The veterans who fought for the U.S. in wars from World War II to Afghanistan face a huge range of housing challenges across a wide swath of people.
“It can be a single mom in her 20s with two kids,” says Nancy Hughes Moyer, president and CEO of Volunteers of America (VOA) Illinois.
Or veterans with families who’ve just returned from conflicts in the Middle East.
The group also includes older veterans who’ve struggled for years with chronic homelessness.
Though they differ in age, gender, and experience, all, as veterans, face similar obstacles to finding affordable housing across the country. These obstacles often come on top of already trying conditions for ex-service men and women, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the difficulty of adjusting to life outside the military. Fortunately, sometimes housing providers can help by drawing on resources available just for veterans.
Progress in Fighting Chronic Homelessness Among Veterans
The majority of the roughly 1 million war veterans in the U.S. are those who fought in conflicts like Vietnam, including a set of many single men who have struggled for years with homelessness, often along with a mix of mental-health and addiction issues.
These vets have been perhaps the most recognizable face of the housing challenges faced by former service personnel. Until recently, roughly a third of all homeless people were veterans who had fought in the armed services, including many chronically homeless. In 2009, the federal government announced the goal of ending homelessness among veterans, and from 2010 to 2016, the number of homeless veterans fell by roughly half, for both unsheltered and people, according to the National Housing Conference (NHC).
In this effort, the government provided several new resources, including the HUD–Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing (HUD–VASH) program. Since 2010, VASH has provided 85,000 vouchers that provide rental housing subsidies to veterans threatened by homelessness. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has also provided land on the campuses of the VA hospital system to build new supportive-housing communities that provide stable housing and other services to help chronically homeless vets.
A Huge, Diverse Group
Today’s veterans comprise a much larger, more-diverse group than the sometimes highly visible set of chronically homeless vets.
“They’re more likely to be employed and have higher earnings, on average, than the broader population,” says Rebekah King, policy associate for the NHC, which completed its own survey of veterans who have served since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and also found vets, overall, to be better off than the larger population. An analysis of Census data by the National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics found a similar result for the broader population of veterans, on average.
Slightly better earnings, on average, aren’t enough to shield many veterans from the shortage of affordable housing in the U.S., however. About a third of veterans who served after 2001 pay more than 30% of their income on housing, according to the NHC.
Also, veterans are still more likely to struggle with homelessness than is the overall population. The particular challenges faced by many younger veterans help explain why.
Young Vets With Families Face Homelessness
Many young veterans have returned from combat zones to find few job opportunities—and the positions that are available often pay much less than they earned in the armed services.
“Their earning potential drops precipitously after their discharge—it’s inconsistent with the scale of their obligations as the head of a household,” says VOA Illinois’ Hughes Moyer. “There was no one standing at the airport with a job and a paycheck.”
The shock may be especially difficult for veterans who started families while in the service. “So many of our veterans struggling with homelessness and PTSD have kids,” says Hughes Moyer. Younger veterans with families rarely stay at homeless shelters or sleep outdoors, so they often aren’t included in counts of homeless people. Instead, they frequently live doubled-up, with family or in some other improvised arrangement. “We had a family with six kids living in a van,” Hughes Moyer recalls.
Families led by young veterans often struggle with the same problems of slow wage growth and the lack of affordable housing as other families across the country. Young vets also find it difficult to reintegrate into civilian life. The workplace culture is often much less structured than in the military. These former service members may also have less experience with life skills like budgeting or dealing with health care and insurance costs outside of the military.
After their discharge, some vets return home to encounter challenges they might have joined the military to escape in the first place. Some left chaotic family situations or communities stressed by poverty and high crime rates. “We’re targeting for recruitment people from lower-income communities,” says Hughes Moyer. “You don’t see many recruitment offices in the affluent suburbs of Chicago.”
One of the reasons veterans are more likely to become homeless is because of these risk factors. “They were disproportionately at risk of homelessness before they entered the service,” says Hughes Moyer.
VOA Illinois has opened two properties targeted to serve veterans with families: Hope Manor II in Chicago and Hope Manor Joliet in Joliet, Ill. Having a stable, affordable place to live can give vets a platform on which to build their new lives after their military service, whether that means undergoing some kind of job training or connecting with programs that may pay for them to go to college.
Female Vets Overcome Abuse, Greater Housing Issues
The population of younger veterans also includes a growing number of women. Roughly 8% of veterans are women, according to HUD’s 2016 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, up from close to zero in prior generations. And that number is likely to rise as more women serve in the military.
“Female veterans do face disproportionate housing challenges compared to male vets,” says the NHC’s King. That includes the economic challenge of lower pay, on average.
Many of these women are also overcoming trauma: 23% of female users of VA services report that they experienced sexual assault during their service, and the real number may be higher. “I’m sure it is underreported,” says King.
Some housing providers are creating communities targeted to female vets to provide a greater sense of safety and security, like VOA’s Blue Butterfly Village in Los Angeles, which opened 73 affordable homes in 2015.
Older Vets Struggle With Aging
Another group of veterans, seniors, struggles with the challenge of getting older in addition to living with the scars left behind by their wartime experience.
“Our societal plan for our aging population isn’t robust,” says King. Overall, the U.S. doesn’t have nearly enough programs to provide medical care at home, in assisted-living facilities, or in nursing homes for all the people who will soon need some level of care.
Adding to the challenge, 35% of veterans who are older than 55 have a disability that is related to their service, including scars from old wounds received in combat. These hurdles are only going to become progressively more severe as this group of vets becomes frailer.
“The majority of older veterans may be stable now, but their needs are going to shift,” says King.
