Chairman Filner, Representative Buyer, and Members of the Committee: on behalf of the hundreds of homeless veterans served every year by United Veterans of America, I am honored by your invitation to be here today testifying on the subject of homelessness among veterans of U.S. military service.   

I have the privilege of serving as President and CEO of United Veterans of America, Inc., doing business as Soldier On.  Based in Leeds, Massachusetts, with facilities serving homeless veterans in Pittsfield and Leeds, Soldier On serves upwards of 250 veterans every day.  Our program is based on a continuum of care, ranging from the treatment of trauma and mental health issues to substance abuse counseling, shelter, food and other necessities, job training, and permanent housing.  Our partners include the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Department of Labor, HUD, and many state and local agencies.  Shelter, treatment, and hope are our cornerstones.

Soldier On hosts one hundred and forty-five men and women in transitional living on site at the VA Medical Center campus in the Leeds section of Northampton, Massachusetts.  Soldier On rents from the VA a few of the old staff “cottages”  where we have created appropriate housing for women veterans and for frail, elderly male veterans.  We pay HUD’s fair market rent to the VA for the privilege of housing these men and women.  Sixty more vets live in transitional housing at our Berkshire Veterans Residence in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which opened in September, 2004.  Ten new studio apartments, funded through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, provide permanent housing for homeless veterans with a disability at the Pittsfield site. 

Soldier On serves veterans primarily from the northeast United States.  A few are referred to us from across the country.  The average age of our population is 54, but the mean age is trending younger as we see more veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Approximately eighty-eight percent of our vets suffer mental health and/or substance abuse issues.  Some ten percent are elderly, at age 65 or older.  Five percent of our vets are women.  More than twenty-five percent of our vets have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); twenty-eight percent are on parole or probation; forty-two percent of Soldier On’s vets are minority. 

I could go on, but I would invite you to take a look at our web site at www.wesoldieron.org  to learn more about our program.  I am supported by a dedicated staff and a committed board of directors, and I enjoy a strong, collaborative relationship with our VA Medical Center and with VA Headquarters here in Washington. 

Currently we are in the pre-development stage of a 39 unit limited equity cooperative, to be built on our site in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.  The development will be owned cooperatively and managed by formerly homeless veterans.  These apartments will meet the highest standards of “green” building, incorporating energy efficiency, renewable energy, and alternative fuels.  This housing will be sustainable in perpetuity for low income veterans.  Additionally, with reasonable support from the federal government, we can dedicate a portion of each veteran’s rent to an Individual Development Account (IDA), thus enabling formerly homeless veterans to realize the American dream of home ownership and building wealth through equity.  This changes the end of the story for homeless veterans of U.S. military service.

I mentioned changing the end of the story for homeless veterans, and I’d like to go back to that.  Typically, the veterans in our care, both men and women, cycle from the streets to shelter, back to the old neighborhood and, ultimately, back to shelter.  Along the way, these men and women lose everything.  It’s hard to imagine but, typically, every contact with family and community has been lost.  Jobs, houses, family ties, self-respect, sobriety, mental health, personal hygiene – all gone.  Dignity – gone.  At Soldier On our vets come to see each other as their community.  Only by creating permanent, affordable housing for veterans can we change that pattern.  By creating permanent, affordable housing opportunities, whether it’s rental, cooperative, or home ownership, and by bringing comprehensive support services to the veterans in this housing, we can change the end of that story once and for all.  In the long run, permanent supportive housing is less expensive than shelter.  And, finally, our veterans deserve better than what we’re doing today.

Why is all this necessary?  How is it that nearly one hundred fifty thousand veterans of U.S military service are homeless on any given night?  How is it that so many men and women who have worn the uniform can end up on the streets of America’s cities and towns?  Lately, we have seen somewhat of a downturn in those numbers, which leads us to believe that our efforts have been successful to some degree.  But, sometime soon, we hope, the GIs serving bravely today in Iraq and Afghanistan will return home, and we know that the rate of homelessness among veterans will increase.  What are we doing to get ready for our returning GIs?  Soldier On’s 39 units in Pittsfield, Massachusetts will be occupied fully the day we cut the ribbon.  What is our plan? 

Last fall the National Alliance to End Homelessness released a comprehensive report on the status of homeless veterans.  I know you’ve all received that report, and I commend it to you.  You will read about poverty and unemployment among veterans.  You will read about veterans with disabilities who are further burdened by severe housing costs, especially among veterans who are renters.  And, sadly, you will read about veterans who fall into more than one of these high risk categories.  Factor in such variables as substance abuse, mental illness, and arrest or incarceration history, and the picture is bleak, indeed.  But the situation is not hopeless.  Just as we, as a country, have been able to marshal resources to take the battle to terrorists abroad, so can we mobilize to meet the needs of those who, in the words of Lincoln, “shall have born the battle.”  Last week The Boston Globe reported the story of a disabled OIF veteran whose wife has had to quit her job a number of times as they have moved around to be near a VA Medical Center.  She is saving the system a lot of money by taking care of her husband at home, but the family is suffering.  The child has been moved from school to school, the wife – a flight attendant – has devoted herself to her husband, whose brain injury makes him difficult to live with, and the family now is impoverished.  What kind of future do they have?  Don’t that veteran and his family deserve our help?  What’s wrong with us?  Must they become homeless before we help them? 

