What does this mean?

Hundreds of homeless camp outside New Orleans City Hall, urge mayor to offer more housing
November 16, 2007 5:49 PM EST
NEW ORLEANS - The homeless of New Orleans have left the city's shelters and gutted buildings to set up camp on the mayor's doorstep.

About 250 homeless people have erected smal makeshift tents - the only affordable housing they say they could find since Hurricane Katrina - and created a colony of despair in a grassy plaza outside City Hall.

Mayor Ray Nagin's second-floor office faces the camp, and its residents rally almost daily with the chant: "Hey, Ray! How about a house today!"

Nagin has not met with the group, but he said in a statement that the city "is working with numerous agencies to address the homelessness" that worsened after the hurricane.

The mayor said many of the homeless in Duncan Plaza have refused temporary shelter and rental assistance, and he is concerned about unsanitary conditions and safety.

Julius Nelson, 32, leader of a group called Homeless Pride that formed in the plaza, said shelters are overflowing and rental assistance is useless in a city where the storm destroyed most of the inexpensive apartments. He feared Nagin's statement meant the mayor would break up the camp.

"You've got people all over New Orleans sleeping in abandoned buildings, in abandoned cars, everywhere," Nelson said. "You don't have any affordable housing. People don't even go to the crowded shelters. They come straight here."

New Orleans has 12,000 homeless people, up from 6,300 before Katrina, according to UNITY of Greater New Orleans, a group that helps the homeless.

Nagin said his office of public advocacy has provided food, clothing and shelter to more than 1,000 people this year. On Thursday, he urged state officials to release rental subsidies that UNITY plans to distribute at the plaza.

Still, the encampment has grown from a half-dozen tents three months ago to more than 40 pitched on two grassy knolls. A gazebo in the plaza center is a pen for sleeping bags, cardboard and newspapers on which more homeless people sleep.

Some call it a safe haven because National Guard humvees begin their patrols from a Holiday Inn across the street. But a 39-year-old homeless man died in his tent Nov. 8 after he was beaten elsewhere the previous night and wandered back, authorities said.

"Bad things happen out here," said a 47-year-old woman who asked to be identified only as Donna. A gold ribbon tied to jesters bells hung on her tent zipper not for decoration, she said, but as an alarm after a stranger tried to enter one night.

The camp has become so hard to ignore that some observers believe it will force the mayor to take action on housing, an issue many critics say he has failed to address.

"His hand is being forced," said Sam Jackson, a member of the group Concerned Compassionate Community, one of several that brings food to the park. "The mayor can work to get these people a place to stay. Or, he could run them all out. But isn't that harsh?"

Of the 200,000 homes the hurricane destroyed, 41,000 were affordable rental units, according to estimates by the nonprofit group PolicyLink. Since the storm, fair-market rent for an efficiency apartment has risen from $463 (euro316) to $764 (euro521).

The storm also destroyed homeless shelters, reducing the number of beds from 832 to 232, according to UNITY.

About a third of the people in the plaza work at least part-time, but they cannot find affordable housing, UNITY said.

Katherine Scott, who stocks the camping section of a nearby Wal-Mart, said she has seen tents purchased one-by-one by people who look down on their luck.

"They've been buying them up faster than we can stock them, the sleeping bags, too. That just makes you cry," she said.

A church near the plaza offers laundry and showers to the homeless. Several groups bring regular meals. A few people living in the plaza give haircuts.

Those living in the plaza relieve themselves at fast-food restaurants, or in a row of bushes on the far end of the grounds, the smell wafting through the compound on a breezy day.

As night began to fall on the camp, Donna watched a group of people open beer cans after a day in which they did not leave the grounds.

"Around this time people start drinking. They've been fed. They don't have a reason to go out and work," she said. "But where else do they have to go?"

The few, proud, and the brave on the streets

Every morning I watch veterans board my bus and head up the hill to where both my work place and the veteran’s hospital are located. There is an American flag outside the hospital and I can't help but wonder if they ever question if it was all worth it. If the country that promised to take care of them on and off the field, is living up to its promise now that the years have gone by and the hospital visits are still regular. I don't mean to speak about things that I don't understand - and hear me - I don't understand much of it all - serving in the military, war, patriotism....but from the deepest depth of my heart I hope and pray that these folks, the veterans, are getting the best possible care post- war, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korean ... because, they - like any other human - deserves that dignity and that right.

Veterans Make Up 1 in 4 Homeless in US
November 07, 2007 7:14 PM EST
WASHINGTON - Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.

The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans from the current wars and says 400 of them have participated in its programs specifically targeting homelessness.

The Alliance to End Homelessness, a public education nonprofit, based the findings of its report on numbers from Veterans Affairs and the Census Bureau. 2005 data estimated that 194,254 homeless people out of 744,313 on any given night were veterans.

In comparison, the VA says that 20 years ago, the estimated number of veterans who were homeless on any given night was 250,000.

Some advocates say such an early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future. It took roughly a decade for the lives of Vietnam veterans to unravel to the point that they started showing up among the homeless. Advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly vulnerable.

