangle external circumstances that are woven together.”

Angela is a gentle woman of 50, with hair neatly braided under a tattered khaki cap and clad in sneakers, a fluorescent green cotton T-shirt and blue jeans cut off just above her knees. She’s clear-eyed and well-spoken — but offers a baffling explanation of the global redemptive mission that has her walking Frisco streets.

Angela is thankful that Frisco folks help her out — whether it’s the cops or firefighters who check on her at night or residents who provide gift cards and food. But she doesn’t want shelter — she wants to live and sleep on the streets until God’s message is clear.

Angela took my business card but warned me it could be weeks, months or even years before she will be ready to reveal more. For now, she just plans to keep living on city streets. Her only request of Frisco? “Pray for God to give me discernment and direction.”

While Angela would prefer no attention (she would not allow us to take her photo), Katherine Rourke, age 60, is robustly advocating for the city of Frisco to help its homeless.

Katherine Rourke reads from the driver's seat of her station wagon where she also sleeps in Frisco. "Homelessness got me back into reading," Rourke said. "I've read some incredible books in this car. I'm different because of them, and I value that." (Ryan Michalesko / Staff Photographer)

Originally from Connecticut, she says she is an experienced executive assistant who has moved over 40 times during her lifetime. She broke her ankle in 2014, forcing a surgery that drained her remaining funds and left her without a home.

Like Angela, she had a bad experience in a shelter, this one in Collin County. So she returned to Frisco, where she previously held a job, and since March 2015 has lived out of her tightly packed station wagon in various city lots.

The library provides a good home base for most of the day. There she reads, continues to learn Hebrew and fine-tunes her ideas for a Frisco homeless shelter.

Katherine is quick to point out that she’s luckier than most homeless residents: She not only has a car to sleep in but, beginning earlier this year, she began receiving about $90 a month in federal food aid. In addition to the help she receives from random Frisco residents who hear her story, several longtime friends give Katherine a financial hand.

She becomes most anxious when she doesn’t have sufficient funds for the gas needed to get her to a nearby convenience store to brush her teeth and wash off. She recalls months when she was unable to stay clean and existed on free ice cream, crackers and chips and salsa.

These days, Katherine participates in town hall meetings and emails elected officials — she even graduated from Frisco’s Citizens Police Academy. She says she’s met at least a dozen other homeless individuals in Frisco and has scheduled a meeting at the library Oct. 13 to discuss how to build and operate a shelter in the city.

Currently, the best option for Collin County’s homeless is the Samaritan Inn, funded in part by Frisco’s annual grant awards of $10,000 or so. Located in McKinney, it’s 17 miles away.

Katherine Rourke's purple coat hangs from a chair at the Frisco Public Library on Tuesday. "Everybody knows that the chair with the purple coat is where I sit," said Rourke, who has been homeless since 2015. (Ryan Michalesko / Staff Photographer)

City Council member Will Sowell, who recently visited briefly with Katherine in the municipal center elevator, notes a growing recognition at Frisco City Hall that Collin County has a homeless challenge.

Sowell told me that “Frisco is focused on joining forces with the other cities in Collin County — for instance, Plano, Allen and McKinney — because at this point in time I don’t think any one of us has a large enough homeless population to warrant us doing something individually.”

He also isn’t surprised by the buzz created of late about the two homeless women. “People in Frisco are generally empathetic people, so when they see people that need help they want to be able to try to help them,” Sowell said.

The council member’s words reflect most of what residents have said to me and on social media. While a few have complained that Frisco doesn’t need homeless people living on the streets — and criticized neighbors who have “enabled” Angela — the overwhelming reaction has been big open hearts.

Not only do families, groups of students or bike riders stop and provide necessities, Frisco cops check on the two women to make sure they are safe. Employees at convenience stores look the other way as Angela or Katherine walk to the ladies room. Other establishments are quick to offer Angela water as she walks in blistering heat.

Radd Rotello, with the Frisco Police Department, notes that many officers have bought Katherine food out of their own pockets. “She’s never caused us any problems. She’s just a citizen who lives in her car. We help where we can, but we work within the law.”

Modestly dressed and articulate, Katherine mostly blends in with other Frisco residents. It’s Angela-on-crutches who is creating quite a buzz.

That’s a good thing.

Any growing city — even one named No. 1 in the U.S. — will face prickly problems such as homelessness. So it’s best that Frisco City Hall not get too caught up in its own PR. Ignoring — or overreacting to — challenges such as Katherine and Angela present is a bad strategy.

(Clarification, 2:50 p.m. 9/20: This column was updated to include the most recent Frisco marketing reference to real estate along the Dallas North Tollway.)