The Veteran Homelessness Crisis

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.

There are over a half million people experiencing homelessness in the United States, nearly 160,000 of them are children, and nearly 38,000 are veterans. This book reports on the national homelessness crisis.

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.

Veteran homelessness in Los Angeles (LA), California, is a pervasive public health problem, with the county having the highest concentration of veterans experiencing homelessness (VEH) in the United States. Despite significant investments and many programs and services available to VEH, eliminating homelessness has proven to be a major public policy challenge. In this report, the authors describe a first-of-its-kind longitudinal study conducted in 2019/2020 that followed 26 VEH in West LA. The information obtained about the veterans' housing, health, and service experiences can be used by policymakers and public health practitioners to identify specific factors that are related to engagement in care and housing attainment and stability. The COVID-19 pandemic began during the study, and the research team had to adapt to remote data collection protocols to complete the follow-up data collection. As a result, important lessons about the feasibility of remote data collection with VEH both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic were learned. The authors make a number of recommendations, including allocating more resources to fully meet the needs of VEH in LA (including more-robust outreach services, substance use disorder treatment, and other health care treatment), implementing additional temporary and permanent housing solutions, and building in accountability measures to make progress toward these goals more transparent to a larger audience. This report should be of interest to entities serving populations that experience homelessness, including governments, health care organizations, practitioners, advocacy groups, researchers, and others interested in addressing the homelessness crisis.

Chronic homelessness is a highly complex social problem of national importance. The problem has elicited a variety of societal and public policy responses over the years, concomitant with fluctuations in the economy and changes in the demographics of and attitudes toward poor and disenfranchised citizens. In recent decades, federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, and the philanthropic community have worked hard to develop and implement programs to solve the challenges of homelessness, and progress has been made. However, much more remains to be done. Importantly, the results of various efforts, and especially the efforts to reduce homelessness among veterans in recent years, have shown that the problem of homelessness can be successfully addressed. Although a number of programs have been developed to meet the needs of persons experiencing homelessness, this report focuses on one particular type of intervention: permanent supportive housing (PSH). Permanent Supportive Housing focuses on the impact of PSH on health care outcomes and its cost-effectiveness. The report also addresses policy and program barriers that affect the ability to bring the PSH and other housing models to scale to address housing and health care needs.

The world is turning upside down, as families who were barely getting by before, now find themselves facing foreclosures and homelessness. Veteran families are no different, even with their homes under VA secure home loans. All it takes is losing your job unexpectedly, an unexpected medical bill, accident or natural disaster, to throw you into a sea of debt and additional hardships that launch you into a path that leads to losing your home. That's exactly what my family is facing right now, and unless the higher power that be or some amazing miracle appears, unless someone, somewhere who has the ability to help us turn things around and stop this horrific and cruel injustice, we almost surely will be losing our home in the next three months.. Without warning or reason, my husband lost the dream job that he had left the safety and security of active duty to take. It was that pay that our mortgage was based on, and there was no way we could have known it would only last for four short months. I made the mistake of thinking that finally life was going to start going our way, and stop kicking us around, after all that was the story my husband and i seemed to share. All that we wanted was to work, pay our bills, and enjoy our first home, while giving my son the chance to have a stable home that didn't have us moving to another duty station. For the first time in a very long time, i saw happiness and excitement on my sons face, and that was worth everything. I'll never forget the day my husband came home to tell me they had let him go without a reason. i will also ever forget how quickly our lives would go from living paycheck to paycheck, to watching it all come apart as the weeks and months that followed, turned into years. The battle to try and keep our home and not be forced out on the streets and homeless has been devastating and full of one nightmare after another. We are living proof that you can follow the rules, do everything right, and still get knocked on your butt. For the last three years, we have had to do everything we legally can to try and save our home from foreclosure and beg and plead the previous and current lenders to really help us and not just offer us band aid solutions. What we got were drawn out months of stalling and racking up interest and fees, while continued to deny us and push on with the foreclosure. Its concrete proof that profits and the laws protect and support the wealthy lenders and bakers, while offering little to no help nor interest on keeping veteran families in their homes. Try as i have, I have done everything i could to use social media and emails to try and get someone anywhere to listen to our story and help, but time after time its fallen on deaf ears, til now. The last three years has introduced me to other veteran families, many of which either have already lost their homes, or like mine, are trying to do what they can as quickly as they can to keep it. Taking the uniform off doesn't mean they are any less valuable. They answered the call to serve without hesitation because it was their duty. Now with my family, and all of those like mine, facing the growing crisis that we are facing, we are sending out the call for help and hoping that now, this country will answer our call. Our families are more than just account numbers on pieces of paper. For too long this country has crated waves of veterans and failed to protect and provide for them when they come home. It is my hope that sharing our story might help to raise awareness to this growing crisis, to maybe inspire others to not walk away but stand and fight as well. Until we stand up and start fighting back, they'll continue to take and destroy dreams, profiting along the way while we are left to pick up the pieces and try to survive. We are left trying to explain to our children why they dont have a room anymore, and now live in a car. We need change now not later, and it starts by sharing our stories.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought renewed attention to the needs of veterans, including the needs of homeless veterans. Preventing and ending homelessness among Veterans in five years is a key priority for the White House as well as the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness and its member agencies. This book addresses this need in showcasing novel analyses that use data currently available from administrative records to provide detailed information about the prevalence of Veterans within the homeless population; the prevalence of homelessness among Veterans; and, the differential risks for homelessness among Veteran, age, race, poverty, and sex subgroups.

Foreword by Nan Roman, President and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness This book explains how to end the U.S. homelessness crisis by bringing together the best scholarship on the subject and sharing solutions that both local communities and national policy-makers can apply now In the Midst of Plenty shifts our understanding of the phenomenon of homelessness away from issues of individual disability and embeds it in larger contexts of poverty, income inequality, housing affordability, and social exclusion. Homelessness experts Shinn and Khadduri provide guidance on how to end homelessness for people who experience it and how to prevent so many people from reaching the point where they have no alternative to sleeping on the street or in emergency shelters. The book is organized around four questions: Who becomes homeless? Why do people become homeless? How do we end homelessness? How do we prevent it? Based on a comprehensive look at relevant research, the authors show that we know how to end homelessness—if we devote the necessary resources to doing so. In the Midst of Plenty: Homelessness and What to Do About It is an excellent resource for professionals and decision-makers in the homeless services system, as well as for anyone who is interested in helping to end homelessness. It also can be used as a text in undergraduate or masters courses in public policy, sociology, psychology, social work, urban studies, or housing policy. “The knowledgeable and thoughtful authors of this book—two brilliant women who know as much as anyone in the country about the nature of homelessness and its solutions—have done a great service by taking us on a journey through the history of homelessness, how our responses have changed, and how we can end it.” Nan Roman, President and CEO National Alliance to End Homelessness. “Shinn and Khadduri’s new book is a thorough yet concise examination of what we know about the nature and causes of homelessness, and the crucial lessons learned. This critically important work provides a roadmap to restoring basic housing and income security as viable policy options, in the face of our daunting inequality divide that otherwise threatens millions with destitution and homelessness.” Dennis Culhane, Dana and Andrew Stone Professor of Social Policy, University of Pennsylvania “Marybeth Shinn and Jill Khadduri have combined their significant expertise to create an essential guide about the history of modern homelessness and to offer a clear path forward to end this American tragedy. Their policy recommendations on ending homelessness are culled from the best about what we know works.” Barbara Poppe, Executive Director US Interagency Council on Homeless, 2009-2014.