[Editor’s Note: Under Robert L. Rosebrock’s byline, this newspaper has reported for years on the predicament of homeless military veterans in Los Angeles. Mr. Rosebrock says that 20,000 veterans are homeless every night.]
Dateline Baltimore — Two months ago, Richard Newman was living in whatever abandoned house or car he could find in a crime-ridden Baltimore neighborhood he calls “the devil’s playground.”
A former nuclear weapons specialist for the U.S. Army, Mr. Newman, 44, once owned a $300,000 home in the suburbs and a comfortable lifestyle. But heroin addiction had taken it all away.
“I was existing day-to-day in this almost animalistic way, just fighting to stay alive in the streets,” the Baltimore native says.
Mr. Newman, who served at a missile site in the 1990s, now lives in a barracks-like room, attends daily life-skills classes and meets regularly with men and women traveling the same road, whether at nightly Narcotics Anonymous meetings or on occasional outings such as, a week ago, a Baltimore Orioles game.
He is one of the newer residents at the Maryland Center for Veterans Education & Training in Baltimore, a nonprofit facility for homeless veterans known as MCVET.
And he is glad for the “safe haven” and the rare opportunity it offers to develop long-term plans.
“Once you’re out in the streets — even when you decide to try to reestablish yourself — it’s ‘good luck,'” says Mr. Newman. “You don’t even have a desk to sit down and handle an application. The odds of doing it by yourself are so small.”
The problem of veteran homelessness in Baltimore, and in the United States in general, is substantial by any measure.
Exact figures are hard to come by, but the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development has estimated that more than 45,000 veterans are homeless on any night. They make up 11 percent of the total adult homeless population.
Veterans are as vulnerable as any group to the factors that contribute to homelessness: shortages of affordable healthcare and housing, the scarcity of good-paying jobs.
They can also face special challenges in this area, says Vidia Dhanraj, the director of homeless services for the Baltimore mayor’s office.
The prevalence among veterans of substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental illnesses, and inadequate social and family support worsens the problem, Ms. Dhanraj says.
Predicted End Did Not Happen
The crisis is severe enough that in 2014, the Obama administration introduced the Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness, a nationwide initiative that challenged the mayors of major cities including Baltimore to work with government and nonprofit agencies to end veteran homelessness by the end of 2015.
It didn’t reach the goal. As of last January, Baltimore’s homeless population measured 2,700, including 330 veterans.While 45 veterans per month were finding permanent housing, 40 more were becoming homeless.
On the positive side, Ms. Dhanraj says, the program helped improve communication among agencies, and boosted their capacity to identify and track the homeless.
“The initiative promoted much better practices, and that’s significant,” Ms. Dhanraj says.
Jeffery Kendrick, the Air Force veteran who serves as MCVET’s executive director, says numbers don’t tell the whole story.
The Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, which oversaw the challenge, advocates a “housing-first” strategy — that is, its first priority is to get homeless veterans into permanent housing, whatever their condition.
MCVET, Mr. Kendrick says, has always believed in the opposite approach: first, analyze and treat whatever conditions underlie a veteran’s homelessness; then require the veteran — or “student” — to progress through several major phases, demonstrating commitment and increasing personal responsibility at each stage.
During the final phase — known as “SRO,” for “single-room occupancy” —70 of the 200 residents live in private apartments while commuting to jobs they’ve obtained through MCVET’S robust employment program.
“By that time, we are confident that these men and women have the skills and the resources to maintain that life of stability,” Mr. Kendrick says. “We see homelessness as something you can’t fix in a month or two.”
The approach, which is based on a military model that includes a zero-tolerance policy toward drugs, seems to work. Of the 10,000 men and women MCVET has housed, 70 percent have met its definition of success: Remaining employed for two years after release while living with family or at another permanent address.
The organization is so committed to the approach that its board voted to keep it this year even after HUD told them the federal government would stop providing an annual $1.36 million in funding — 40 percent of its $3.4 million budget — if it didn’t switch to “housing first.”
“We’re scrambling to raise the money, but we decided to stick with the approach we’ve seen succeeding from the beginning,” Mr. Kendrick says.
This story originally appeared in the Baltimore Sun.
