Mayor Landrieu Declares Victory in Ending Homelessness Among Veterans
Michael Washington said he’s not suicidal, but on some days he wishes that he were never born. And over the past two decades, there have been a lot of days like that.
Washington, 56, lived on the streets of New Orleans for 20 years. He’s been addicted to crack, suffered through severe depression, and continues to struggle with acute pain after being slammed so violently to the ground during a brutal attack years ago that he separated both shoulders.
But the hardest part about being homeless, said Washington, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, is the weather.
“Sometimes you have to endure the rain and the cold and sometimes you have to endure both,” he said. “The weather can turn on you and you end up with nothing. I think Unity rescued me just in the nick of time.”
Last year, as part of Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s pledge to be the first city in the country to end veteran homelessness by Dec. 31, 2014, outreach workers with Unity of Greater New Orleans conducted sweeps looking for former members of the military in need. They found Washington sleeping on a bus stop bench at the corner of Elysian Fields and St. Claude avenues. Less than a month later, on Sept. 19, they moved him into his own apartment.
“It’s a blessing,” Washington said. “I sit down and when it’s storming outside I say, ‘Wow. Normally I’d be out there.'”
In March 2014, there were an estimated 193 homeless veterans in the city, according to a Unity survey that looks at the number of people without a home on a given night. By the end of the year, a city-led coalition that includes Unity, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Housing Authority of New Orleans and a network of nonprofits successfully found permanent supportive housing for all of them.
“On July 4th the mayor made a commitment to the first lady and the president to take on this challenge and end veteran homelessness by the end of 2014 and we’ve done it,” said Landrieu’s policy advisor Sam Joel.
That doesn’t mean that there currently isn’t or will never be another homeless veteran in New Orleans, Joel said. But the city now has the resources and system in place to provide them with the help they need once they are identified.
“There could be a homeless veteran living in an abandoned house right now that we don’t know about and he could have been there for the past month,” Joel said. “But we’ve built this machine where we can house homeless veterans rapidly.”
The Landrieu administration achieved its goal by bringing together organizations and agencies that previously didn’t collaborate or share data and, by doing so, created a rapid response system that can house veterans within an average of 30 days.
Once a homeless veteran is identified, Unity or one of its partner agencies contacts the VA’s Supportive Services for Veterans Families Program. That program conducts an assessment of the veterans, confirms their military records, determines their mental and physical needs and then provides up to five months of rental assistance to get them off the streets.
During that time, the city and its coalition of homeless advocacy groups looks for more permanent rental assistance that often comes in the form of housing vouchers through the VA, state or HANO.
The city further enhanced these efforts by recruiting 150 active and former members of the military to join its outreach team as it conducts periodic sweeps at night searching for homeless veterans.
“We’ve found you can’t overestimate the power of brothers and sisters in arms reaching out to these folks on the streets,” Joel said.
The Landrieu administration also provided $1.2 million in funding to help renovate the Sacred Heart convent and school buildings at 3222 Canal St., which have been vacant since Hurricane Katrina, into a 109-unit apartment complex.
The $7.6 million project spearheaded by Unity, which owns the property, will provide 55 units for chronically homeless people, giving veterans priority, and 54 units for low-income families. Catholic Charities and the VA will provide supportive services, including case management, life skills, job training and mental health care.
There are 22 formerly homeless veterans living in the facility with construction on the remaining apartments expected to be completed in a month.
“For veterans to spend their later years homeless and disabled, reduced to foraging for food and having to use the sidewalk as their pillow, is shocking,” said Martha Kegel, executive director of Unity. “All of us working on this challenge were grateful to be able to finally right a terrible wrong by bringing them home.”
Merlin Verrett and his wife Vanessa, moved into a one-bedroom unit in the Sacred Heart Apartments the day after Christmas after spending the previous nine years on the streets.
Verrett, 62, who served in the military from ’72 to ’76, said they lost their eastern New Orleans home during the flooding following Katrina and, being on a fixed-income with both suffering from bipolar disease, they were unable to get back on their feet and find a stable place to live.
Sitting on a couch next to the woman he’s been married to for 42 years, Verrett is unable to hold back his tears when describing the events he’s endured over the past decade.
He lost his home and was forced to live on the streets where he bounced from shelter to shelter, from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and Houston and back again. Verrett said he was robbed at gunpoint and lost a friend, a fellow homeless veteran, whose body was found in an abandoned house. He struggled with emotional and mental problems that became so severe he attempted suicide 18 times.
It wasn’t until an outreach worker with Volunteers of America offered him assistance after finding him in Duncan Plaza near City Hall last year that Verrett finally allowed hope to creep back into his life.
“To be a veteran and serve your country and to be out there on the streets in New Orleans after the storm was very hard. But God is good. He brought me here,” Verrett said of his new home at Sacred Heart. “I’m comfortable and I’m stress free now. I got people around me that care.”
Tags: Veterans News
