thedrifter
10-23-08, 06:32 AM
Get with the program
Red tape and the recession hurt vets housing plan
by JASON WHITED
SIX months after word of sweeping new housing assistance for homeless veterans here, thousands of them are still stuck on Las Vegas streets, thanks to a complicated mix of bureaucratic wrangling, recession and lingering damage from their own experiences in combat.
Back in mid-April, officials with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Veterans Affairs promised a new era of readily available aid for any vet facing homelessness. After centuries of historically underfunding veterans' health and assistance programs, 2008 was going to be the year Uncle Sam began giving back in a big way, they said.
That new cooperative effort? The Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing plan, or VASH for short, which promised to inject $75 million in housing aid into communities across the country. Officials said local vets, under the direction of the Clark County Housing Authority, would have access to more than $842,000 in rental vouchers that would allow many of them to sleep under their own roofs for the first time in years -- and out of shelters, parks or back alleys.
Vets in rural Nevada were getting help, too - more than $407,000, which the Carson City-based Nevada Rural Housing Authority would administer to vets living in smaller communities around the state.
"VA and HUD are strengthening our long-standing partnership on homelessness to achieve a simple vision: that no one who has served and fought for their country should have to live on the streets," said Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake, at the time of the joint program's announcement.
The promise of federal help came just five months after the National Alliance to End Homelessness found Nevada with the fifth highest rate of homeless vets in the country, or 1.9 percent (an all-time high). At the time, however, Las Vegas veterans' advocates warned that the number of homeless former troops here locally was at least that high on any given day.
Yet since the program's inception, a variety of factors have coalesced to hamstring efforts to get more Nevada vets into permanent housing of their own.
Despite enough funding for 105 local vets and their families, Clark County housing officials have handed out just 11 vouchers since mid-April. Elsewhere in the state, Nevada rural housing officials have signed up just eight vets for the program, out of a possible 70.
Thank the VA for much of the delay, says Howard Wasserman, director of the Clark County Housing Authority. In an ironic twist, the department set up to expedite veterans' assistance has actually set up the most bureaucratic roadblocks. Whether requiring homeless vets to sign a multi-year contract with the VA and have their case heard by a review committee, failing to coordinate with local housing authorities or not handling the new program's workload, the VA threatens to drop this economic and political hot potato.
"What's slowed [the program] down is having to educate the VA in terms of how the housing authority operates. We are our own separate operation, with our own separate rules and regulations," says Wasserman.
Across the Southwest, CityLife has talked to housing officials singing the same song: despite plenty of advance notice for the new program, VA officials have failed to hire, or train, enough case managers to handle the increased workload; have failed to work with housing officials to get vets into permanent housing and have placed undue burdens on vets seeking help.
Gary Longaker, executive director of the Carson City-based Nevada Rural Housing Authority, explains.
"We've run into communication problems with the VA," he says. "We were thinking that we'd have the program filled in a couple of years, but it could take as much as three years."
For Longaker, much of that delay will come as a result of Veterans Affairs failing to plan for the interest this new joint program with HUD has drawn. A prime example? The vetting process for program applicants is unlike any other housing program Longaker can recall.
"I don't know why there is this disparity. Why would [this program] be any different from someone getting a [routine] housing voucher? I was not a happy camper when I learned this is what a veteran has to do for the program," he says.
For Vegas-area veterans activists like Frank Perna, a big problem with the joint assistance program is that rental vouchers are only good for so-called Section 8 housing -- or, federally subsidized housing for low-income people.
"My objection to Section 8 housing is that it attracts crime. This isn't good for vets to be living there. Why not call up to Nellis and see what they have?" he asks.
Perna isn't surprised at the lack of coordination between the Veterans Administration and area housing authorities. What do you expect from a government that regularly fails to treat the one in three soldiers and Marines who come home with combat-related emotional trauma? Should you expect vets housing programs to be run any better? he asks.
"Homelessness is a humanitarian issue that's being treated politically. It's par for the course for the government," he says.
Local VA spokesman David Martinez tells CityLife his agency is hiring and training case managers to track veterans in the program, to ensure they find good housing and that taxpayer money is spent wisely. He would not comment on criticisms that VA officials here and across the country were unprepared to administer this program.
