Prompted by a call from First Lady Michelle Obama to end veteran homelessness by 2015, New Orleans, Houston, Las Vegas, Philadelphia and 15 other cities as well as the entire Commonwealth of Virginia met that challenge. However, you’ll still spot former service members sleeping on the streets of each of those locales today.
Homelessness, after all, is not a static challenge. As quick as a dozen former warriors are placed in housing, a Greyhound bus could drop an Iraq War veteran off in Mobile, Ala., with no place to sleep, for example, or a Gulf War soldier in Syracuse, N.Y., could lose his job and then his apartment. “The truth is that ending veteran homelessness requires daily work,” Sam Joel, a policy advisor who assists New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu in leading the city’s work to end veteran homelessness, tells NationSwell. “We did what we sought to do. But it’s one thing to reach a goal, and another thing to sustain it.”
As volunteers fan out across urban areas this month to log a point-in-time homeless count, mayors and policymakers await figures on whether the systems they created were effective enough to keep veterans housed. (Last January, 47,725 veterans nationwide were homeless.) The exact definition of how to “end homelessness” varies; the gold standard — achieving “functional zero” — provided by the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness generally defines it as offering interim shelter and then permanent housing to every homeless veteran who has been identified, plus creating the capacity to house any newly homeless vets as quickly as possible, usually in a 90-day period.
Approaching the one-year anniversary of its achievement, New Orleans is confident they’ll be pleased with their updated numbers. For one, the Big Easy now maintains an “active list,” that tracks every homeless veteran by name and the details of when and where they checked in for services — so it’s pretty much aware of any population fluctuations.
The city’s data is also a metric of how far it has come since Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. Back in 2010, when Landrieu took office, nearly 4,500 people (down from 117,600 in 2007) were still stranded without homes in the Crescent City. “In New Orleans, we are all too familiar with the feeling of homelessness. After Hurricane Katrina, literally all of us were without a home,” Landrieu wrote in an op-ed. By last January, only 1,700 remained homeless. Shortly after, New Orleans was certified as the first major city to end veteran homelessness.
Many people ask what’s the Big Easy’s secret? Joel says there are three: “partnership, partnership, partnership.” Previously, services overlapped and communication lagged. Today, local, state and federal agencies come together to collaborate on the same goal.
With the help of active duty military and other veterans, New Orleans sweeps every block to find homeless vets and usually connects them to permanent housing within a few weeks, Joel reports. While unable to provide an exact figure of days that pass before being housed, Joel says the average is below the original 30-day goal.
As New Orleans is pioneering best practices for maintaining an end to veteran homelessness, other local and state governments are hoping to achieve the same. The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness plays a key role by sharing strategies and data across communities, facilitating collaborations, checking in to “make sure we’re being as strategic as possible” and ensuring the momentum is sustained nationwide, says Robert Pulster, regional coordinator for the council.
“I think there was a moral imperative to support men and women who had served in the military, to see they were well cared for,” Pulster says. With leadership from the White House, plus bipartisan support from Congress, the country has an unique opportunity to end veteran homelessness nationwide.
More importantly, however, is the idea that ending veteran homelessness is the first step in ending homelessness of all types. “We realized we could learn a lot about how to build the kind of collaborative systems and how we use resources to serve the entire population,” he continues. It doesn’t matter whether they’re led by a strong mayor or governor, cities like New Orleans prove that ending veteran homelessness is both possible and sustainable.
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Tag: Mitch Landrieu
This City Thought It Would Take Five Years to House Homeless Vets. They Did It a Year Ahead of Schedule
Standing at a podium before New Orleans’s bigwigs was an unusual place for a homeless veteran — or as he corrected the presenter at the press conference, “a former homeless vet.” Now living in permanent housing, he thanked the audience “for possibly saving my life, cus I don’t know if I could have survived another night on the street. … On behalf of all homeless veterans, I want to thank you.”
This month, New Orleans succeeded in becoming one of the first major U.S. cities to house every single homeless veteran.
In a collaboration unprecedented in scope, government agencies and nonprofits united around one common goal of housing at least 193 veterans, the number of homeless in New Orleans that were counted at the last point-in-time survey. Together, almost a year ahead of schedule, they exceeded that goal, placing 227 veterans into apartments in 2014.
“Veteran homelessness is an important and challenging issue, and we are very proud of our accomplishment today in New Orleans,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said at the city’s World War II Museum. “We owe our veterans our eternal gratitude for their service and sacrifice to this nation and making sure they have a place to call home is a small but powerful way we can show our appreciation.”
