In 2009, the Department of Veterans Affairs committed to ending veteran homelessness by the end of 2015. Significant steps have been taken to get our heroes the services they need with, roughly, 50,000 fewer veterans experiencing homelessness than a decade ago. However, there is still much work still to do. Congress has continued working to improve the variety of Federal programs that currently exist to support homeless veterans. This includes permanent housing, transitional housing, prevention services, treatment, and employment programs.
There are over a half million people experiencing homelessness in the United States, nearly 160,000 of them are children, and nearly 38,000 are veterans. This book reports on the national homelessness crisis.
The challenges facing military veterans who return to civilian life in the United States are persistent and well documented. But for all the political outcry and attempts to improve military members' readjustments, veterans of all service eras face formidable obstacles related to mental health, substance abuse, employment, and — most damningly — homelessness. Homelessness Among U.S. Veterans synthesizes the new glut of research on veteran homelessness — geographic trends, root causes, effective and ineffective interventions to mitigate it — in a format that provides a needed reference as this public health fight continues to be fought. Codifying the data and research from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) campaign to end veteran homelessness, psychologist Jack Tsai links disparate lines of research to produce an advanced and elegant resource on a defining social issue of our time.
Chronic homelessness is a highly complex social problem of national importance. The problem has elicited a variety of societal and public policy responses over the years, concomitant with fluctuations in the economy and changes in the demographics of and attitudes toward poor and disenfranchised citizens. In recent decades, federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, and the philanthropic community have worked hard to develop and implement programs to solve the challenges of homelessness, and progress has been made. However, much more remains to be done. Importantly, the results of various efforts, and especially the efforts to reduce homelessness among veterans in recent years, have shown that the problem of homelessness can be successfully addressed. Although a number of programs have been developed to meet the needs of persons experiencing homelessness, this report focuses on one particular type of intervention: permanent supportive housing (PSH). Permanent Supportive Housing focuses on the impact of PSH on health care outcomes and its cost-effectiveness. The report also addresses policy and program barriers that affect the ability to bring the PSH and other housing models to scale to address housing and health care needs.
The world is turning upside down, as families who were barely getting by before, now find themselves facing foreclosures and homelessness. Veteran families are no different, even with their homes under VA secure home loans. All it takes is losing your job unexpectedly, an unexpected medical bill, accident or natural disaster, to throw you into a sea of debt and additional hardships that launch you into a path that leads to losing your home. That's exactly what my family is facing right now, and unless the higher power that be or some amazing miracle appears, unless someone, somewhere who has the ability to help us turn things around and stop this horrific and cruel injustice, we almost surely will be losing our home in the next three months.. Without warning or reason, my husband lost the dream job that he had left the safety and security of active duty to take. It was that pay that our mortgage was based on, and there was no way we could have known it would only last for four short months. I made the mistake of thinking that finally life was going to start going our way, and stop kicking us around, after all that was the story my husband and i seemed to share. All that we wanted was to work, pay our bills, and enjoy our first home, while giving my son the chance to have a stable home that didn't have us moving to another duty station. For the first time in a very long time, i saw happiness and excitement on my sons face, and that was worth everything. I'll never forget the day my husband came home to tell me they had let him go without a reason. i will also ever forget how quickly our lives would go from living paycheck to paycheck, to watching it all come apart as the weeks and months that followed, turned into years. The battle to try and keep our home and not be forced out on the streets and homeless has been devastating and full of one nightmare after another. We are living proof that you can follow the rules, do everything right, and still get knocked on your butt. For the last three years, we have had to do everything we legally can to try and save our home from foreclosure and beg and plead the previous and current lenders to really help us and not just offer us band aid solutions. What we got were drawn out months of stalling and racking up interest and fees, while continued to deny us and push on with the foreclosure. Its concrete proof that profits and the laws protect and support the wealthy lenders and bakers, while offering little to no help nor interest on keeping veteran families in their homes. Try as i have, I have done everything i could to use social media and emails to try and get someone anywhere to listen to our story and help, but time after time its fallen on deaf ears, til now. The last three years has introduced me to other veteran families, many of which either have already lost their homes, or like mine, are trying to do what they can as quickly as they can to keep it. Taking the uniform off doesn't mean they are any less valuable. They answered the call to serve without hesitation because it was their duty. Now with my family, and all of those like mine, facing the growing crisis that we are facing, we are sending out the call for help and hoping that now, this country will answer our call. Our families are more than just account numbers on pieces of paper. For too long this country has crated waves of veterans and failed to protect and provide for them when they come home. It is my hope that sharing our story might help to raise awareness to this growing crisis, to maybe inspire others to not walk away but stand and fight as well. Until we stand up and start fighting back, they'll continue to take and destroy dreams, profiting along the way while we are left to pick up the pieces and try to survive. We are left trying to explain to our children why they dont have a room anymore, and now live in a car. We need change now not later, and it starts by sharing our stories.
Homeless assistance has frequently adhered to the “three hots and a cot” model, which prioritizes immediate material needs but may fail to address the political and social exclusion of people experiencing homelessness. In this study, Loehwing reconsiders typical characterizations of homelessness, citizenship, and democratic community through unconventional approaches to homeless advocacy and assistance. While conventional homeless advocacy rhetoric establishes the urgency of homeless suffering, it also implicitly invites housed publics to understand homelessness as a state of abnormality that destines the individuals suffering it to life outside the civic body. In contrast, Loehwing focuses on atypical models of homeless advocacy: the meal-sharing initiatives of Food Not Bombs, the international competition of the Homeless World Cup, and the annual Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day campaign. She argues that these modes of unconventional homeless advocacy provide rhetorical exemplars of a type of inclusive and empowering civic discourse that is missing from conventional homeless advocacy and may be indispensable for overcoming homeless marginalization and exclusion in contemporary democratic culture. Loehwing’s interrogation of homeless advocacy rhetorics demonstrates how discursive practices shape democratic culture and how they may provide a potential civic remedy to the harms of disenfranchisement, discrimination, and displacement. This book will be welcomed by scholars whose work focuses on the intersections of democratic theory and rhetorical and civic studies, as well as by homelessness advocacy groups.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With stark poignancy and political dispassion Tightrope addresses the crisis in working-class America while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. This must-read book from the authors of Half the Sky “shows how we can and must do better” (Katie Couric). "A deft and uniquely credible exploration of rural America, and of other left-behind pockets of our country. One of the most important books I've read on the state of our disunion."—Tara Westover, author of Educated Drawing us deep into an “other America,” the authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the people with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon. It’s an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About a quarter of the children on Kristof’s old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. While these particular stories unfolded in one corner of the country, they are representative of many places the authors write about, ranging from the Dakotas and Oklahoma to New York and Virginia. With their superb, nuanced reportage, Kristof and WuDunn have given us a book that is both riveting and impossible to ignore.
