Veteran homelessness is getting renewed attention from the federal government, which seems to be trickling down to the local level. In March, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced the goal of permanently housing 38,000 Veterans in 2023. On June 29, the White House released a fact sheet with specific action steps to help address Veteran homelessness. And in a recent local Request for Proposal (RFP) for support services, Metro stressed the focus on serving Veterans.
Let’s start with some facts.
Veterans are the population that has seen the most reduction in homelessness since 2010. The reason is that it’s been a priority for the federal government and resources were available to implement a Housing First strategy. As a result, Veteran homelessness has been cut by 55 percent since 2010.
Between 2020 and 2022 alone, Veterans homelessness was reduced by 11 percent at the national level from 37,252 to 33,129. This compares to a reduction of 23 percent in Nashville-Davidson County, from 249 in 2020 to 191 in 2022. This data is from the annual Point In Time Count (PIT), which requires all local jurisdictions to count individuals and families (including subpopulations like Veterans) experiencing literal homelessness. This count is a one-time snapshot where over one hundred volunteers scan Nashville and all shelter providers submit information on one night. The PIT count is conducted within the last 10 days of January across the country. It provides overall trends for a narrowly defined population of people who sleep in shelters, transitional housing, outdoors, in cars, or other places not meant for human habitation.
Trends provide valuable long-term measures. But the federal government through the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) recommends that Continuums of Care* (CoCs) look at additional local data sources to capture in more detail what Veteran homelessness looks like. Specifically, USICH recommends that communities establish what they term a master list or By Name List, which I have discussed in previous columns.
Nashville’s By Name List is updated monthly, which allows for intense discussion among local Veteran providers to see what works, what doesn’t, and identify gaps and opportunities.
The local Veteran By Name List showed the following:
- 175 Veterans were identified as experiencing homelessness in June 2022;
- 203 Veterans in December 2022; and
- 174 Veterans as of the time of this writing (July 2023).
So, what is the White House doing that they say will make a difference in addressing Veteran homelessness? Their fact sheet highlights the following four actions:
- Making the single largest investment in communities’ homelessness response systems in history. The Biden Administration combined this fact sheet with the announcement of the annual Continuum of Care (CoC) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) competition. Basically, every year, the federal government allocated homelessness funding for local CoCs. This year, the federal government makes a total of $3.1 billion available, and HUD strongly encourages CoCs to coordinate with local Departments of Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Centers to ensure these funds also support veterans and their families.
The $3.1 billion is an overall increase in CoC funding. - Providing first-of-its-kind funding for legal services for veterans experiencing or at risk of homelessness. The White House fact sheet says, “The VA is awarding $11.5 million to public and nonprofit organizations through its new Legal Services for Veterans Grant Program. Funds will support veterans experiencing or at risk of homelessness, including providing legal representation to help prevent eviction and helping veterans obtain public benefits for which they are eligible.”
This is the only new funding that I can discern from the fact sheet. - Connecting veterans experiencing homelessness with jobs. “The Department of Labor Veterans’ Employment and Training Service (VETS) is awarding more than $58 million in grant funding to help veterans experiencing or at risk of homelessness reintegrate into the labor force, including homeless women veterans, homeless veterans with children, and justice-involved veterans.”
- Launching a new effort to quickly rehouse veterans. To do so, HUD and the VA will launch a series of “Boot Camps” that aim to improve processes to transition veterans from homelessness to permanent housing more efficiently.
Let’s focus on Nashville’s approach to effectively end Veteran homelessness, which means to build a system that makes homelessness among Veterans rare, brief, and non-recurring.
Nashville’s CoC has revived its Veteran Committee, which is chaired by staff of the local VA. In their July meeting, the group started evaluating with community partners what works well and where improved efforts can drive down the Veteran By Name List further.
In 2018, Nashville became part of the Built for Zero initiative, which is a national effort to ensure that Veterans experiencing homelessness are identified quickly and linked with housing within 30 days. Nashville has been able to reduce Veteran homelessness, but we are not quite at the point where we can claim we have effectively ended it or reached the functional zero milestone (see box). But Nashville has been able to significantly improve its data collection effort since 2018 and is now taking a data-driven approach to address Veteran homelessness, which can serve as model to address homelessness for other populations.
We all know that prevention is a key to ending homelessness. In October 2021, a Metro Council Special Committee chaired by Eden Murray, the CEO of Operation Stand Down Tennessee, released several recommendations that are focused on assisting Veterans as they leave active duty. That report is available online at nashville.gov (google: Metro Council Special Committee on Veterans Assessment).
The most obvious needed resources in Nashville are landlords who accept VASH vouchers. VASH stands for Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing, and they are housing vouchers administered by the local Public Housing Authority, which is the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) in Nashville. Under the VASH program, an eligible Veteran pays only about 30 percent of his/her income in rent. The landlord signs a Housing Assistance Payments (HAP) contract with MDHA. Thus, it works very similarly to a Housing Choice Voucher program (also known as Section 8).
MDHA provided me with the following information at the end of July:
- Currently 570 VASH vouchers have been allocated (538 tenant-based VASH vouchers and 32 project-based VASH vouchers);
- 467 of the 570 VASH vouchers are leased as of July 1, 2023;
- The 6-month average utilization rate of the VASH vouchers is 79.5%;
No new Veteran-housing units (designated specifically to house Veterans with/without VASH) came on board in 2023 or are in planning or construction.
The biggest need is for landlords to accept VASH vouchers and help end Veteran homelessness in Nashville. Looking at the data above, we see that about 82 percent of the VASH vouchers are leased up. That means 18 percent or 103 rental units are needed to reduce Veteran homelessness significantly, considering that at the beginning of July our city identified about 174 Veterans in need of housing assistance. Landlords interested in learning more about accepting VASH vouchers can call MDHA at (615) 252-6603.
The Continuum of Care (CoC) is a federally designated area in which all stakeholders from a community work together to build a system to prevent and end homelessness. CoC’s receive competitive federal funds for eligible programs that further their systems goals.