A National Commitment To End Veterans Homelessness

A national commitment to end veterans' homelessness : hearing before the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Eleventh Congress, first session, June 3, 2009.

A national commitment to end veterans' homelessness: hearing before the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Eleventh Congress, first session, June 3, 2009.

The challenges facing military veterans who return to civilian life in the United States are persistent and well documented. But for all the political outcry and attempts to improve military members' readjustments, veterans of all service eras face formidable obstacles related to mental health, substance abuse, employment, and — most damningly — homelessness. Homelessness Among U.S. Veterans synthesizes the new glut of research on veteran homelessness — geographic trends, root causes, effective and ineffective interventions to mitigate it — in a format that provides a needed reference as this public health fight continues to be fought. Codifying the data and research from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) campaign to end veteran homelessness, psychologist Jack Tsai links disparate lines of research to produce an advanced and elegant resource on a defining social issue of our time.

In 2009, the Department of Veterans Affairs committed to ending veteran homelessness by the end of 2015. Significant steps have been taken to get our heroes the services they need with, roughly, 50,000 fewer veterans experiencing homelessness than a decade ago. However, there is still much work still to do. Congress has continued working to improve the variety of Federal programs that currently exist to support homeless veterans. This includes permanent housing, transitional housing, prevention services, treatment, and employment programs.