Study: 1 out of 4 homeless are veterans
By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer 8 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States,
though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a
report to be released Thursday.
And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans.
Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup
kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.
The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans from the
current wars and says 400 of them have participated in its programs
specifically targeting homelessness.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness, a public education nonprofit, based
the findings of its report on numbers from Veterans Affairs and the Census
Bureau. 2005 data estimated that 194,254 homeless people out of 744,313 on any
given night were veterans.
In comparison, the VA says that 20 years ago, the estimated number of veterans
who were homeless on any given night was 250,000.
Some advocates say the early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at
shelters does not bode well for the future. It took roughly a decade for the
lives of Vietnam veterans to unravel to the point that they started showing up
among the homeless. Advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave
newer veterans particularly vulnerable.
"We're going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental
health toll from this war is enormous," said Daniel Tooth, director of veterans
affairs for Lancaster County, Pa.
While services to homeless veterans have improved in the past 20 years,
advocates say more financial resources still are needed. With the spotlight on
the plight of Iraq veterans, they hope more will be done to prevent
homelessness and provide affordable housing to the younger veterans while
there's a window of opportunity.
"When the Vietnam War ended, that was part of the problem. The war was over, it
was off TV, nobody wanted to hear about it," said John Keaveney, a Vietnam
veteran and a founder of New Directions in Los Angeles, which provides
substance abuse help, job training and shelter to veterans.
"I think they'll be forgotten," Keaveney said of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
"People get tired of it. It's not glitzy that these are young, honorable,
patriotic Americans. They'll just be veterans, and that happens after every
war."
Keaveney said it's difficult for his group to persuade some homeless Iraq
veterans to stay for treatment and help because they don't relate to the older
veterans. Those who stayed have had success - one is now a stock broker and
another is applying to be a police officer, he said.
"They see guys that are their father's age and they don't understand, they
don't know, that in a couple of years they'll be looking like them," he said.
After being discharged from the military, Jason Kelley, 23, of Tomahawk, Wis.,
who served in Iraq with the Wisconsin National Guard, took a bus to Los Angeles
looking for better job prospects and a new life.
Kelley said he couldn't find a job because he didn't have an apartment, and he
couldn't get an apartment because he didn't have a job. He stayed in a
$300-a-week motel until his money ran out, then moved into a shelter run by the
group U.S. VETS in Inglewood, Calif. He's since been diagnosed with
post-traumatic stress disorder, he said.
"The only training I have is infantry training and there's not really a need
for that in the civilian world," Kelley said in a phone interview. He has
enrolled in college and hopes to move out of the shelter soon.
The Iraq vets seeking help with homelessness are more likely to be women, less
likely to have substance abuse problems, but more likely to have mental illness
- mostly related to post-traumatic stress, said Pete Dougherty, director of
homeless veterans programs at the VA.
Overall, 45 percent of participants in the VA's homeless programs have a
diagnosable mental illness and more than three out of four have a substance
abuse problem, while 35 percent have both, Dougherty said.
Historically, a number of fighters in U.S. wars have become homeless. In the
post-Civil War era, homeless veterans sang old Army songs to dramatize their
need for work and became known as "tramps," which had meant to march into war,
said Todd DePastino, a historian at Penn State University's Beaver campus who
wrote a book on the history of homelessness.
After World War I, thousands of veterans - many of them homeless - camped in
the nation's capital seeking bonus money. Their camps were destroyed by the
government, creating a public relations disaster for President Herbert Hoover.
The end of the Vietnam War coincided with a time of economic restructuring, and
many of the same people who fought in Vietnam were also those most affected by
the loss of manufacturing jobs, DePastino said.
Their entrance to the streets was traumatic and, as they aged, their problems
became more chronic, recalled Sister Mary Scullion, who has worked with the
homeless for 30 years and co-founded of the group Project H.O.M.E. in
Philadelphia.
"It takes more to address the needs because they are multiple needs that have
been unattended," Scullion said. "Life on the street is brutal and I know many,
many homeless veterans who have died from Vietnam."
The VA started targeting homelessness in 1987, 12 years after the fall of
Saigon. Today, the VA has, either on its own or through partnerships, more than
15,000 residential rehabilitative, transitional and permanent beds for homeless
veterans nationwide. It spends about $265 million annually on homeless-specific
programs and about $1.5 billion for all health care costs for homeless
veterans.
Because of these types of programs and because two years of free medical care
is being offered to all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, Dougherty said they hope
many veterans from recent wars who are in need can be identified early.
"Clearly, I don't think that's going to totally solve the problem, but I also
don't think we're simply going to wait for 10 years until they show up,"
Dougherty said. "We're out there now trying to get everybody we can to get
those kinds of services today, so we avoid this kind of problem in the future."
In all of 2006, the National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that
495,400 veterans were homeless at some point during the year.
The group recommends that 5,000 housing units be created per year for the next
five years dedicated to the chronically homeless that would provide permanent
housing linked to veterans' support systems. It also recommends funding an
additional 20,000 housing vouchers exclusively for homeless veterans, and
creating a program that helps bridge the gap between income and rent.
Following those recommendations would cost billions of dollars, but there is
some movement in Congress to increase the amount of money dedicated to homeless
veterans programs.
On a recent day in Philadelphia, case managers from Project H.O.M.E. and the VA
picked up William Joyce, 60, a homeless Vietnam veteran in a wheelchair who
said he'd been sleeping at a bus terminal.
"You're an honorable veteran. You're going to get some services," outreach
worker Mark Salvatore told Joyce. "You need to be connected. You don't need to
be out here on the streets."
___
Associated Press writer Kathy Matheson contributed to this story from
Philadelphia.
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