San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
KEEPING PROMISE TO HOUSE VETERANS
S.F. apartments for formerly homeless help restore effort that stalled under Trump
Margie Talavera was a Navy corpsman at the tail end of the Vietnam War. Like many veterans of many wars, she doesn’t enjoy talking about what she experienced, the wounded sailors she patched up — or the alcohol addiction that pursued her into civilian life.
In the decades since her six-year hitch ended in 1979, Talavera became a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey clown, a postal carrier and more. But the booze and the trauma it no longer masked pitched her into occasional periods of couch surfing until finally, a few years ago, she became someone she fervently did not want to be: a person without a home in San Francisco.
That’s when that time in the Navy as a healing corpsman paid off, and in a way, reached through the years to heal her.
In late 2020, Talavera became one of the first people to move into the Edwin M. Lee Apartments, a state-of-the-art supportive housing complex for 62 formerly homeless veterans, built near Oracle Park, the San Francisco Giants stadium in Mission Bay.
“I have to pinch myself sometimes to believe I actually live here,” said Talavera, 67, who shares her roomy onebedroom apartment with her 10-year-old Scottish terrier,
Little Bear. “The first thing I saw when I walked in here was the brand-new bathroom, and nobody had ever used it. After living in my car and on couches of friends and family ...”
She stopped, eyes wide, unable to speak for a moment. “It’s beautiful.”
The Edwin M. Lee Apartments, fully opened in 2021, are a showpiece of how to reduce homelessness through permanent supportive housing, in this case by blending conscious architectural design with a citywide-best ratio of one case manager for every 12 residents.
They’re everything the city is shooting for in supportive housing, in contrast to the troubled century-old residential hotels exposed by The Chronicle this year as substandard.
But the complex also represents an effort to jump-start a very specific promise to the nation’s military veterans, one that stalled during the four-year term of former President Donald Trump.
‘A commitment to end veterans homelessness’
Veteran homelessness had declined by 47% from 2010 to 2016 as the federal government made the extra health and housing resources available through the Department of Veterans Affairs to quickly move veterans into supportive housing geared for them. That momentum halted after Trump’s election as his national homelessness and welfare officials reduced emphasis on the issue in funding and policy decisions, leaving the numbers flat as he left office.
However, during the first two years of the Biden administration, the nation saw an 11% reduction in the number of homeless veterans, according to figures released this month by the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. That brings the one-night national total of unhoused veterans to 33,136 — 55% fewer than the 2010 total of 74,087.
Until the latest national figures came out, San Francisco had been roughly keeping pace with the nation, cutting its number of homeless veterans by 45% from 2010 to 2019. But while the rest of the nation improved, the city’s numbers stayed flat from 2019 to 2022 — from 608 homeless vets to 605 — even as the overall homeless one-night count fell 3.5% to 7,754.
But program managers with the city’s coordinated entry system for homeless residents say the needle may be moving in the right direction again. Ten months after the last official survey was conducted in January, program managers say the city’s coordinated entry system that routes homeless people into services is indicating that the current nightly number of unhoused veterans appears to have dropped to around 400.
Experts acknowledge that one-night Point-In-Time counts, normally taken every two years but delayed by the pandemic, are imprecise at best. And the daily calculations conducted by the coordinated entry system could change. But together they seem to reflect progress.
Federal homelessness officials and national experts credited the national drop to the renewed focus, outlined in a multiagency agenda released in 2021, and new funding including $481 million for VA homelessness programs in the American Rescue Plan.
“I’m seeing movement nationally, and I’m seeing movement in San Francisco,” said Ann Oliva, one of the architects of former President Barack Obama’s national veterans homelessness program. “Our progress on ending veterans homelessness is the proof point for ending all homelessness.”
Oliva is now executive director of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. While working with the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Obama, she and Dr. Josh Bamberger, UCSF clinical and family medicine professor, helped develop the 2010 national strategy that led to the reduction in the unhoused veterans’ population.
The Biden administration is asking Congress for 200,000
After living in my car and on couches of friends and family ... It’s beautiful.”
Margie Talavera, formerly homeless Navy veteran who found supportive housing in the Edwin M. Lee Apartments
new housing vouchers to be used nationally, an unspecified number of which could be used for veterans. Along with an increase in grants coming to the city, local vet program managers see progress ahead.
“The Trump administration really put the kibosh on housing vouchers for veterans — and focus on vets in general — but we’ve been encouraged,” said Michael Blecker, executive director of Swords to Plowshares — which with the Chinatown Community Development Center developed and operates the Lee apartments. “I think we can make progress.”