The economy has also kept many out of the program, according to vets who talked to CityLife about the program in late August.
In an interview near Woodlawn Park on a typical late-summer weekday, 42-year-old Lou Ellis, a former soldier in Gulf War I, said the program gave him enough hope to look for work, with the goal of saving for a security deposit and qualifying for the monthly rental voucher.
"It sounds good, I hope I can get in on that," said Ellis, as he eased his dirty, haggard frame against a huge, sweat-stained hiker's pack that, he said, holds everything he owns. "Being homeless makes it real hard to get a job, but I could pay my share. Up to now, there hasn't been a lot of hope for me and the guys out here. Life got screwed up for a lot of us or screwed us up. If I can get a job, I can save up a security deposit or the first month's rent," said Ellis, who hadn't yet applied for the funding.
Nevada's highest unemployment rate in 23 years, pegged this week at 7.3 percent, has made it tougher on Ellis and other vets to find work. With no place to shower or hang his clothes, the odds of a potential boss hiring Ellis are slim to none.
Then, there are the emotional legacies of combat that keep many vets out of programs like VASH, which could offer them an entrée back into society.
A November 2007 study by the U.S. Office of Applied Studies, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found vets disproportionately face serious psychological stress and substance abuse problems. According to the data, 32.1 percent of vets under 55 deal with psychological problems, and 36.3 percent of these same troops have difficulties with drugs and alcohol. Further, a recent CBS report found that as many as 6,256 vets commit suicide per year. That's a rate of more than 17 per day.
Facing these types of problems, it's little wonder that so many local vets find it hard to get themselves into a program like VASH.
Still, for their part, both Wasserman and Longaker say they think their staffs and VA case managers will eventually find more common ground and will work together to turn the program into a success.
"They're [VA] learning what we do, and they're tying in what they do with what we do," says Wasserman. "It's been a bit slow off the drawing board, but it's a good program, and it will be a positive experience. People will get served."
Last updated on Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 12:19 am
Ellie
Red tape and the recession hurt vets housing plan
by JASON WHITED
SIX months after word of sweeping new housing assistance for homeless veterans here, thousands of them are still stuck on Las Vegas streets, thanks to a complicated mix of bureaucratic wrangling, recession and lingering damage from their own experiences in combat.
Back in mid-April, officials with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Veterans Affairs promised a new era of readily available aid for any vet facing homelessness. After centuries of historically underfunding veterans' health and assistance programs, 2008 was going to be the year Uncle Sam began giving back in a big way, they said.
That new cooperative effort? The Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing plan, or VASH for short, which promised to inject $75 million in housing aid into communities across the country. Officials said local vets, under the direction of the Clark County Housing Authority, would have access to more than $842,000 in rental vouchers that would allow many of them to sleep under their own roofs for the first time in years -- and out of shelters, parks or back alleys.
Vets in rural Nevada were getting help, too - more than $407,000, which the Carson City-based Nevada Rural Housing Authority would administer to vets living in smaller communities around the state.
"VA and HUD are strengthening our long-standing partnership on homelessness to achieve a simple vision: that no one who has served and fought for their country should have to live on the streets," said Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake, at the time of the joint program's announcement.
The promise of federal help came just five months after the National Alliance to End Homelessness found Nevada with the fifth highest rate of homeless vets in the country, or 1.9 percent (an all-time high). At the time, however, Las Vegas veterans' advocates warned that the number of homeless former troops here locally was at least that high on any given day.
Yet since the program's inception, a variety of factors have coalesced to hamstring efforts to get more Nevada vets into permanent housing of their own.
Despite enough funding for 105 local vets and their families, Clark County housing officials have handed out just 11 vouchers since mid-April. Elsewhere in the state, Nevada rural housing officials have signed up just eight vets for the program, out of a possible 70.
