Category: Veterans

After 30 years of widespread veteran homelessness, communities around the country are racing to end it by the end of this year. Some communities like Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, New Orleans, Houston, and Las Cruces, New Mexico have already announced that they’ve reached the goal.

How has the country suddenly gotten so close to bringing an end to veteran homelessness? We get this question a lot. The truth of course is that there’s nothing sudden about it. People have been working behind the scenes at the national, state and local levels for years to make this happen. Since 2009, they have reduced the number of veterans who experience homelessness on a given day by 33 percent. Here’s a look at how we got here.

At the end of this year we will reach the deadline for a truly historic goal set in 2010: an end to homelessness among all veterans! The clock is ticking.

Since the goal was set in the federal government’s strategic plan Opening Doors, we’ve seen tremendous progress around the country. Just today, the federal government declared Connecticut the first state to end chronic homelessness among veterans. True, chronically homeless veterans make up a fraction of the total homeless veteran population, but this is an important achievement, one we expect to see repeated soon.

Each year, thousands of Americans transition from active duty military service to veteran status. But after fighting for our country, these men and women are more likely than civilians to experience homelessness. Though the reasons for this are varied, many veterans struggle to return to civilian life, placing them at increased risk of experiencing homelessness. On any given night, nearly 50,000 veterans are homeless.

In 2009, our federal government acknowledged the growing problem of veteran homelessness and proposed a solution. Then-Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) Secretary Eric Shinseki, in conjunction with President Barack Obama, established the audacious goal of ending veteran homelessness by the end of 2015. We’re now more than halfway through the year, with only five months to go. So how are we doing?