Orlando VA reports drastic drop in vet homelessness

When Robert Bacon got out of the Army in 1978, he never thought he’d have much use for the VA.

“Back then it was very, very different. It was beyond miserable,” he said. “I couldn’t get any help at all.”

But four decades later — after a job layoff, a difficult divorce, heart surgery and homelessness — the 61-year-old Winter Park veteran credits the Department of Veterans Affairs with helping to save his life. For one thing, VA outreach workers got him off the streets and into his own apartment.

Bacon is among more than 1,400

formerly homeless veterans now housed in Orange, Seminole, Lake, Osceola, Volusia and Brevard counties — the product of an intense campaign that has cut veteran homelessness in Central Florida by nearly 74 percent since 2010.

In just the past year, according to a newly released report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, veteran homelessness in Orange, Osceola and Seminole alone dropped 17 percent.

“We do get excited when we see these wins,” said Ken Mueller, homeless program manager at the Orlando VA Medical Center. “But we always want to do better. I mean, we really don’t want to see any veterans homeless.”

The federal government counts homelessness through a yearly census it orchestrates on a single night each January. This year, according to the census, there were at least 180 veterans still homeless in Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties — a number that both the VA and the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness would like to get as close to zero as possible.

Nationally, the yearly count found that some 38,000 veterans were homeless on a single night in January — a 5.4 percent decrease since January 2017 and a nearly 50 percent decline since January 2010, when then-President Barack Obama announced the nation’s first-ever strategy to prevent and end veteran homelessness.

“Too many of those who once wore our nation's uniform now sleep in our nation’s streets,” Obama said at the time.

Since then, 64 communities in three states have been certified by the VA as having “effectively ended” veteran homelessness. Central Florida was not among them, although Shelley Lauten, the homeless commission’s CEO, said she expects the region to make the list within the next year.

Many of those still out on

the streets are Vietnam-era soldiers with a distrust of the VA, officials said. And after long periods of homelessness, many who may have been sober or mentally healthy in the beginning are no longer so.

“When you get them into housing, you tend to see them stabilize,” Mueller said. “Once you’re not having to worry about where you’re sleeping, can you keep dry, are you getting a meal soon, will someone steal your stuff — once those core needs are taken care of you have time to rest, to heal, to work on other issues.”

One reason behind the success of the campaign, Lauten said, is the VA’s “housing first” approach — getting veterans into apartments as quickly as possible without requiring that they first stop drinking or get a job, as civilian programs once required.

But finding available housing in Central Florida is becoming increasingly difficult, Mueller said, even though veterans are typically given top priority among housing officials.

“We’re one of the tougher housing markets in the country,” he said. “A lot of times we’ll have a veteran holding a voucher, but to actually get them into housing has become harder and harder … We’re always pounding the pavement to look for new landlords.”

For Bacon, the wait for VA housing took about a year after he applied in March 2014, though he spent much of the wait in a shelter or hospitalized. Now he’s in a one-room apartment in a quiet, “very nice” complex in Winter Park and spends his days working at a Goodwill Industries jobplacement center. He knows there are other veterans out there who are still skeptical of the VA.

“I would tell them, ‘Pack away your pride,’” he said. “‘Things are much better now. And you’ve earned it.’”

Veterans who are homeless or at imminent risk of becoming homeless can call 1-877-4AID-VET for help.