New Orleans’s undertaking began in 2011 with the creation of a 10-year plan to end chronic and family homelessness and a 5-year goal for ending veteran homelessness. (In May 2012, there were 570 veterans living on the streets.) The city was still reeling from Katrina’s destruction: nearly 11,600 people were living on the streets in 2007 and many neighborhoods had yet to rebuild. One of the key advances was the formation of an interagency council, a centralized effort that would unite all five-dozen partner agencies and service providers — from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development all the way down to Ozanam Inn, a local shelter — in what New Orleans refers to as a “continuum of care.” It also includes a committee of active duty military (a group that could quickly establish trust) who scoured the streets locating homeless vets and helping those in transition make the move into new housing.
This collaboration streamlined services for veterans, particularly after a referral center, which served as a day shelter and offered case management, opened up inside the V.A. hospital in 2013. Locating assistance in the hospital not only made it easily accessible for struggling vets, it also advertises its services for those who may one day need help. It’s still the only center of its type in the country.
“This initiative, which has addressed the immediate needs of our city’s homeless veterans while creating a structure for the future, is a testament to the strength of the partnerships that have been forged among government, nonprofit, and private entities as we work together to rebuild a stronger, more sustainable New Orleans,” says City Councilmember Susan Guidry.
In 2013, almost $5 million became available through HUD’s HOME program, which pays for the construction of affordable housing or rental assistance for low-income tenants, and the city earmarked much of that money to combat overall homelessness. Using those funds and vouchers provided through the Department of Veterans Affairs, New Orleans asked landlords to list affordable rentals in one online database. Veterans were given homes without any conditions since the city endorsed “Housing First” and “No Wrong Door,” which aligns caregivers with shared information to help them obtain any needed service, regardless of which door they show up at first.
Since then, New Orleans has pushed local businesses to prioritize hiring veterans and has set up a criminal court that can respond to their unique situation, among many other cutting–edge innovations.
“To be able to give so many homeless veterans a forever home — most of them disabled and a quarter of them elderly — in such a short period of time was extremely challenging but incredibly exhilarating for all of the many partners in this effort,” says Martha Kegel, the executive director of UNITY of Greater New Orleans. “That so many veterans who have risked their lives to serve our country are left homeless, especially in their later years, shocks the conscience. To bring them home, once and for all, has been very rewarding.”
Although veterans may continue to experience homelessness because of poverty or disability, New Orleans has reached a “functional zero,” which means every known homeless veteran has been housed permanently or is on the way to a designated apartment.
Last summer, after First Lady Michelle Obama issued a challenge for cities to end veteran homelessness by 2015, all the New Orleans’s groups involved redoubled their efforts. While Binghamton, N.Y., (pop. 46,400) was technically the first, New Orleans’s feat has yet to be replicated in a major metropolis.
“Quite simply, the men and women who have defended our freedom deserve to return to the American Dream. Far too often we as a nation have failed them in that regard,” says Jared Brossett, another city councilmember. “The fact that New Orleans is on the leading edge of ending veteran homelessness is something of which we should all be proud.”
While Phoenix and Salt Lake City ended chronic homelessness last year after a friendly competition (spoiler: Phoenix won), both western cities are still working towards eradicating veteran homelessness altogether. Los Angeles, Chicago and Wichita, as well as 300 other mayors, six governors and some 70 county officials across the nation are all hoping to house all the homeless veterans in their towns by the year’s end.
Some observers have doubted whether New Orleans’s recent veterans housing push is a sustainable solution, stressing that preventive measures like counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder could keep them off the street in the first place. Those groups want to see a shuttered hospital reopened as a facility to treat mental illness.
Mayor Landrieu readily admits, “The work of ending veteran homelessness is never really done.”
But in response to the huge task, Landrieu announced a new “rapid response model” at the same time he celebrated his city’s hard-won success. This system will centralize “all available local, state and federal resources” and link veterans on the brink with active duty and former soldiers, essentially “utilizing veterans to help veterans.”
There’s also a structure now in place to ensure no vet will fall through the cracks: The mayor promised any veteran who loses his housing will be housed within an average of 30 days.
The city’s milestone has galvanized advocates across the country, far beyond this corner of southern Louisiana. As of the last count on a single January night last year, veteran homelessness nationwide has declined by one-third since 2010, but 49,933 vets still lacked safe and stable housing.
“This remarkable achievement is significant to the entire nation — to every state and community that has the will to end veteran homelessness before the end of 2015,” says Laura Green Zeilinger, the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness who’s coordinating policy among 19 federal agencies. “New Orleans, by answering the call that it must be done, proved to all of us that eliminating veteran homelessness can and will be done.” And after that? Let’s “build on this success to end homelessness for all Americans,” Zeilinger adds.