COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Veterans
Surge Seen in Number of Homeless Veterans
ERIK ECKHOLM, The New York Times
November 8, 2007
WASHINGTON,
Nov. 7 — More than 400 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
have turned up homeless, and the Veterans Affairs Department and aid
groups say they are bracing for a new surge in homeless veterans in the
years ahead.
Experts who work with veterans say it often takes several years after
leaving military service for veterans’ accumulating problems to
push them into the streets. But some aid workers say the Iraq and
Afghanistan veterans appear to be turning up sooner than the Vietnam
veterans did.
“We’re beginning to see, across the country, the first
trickle of this generation of warriors in homeless shelters,”
said Phil Landis, chairman of Veterans Village of San Diego, a
residence and counseling center. “But we anticipate that
it’s going to be a tsunami.”
With more women serving in combat zones, the current wars are already
resulting in a higher share of homeless women as well. They have an
added risk factor: roughly 40 percent of the hundreds of homeless
female veterans of recent wars have said they were sexually assaulted
by American soldiers while in the military, officials said.
“Sexual abuse is a risk factor for homelessness,” Pete
Dougherty, the V.A.’s director of homeless programs, said.
Special traits of the current wars may contribute to homelessness,
including high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and
traumatic brain injury, which can cause unstable behavior and substance
abuse, and the long and repeated tours of duty, which can make the
reintegration into families and work all the harder.
Frederick Johnson, 37, an Army reservist, slept in abandoned houses
shortly after returning to Chester, Pa., from a year in Iraq, where he
experienced daily mortar attacks and saw mangled bodies of soldiers and
children. He started using crack cocaine and drinking, burning through
$6,000 in savings.
“I cut myself off from my family and went from being a pleasant
guy to wanting to rip your head off if you looked at me wrong,”
Mr. Johnson said.
On the street for a year, he finally checked in at a V.A. clinic in
Maryland and has struggled with PTSD, depression, and drug and alcohol
abuse. The V.A. has provided temporary housing as he starts a new job.
Tracy Jones of the Compass Center, a Seattle agency that has seen a
handful of new homeless each month, said she was surprised by
“the quickness in which Iraqi Freedom veterans are becoming
homeless” compared with the Vietnam era. The availability of meth
and crack could lead addicts into rapid downhill spirals, Ms. Jones
said.
Poverty and high housing costs also contribute. The National Alliance
to End Homelessness in Washington will release a report on Thursday
saying that among one million veterans who served after the Sept. 11
attacks, 72,000 are paying more than half their incomes for rent,
leaving them highly vulnerable.
Mr. Dougherty of the V.A. said outreach officers, who visit shelters,
soup kitchens and parks, had located about 1,500 returnees from Iraq or
Afghanistan who seemed at high risk, though many had jobs. More than
400 have entered agency-supported residential programs around the
country. No one knows how many others have not made contact with aid
agencies.
More than 11 percent of the newly homeless veterans are women, Mr.
Dougherty said, compared with 4 percent enrolled in such programs over
all.
Veterans have long accounted for a high share of the nation’s
homeless. Although they make up 11 percent of the adult population,
they make up 26 percent of the homeless on any given day, the National
Alliance report calculated.
According to the V.A., some 196,000 veterans of all ages were homeless
on any given night in 2006. That represents a decline from about
250,000 a decade back, Mr. Dougherty said, as housing and medical
programs grew and older veterans died.
The most troubling face of homelessness has been the chronic cases,
those who live in the streets or shelters for more than year. Some
44,000 to 64,000 veterans fit that category, according to the National
Alliance study.
On Wednesday, the Bush administration announced what it described as
“remarkable progress” for the chronic homeless. Alphonso R.
Jackson, the secretary of housing and urban development, said a new
policy of bringing the long-term homeless directly into housing, backed
by supporting services, had put more than 20,000, or about 12 percent,
into permanent or transitional homes.
Veterans have been among the beneficiaries, but Mary Cunningham,
director of the research institute of the National Alliance and chief
author of their report, said the share of supported housing marked for
veterans was low.
A collaborative program of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development and the V.A. has developed 1,780 such units. The National
Alliance said the number needed to grow by 25,000.
Mr. Dougherty described the large and growing efforts the V.A. was
making to prevent homelessness including offering two years of free
medical care and identifying psychological and substance abuse problems
early.
One obstacle is that many veterans wait too long to seek help. “I
had that pride thing going on, ‘I’m a soldier, I should be
better than this,’” Mr. Johnson said.
Kent Richardson, 49, who was in the Army from 1976 to 1992 and has
flashbacks from the gulf war, said, “when you get out you feel
disconnected and alone.”
Mr. Richardson said it took him two years to find a job after leaving
the Army. Then he became an alcoholic. He now stays at the Southeast
Veteran’s Service Center in Washington, awaiting permanent
subsidized housing.
Joe Williams, 53, spent 16 years in the Army and the Navy, including a
deeply upsetting assignment in the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in
Delaware, where the dead from the gulf war were taken for autopsies.
For the past three years Mr. Williams has lived in a bunk bed in a
Washington shelter. He was laid off, his car and house were
repossessed, and his wife left him. He moved to Georgia, where he lost
another job.
Broke and depressed, he walked from Georgia to a V.A. hospital in the
Washington area, where schizophrenia was diagnosed. Now, after three
years of medication and therapy, he feels ready to start looking for
work.
“I have a mission I’ve got to accomplish,” Mr. Williams said.
Sean D. Hamill contributed reporting from Pittsburgh, Michael Parrish from Los Angeles and J. Michael Kennedy from Seattle.
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