Thank the VA for much of the delay, says Howard Wasserman, director of the Clark County Housing Authority. In an ironic twist, the department set up to expedite veterans' assistance has actually set up the most bureaucratic roadblocks. Whether requiring homeless vets to sign a multi-year contract with the VA and have their case heard by a review committee, failing to coordinate with local housing authorities or not handling the new program's workload, the VA threatens to drop this economic and political hot potato.
"What's slowed [the program] down is having to educate the VA in terms of how the housing authority operates. We are our own separate operation, with our own separate rules and regulations," says Wasserman.
Across the Southwest, CityLife has talked to housing officials singing the same song: despite plenty of advance notice for the new program, VA officials have failed to hire, or train, enough case managers to handle the increased workload; have failed to work with housing officials to get vets into permanent housing and have placed undue burdens on vets seeking help.
Gary Longaker, executive director of the Carson City-based Nevada Rural Housing Authority, explains.
"We've run into communication problems with the VA," he says. "We were thinking that we'd have the program filled in a couple of years, but it could take as much as three years."
For Longaker, much of that delay will come as a result of Veterans Affairs failing to plan for the interest this new joint program with HUD has drawn. A prime example? The vetting process for program applicants is unlike any other housing program Longaker can recall.
"I don't know why there is this disparity. Why would [this program] be any different from someone getting a [routine] housing voucher? I was not a happy camper when I learned this is what a veteran has to do for the program," he says.
For Vegas-area veterans activists like Frank Perna, a big problem with the joint assistance program is that rental vouchers are only good for so-called Section 8 housing -- or, federally subsidized housing for low-income people.
"My objection to Section 8 housing is that it attracts crime. This isn't good for vets to be living there. Why not call up to Nellis and see what they have?" he asks.
Perna isn't surprised at the lack of coordination between the Veterans Administration and area housing authorities. What do you expect from a government that regularly fails to treat the one in three soldiers and Marines who come home with combat-related emotional trauma? Should you expect vets housing programs to be run any better? he asks.
"Homelessness is a humanitarian issue that's being treated politically. It's par for the course for the government," he says.
Local VA spokesman David Martinez tells CityLife his agency is hiring and training case managers to track veterans in the program, to ensure they find good housing and that taxpayer money is spent wisely. He would not comment on criticisms that VA officials here and across the country were unprepared to administer this program.
The economy has also kept many out of the program, according to vets who talked to CityLife about the program in late August.
In an interview near Woodlawn Park on a typical late-summer weekday, 42-year-old Lou Ellis, a former soldier in Gulf War I, said the program gave him enough hope to look for work, with the goal of saving for a security deposit and qualifying for the monthly rental voucher.
"It sounds good, I hope I can get in on that," said Ellis, as he eased his dirty, haggard frame against a huge, sweat-stained hiker's pack that, he said, holds everything he owns. "Being homeless makes it real hard to get a job, but I could pay my share. Up to now, there hasn't been a lot of hope for me and the guys out here. Life got screwed up for a lot of us or screwed us up. If I can get a job, I can save up a security deposit or the first month's rent," said Ellis, who hadn't yet applied for the funding.
Nevada's highest unemployment rate in 23 years, pegged this week at 7.3 percent, has made it tougher on Ellis and other vets to find work. With no place to shower or hang his clothes, the odds of a potential boss hiring Ellis are slim to none.
Then, there are the emotional legacies of combat that keep many vets out of programs like VASH, which could offer them an entrée back into society.
A November 2007 study by the U.S. Office of Applied Studies, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found vets disproportionately face serious psychological stress and substance abuse problems. According to the data, 32.1 percent of vets under 55 deal with psychological problems, and 36.3 percent of these same troops have difficulties with drugs and alcohol. Further, a recent CBS report found that as many as 6,256 vets commit suicide per year. That's a rate of more than 17 per day.
Facing these types of problems, it's little wonder that so many local vets find it hard to get themselves into a program like VASH.
Still, for their part, both Wasserman and Longaker say they think their staffs and VA case managers will eventually find more common ground and will work together to turn the program into a success.
"They're [VA] learning what we do, and they're tying in what they do with what we do," says Wasserman. "It's been a bit slow off the drawing board, but it's a good program, and it will be a positive experience. People will get served."
Last updated on Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 12:19 am
Ellie