"We're going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental health toll from this war is enormous," said Daniel Tooth, director of veterans affairs for Lancaster County, Pa.

While services to homeless veterans have improved in the past 20 years, advocates say more financial resources still are needed. With the spotlight on the plight of Iraq veterans, they hope more will be done to prevent homelessness and provide affordable housing to the younger veterans while there's a window of opportunity.

"When the Vietnam War ended, that was part of the problem. The war was over, it was off TV, nobody wanted to hear about it," said John Keaveney, a Vietnam veteran and a founder of New Directions in Los Angeles, which provides substance abuse help, job training and shelter to veterans.

"I think they'll be forgotten," Keaveney said of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. "People get tired of it. It's not glitzy that these are young, honorable, patriotic Americans. They'll just be veterans, and that happens after every war."

Keaveney said it's difficult for his group to persuade some homeless Iraq veterans to stay for treatment and help because they don't relate to the older veterans. Those who stayed have had success - one is now a stock broker and another is applying to be a police officer, he said.

"They see guys that are their father's age and they don't understand, they don't know, that in a couple of years they'll be looking like them," he said.

After being discharged from the military, Jason Kelley, 23, of Tomahawk, Wis., who served in Iraq with the Wisconsin National Guard, took a bus to Los Angeles looking for better job prospects and a new life.

Kelley said he couldn't find a job because he didn't have an apartment, and he couldn't get an apartment because he didn't have a job. He stayed in a $300-a-week motel until his money ran out, then moved into a shelter run by the group U.S. VETS in Inglewood, Calif. He's since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, he said.

"The only training I have is infantry training and there's not really a need for that in the civilian world," Kelley said in a phone interview. He has enrolled in college and hopes to move out of the shelter soon.

The Iraq vets seeking help with homelessness are more likely to be women, less likely to have substance abuse problems, but more likely to have mental illness - mostly related to post-traumatic stress, said Pete Dougherty, director of homeless veterans programs at the VA.

Overall, 45 percent of participants in the VA's homeless programs have a diagnosable mental illness and more than three out of four have a substance abuse problem, while 35 percent have both, Dougherty said.

Historically, a number of fighters in U.S. wars have become homeless. In the post-Civil War era, homeless veterans sang old Army songs to dramatize their need for work and became known as "tramps," which had meant to march into war, said Todd DePastino, a historian at Penn State University's Beaver campus who wrote a book on the history of homelessness.

After World War I, thousands of veterans - many of them homeless - camped in the nation's capital seeking bonus money. Their camps were destroyed by the government, creating a public relations disaster for President Herbert Hoover.

The end of the Vietnam War coincided with a time of economic restructuring, and many of the same people who fought in Vietnam were also those most affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs, DePastino said.

Their entrance to the streets was traumatic and, as they aged, their problems became more chronic, recalled Sister Mary Scullion, who has worked with the homeless for 30 years and co-founded of the group Project H.O.M.E. in Philadelphia.

"It takes more to address the needs because they are multiple needs that have been unattended," Scullion said. "Life on the street is brutal and I know many, many homeless veterans who have died from Vietnam."

The VA started targeting homelessness in 1987, 12 years after the fall of Saigon. Today, the VA has, either on its own or through partnerships, more than 15,000 residential rehabilitative, transitional and permanent beds for homeless veterans nationwide. It spends about $265 million annually on homeless-specific programs and about $1.5 billion for all health care costs for homeless veterans.

Because of these types of programs and because two years of free medical care is being offered to all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, Dougherty said they hope many veterans from recent wars who are in need can be identified early.

"Clearly, I don't think that's going to totally solve the problem, but I also don't think we're simply going to wait for 10 years until they show up," Dougherty said. "We're out there now trying to get everybody we can to get those kinds of services today, so we avoid this kind of problem in the future."

In all of 2006, the Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that 495,400 veterans were homeless at some point during the year.

The group recommends that 5,000 housing units be created per year for the next five years dedicated to the chronically homeless that would provide permanent housing linked to veterans' support systems. It also recommends funding an additional 20,000 housing vouchers exclusively for homeless veterans, and creating a program that helps bridge the gap between income and rent.

Following those recommendations would cost billions of dollars, but there is some movement in Congress to increase the amount of money dedicated to homeless veterans programs.

On a recent day in Philadelphia, case managers from Project H.O.M.E. and the VA picked up William Joyce, 60, a homeless Vietnam veteran in a wheelchair who said he'd been sleeping at a bus terminal.

"You're an honorable veteran. You're going to get some services," outreach worker Mark Salvatore told Joyce. "You need to be connected. You don't need to be out here on the streets."

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Associated Press writer Kathy Matheson contributed to this story from Philadelphia.

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On the Net: National Alliance to End Homelessness: http://www.naeh.org/

New Directions: http://www.newdirectionsinc.org/

Project Home: http://www.projecthome.org/

County of Lancaster: http://www.co.lancaster.pa.us/

Veterans Affairs Department: http://www.va.gov/

U.S. Vets: http://usvetsinc.org/