The answer to the homelessness issue is not complicated.  This congress, in this year’s budget, funded the HUD VASH rental assistance program.  In your wisdom, you eliminated much of HUD’s red tape, thus providing developers of housing for veterans with more project-based rental subsidies.  In the coming years we will need more HUD VASH subsidies, and many of them will be used as project-based subsidies as we develop new units.  HUD VASH should be allowed to be used as Homeownership Section 8 subsidies, as well as for limited equity cooperative developments, such as the project we are developing in Pittsfield.  The beauty of HUD VASH is, of course, that VA case managers accompany the subsidy, improving the veteran’s chances of a successful tenancy. 

But we’ll need more help.  In general, to the best of my knowledge, the federal government has no program that supports exclusively the creation of permanent, affordable housing for veterans.  I realize that this is a policy decision for the consideration of the entire Congress and the Administration.  If we truly are to be successful, we must embark on a production program to create new units of safe, decent, affordable housing for veterans – not only for individual veterans, but for veterans with families as well.  Recently, Soldier On has developed a partnership with the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, which is based here in Washington, D.C.  The Housing Investment Trust is eager to work with us to develop housing for veterans; beginning in Massachusetts, and working with MassHousing, our state’s housing finance agency, we will create home ownership opportunities for veterans, as well as more limited equity cooperative apartments.  And, although the Housing Investment Trust has considerable human and financial resources to invest, we will need an equity partner in that enterprise.  The most appropriate equity partner is the very nation that our veterans have served.  Fortunately, a precedent exists that provides a model for that equity partnership.  Now, federal earmarks get a bad rap, and some of that might be deserved.  But our representative in this body, Congressman John Olver of the First Massachusetts Congressional District, has secured for us two direct federal appropriations, without which our project in Pittsfield would not be feasible.  We would ask that Congress create programs that provide long-term, soft deferred loans, along the lines of the federal HOME program that would work as equity and reduce the debt load of these projects – a HUD-VA-HOME program, if you will.  The simple fact is that, by providing homeownership opportunities, case management, and affordable rental housing, we could eliminate most of the VA’s shelter programs.  And we know that an investment in permanent housing, whether home ownership or rental, is a better investment than spending money year after year on shelter programs.  We need housing first.

Back home, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, under both Governor Romney and Governor Patrick, is stepping up to the plate with state money and a willingness to support the project with federal resources, such as project-based Section 8 subsidies, VASH subsidies, and HOME funds.  At this point, however, federal participation has been limited to a relatively small direct appropriation from HUD, procured through the good offices of Congressmen John Olver and Richard Neal.  For Soldier On to complete this project with a reasonable, minimal debt load, the federal government must be more of a partner with us.

The beauty of the project we’re building in Pittsfield is that it is replicable.  With a little help from the banks and state and federal government, this type of housing can be adapted for any part of the country.  We are working now with the VA Medical Center in Leeds, Massachusetts to create another limited equity cooperative on the grounds of the Medical Center.  Across the country, VA Medical Center campuses typically enjoy lots of unused green space.  A project like ours could be built on the grounds of any VA Medical Center.  Working with the VA, non-profit developers could lease the land at a nominal rate, while taking the entire responsibility for building and operating the permanent housing on that land.  No additional expense would accrue to the VA, and the VA Medical Center would have a new out-patient population on its doorstep.  But the best reason for doing this is that it serves veterans.  And that’s what we’re talking about today – serving veterans. 

I would add, parenthetically, that, although not the purview of this committee, I would ask Congress to amend the Fair Housing Act to include veterans of U.S. military service as a protected class.  I mention this because, if we are successful in creating permanent housing for veterans, we run the real risk of violating Fair Housing laws by giving veterans priority - again, a Catch-22 situation which I’m sure is unintentional, and which I’m sure can be fixed.  Other technical fixes are within our grasp as well.  For instance, the VA’s payment system is a nightmare.  Good people in this Congress, working with good people at the VA, passed legislation to change the payment system last year, but that legislation never made it to a final bill.   If I go out and raise money to improve service to homeless veterans, the VA is forced to reduce as result of OMB Circulars its payments to us.  We would like to see the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs be allowed to create a system of payments for approved providers of services that allows reasonable funding to insure appropriate care and services are provided.  The Secretary should be allowed to consider the higher costs of doing business in certain geographical areas.  If I can get donations to cover the high cost of heating our buildings in western Massachusetts, the Secretary of the VA should not be forced to penalize me for that initiative.  Services for homeless veterans within a community are most effective when a recipient can augment payments from the VA with funds from any source, including federal, state, local, and private sources.

Soon, we hope, we will be welcoming home the veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Each Veteran deserves a system of care that is anchored in safe, affordable permanent housing that he or she can own.