Study: Veterans Make
Up 1 In 4 Homeless
AP from the Web,
November 8, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Lonnie Bowen Jr.
was once a social worker, but for 17 years the Vietnam war veteran has slept on
the streets off and on as he's battled substance abuse and mental health
problems.
“It's been a hard struggle,” said Bowen, 62, as he rolled a cigarette outside a
homeless processing center in downtown Philadelphia, where he planned to seek
help for his drug and alcohol problem, as he has before.
Every night, hundreds of thousands of veterans like Bowen are without a home.
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 by the Alliance to End Homelessness, a public education
nonprofit.
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. Data from 2005 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 such an 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 for 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 gives
veterans help with substance abuse, job training and shelter.
“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 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 such 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 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 the same day Bowen stood outside the processing center 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.”
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