Another veterans housing complex of 105 units is expected to open on Treasure Island in February, and Swords to Plowshares — the city’s main homeless veterans aid nonprofit — anticipates getting a $4.5 million grant from the state Department of Veterans Affairs in January to help house vets.
Swords has already gotten several million more dollars for homeless vets programs and housing this year, including $1.2 million in federal and city funds to expand its drop-in center, along with nearly $1 million in U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs funding for suicide prevention among the same population.
The city Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing intends to focus on unhoused vets with the most acute difficulties.
“San Francisco made a commitment to end veterans homelessness, and of course there are more challenges than just supplying a roof,” Mayor London Breed said. “The services are very important, too, so I’m looking forward to any new resources we get. I see movement in the right direction.”
The most important beneficiaries of any progress, of course, are the ones who get roofs.
“I don’t know where I’d be if not for this place,” said 72-yearold Randall Larson, who turned his living room into a studio where he makes paintings of people and landscapes that are popular in the complex. A former Army sergeant partially paralyzed in a traffic accident years ago, he struggled with evictions when landlords converted their buildings, time in the street and interim housing before moving to the Ed Lee complex.
“I finally feel like I’m really home,” he said.
‘A real example of how to do it right’
The apartments he lives in are named after the late Mayor Ed Lee, who pushed hard to reduce veterans’ homelessness before he died of a heart attack in 2017.
One month before he died, Lee oversaw the opening of a 70-unit supportive housing complex for veterans on Minna Street, and said he hoped someday to bring the number of chronically homeless vets living outside down to a functional zero, meaning none would stay on the streets for more than 90 days before being sheltered or housed.
That hasn’t happened, though state-of-the-art facilities like the Lee apartments can make a big difference, said Keith Boylan, deputy secretary for veterans services at the California Department of Veterans Affairs, which helped fund the complex’s construction.
The 62 units are layered into a five-story, U-shaped building with a garden in the middle. The neighborhood is serene, and the large meeting rooms include a computer lab, counseling offices, a library and a kitchen for big gatherings. The vets get free meals six days a week, frequent movie gatherings, art workshops, music appreciation meetings and the like.
Three of the offices on the ground floor are for case managers — which at one for every 12 residents is double the city’s goal for supportive housing complexes. One of those offices is staffed through the VA, illustrating how extra federal resources can make a complex like the Lee apartments better than usual.
“The Ed Lee Apartments is a great program, a real example of how to do it right,” Boylan said.
Another aspect that sets the complex apart is the 57 apartments across the inner courtyard occupied by low-income families. The concept of situating veterans alongside families is unique in the region.
“There’s this myth that housing is some kind of magic, that you put someone in a unit and all their problems are solved,” said Malcolm Yeung, executive director of the Chinatown CDC. “It’s not true.
“It’s creating the right environment and support and so many other things that make the difference,” he said. “And that’s what’s happening with these apartments.”
Several vets said that, after years of struggle, they appreciate the laughter of children and the proximity of families.
Navy vet Mark Shaffer, 62, said that’s a big factor in helping him overcome much of the trauma from several years of homelessness — and leftover stress from his 1979-83 duty time on ammunition ships that too often felt like floating bombs.
“Look, I never got married or had children, but I got to witness a newborn daughter coming into the world here a little while ago,” he said, eyes misting. “I love that, love being around all these beautiful families.”
And for their part, the families seem to like having ex-military around — and formerly homeless ex-military at that. It assuages bad feelings for some, especially children, who used to live in difficult neighborhoods layered with encampments.
“I got scared at the last place we lived at, in the Tenderloin,” Emily Ekcab, 10, said as she grabbed a handful of candy from a bowl at a Halloween party for the families and vets. “There were a lot of homeless people outside our door and the workers in the building were kind of mean to us. But here, I feel protected because so many of these people used to be soldiers.”
Right then, Army vet Lawrence Zenk, 70, walked past and gave her a thumbs up. Emily laughed and gave a thumbs up in return.
“At first I was against the idea of moving into a place where I was living around a bunch of kids, but I’ll tell you — these kids are really well behaved,” Zenk said. “This is the best place in the country, the way I see it. The kids and the family folks are just nice to be around.”
Yeung said he was also skeptical about the concept of combining the two populations.
“This one was a bit of an experiment,” he said. “It sounded crazy to me at first, but it’s been anything but that.”
Letting the families and vets have their own spaces, but able to meet in the middle — “that builds a new community in a setting that transmits calm,” he said. “That’s not a small thing.”
It certainly hasn’t been a small thing for Talavera, who has adorned her apartment with pictures of landscapes and family. Empowered by her new stability, she wrote a one-act pantomime play about overcoming challenges, and after recently workshopping it with theater friends in the Lee complex’s main hall, she’s booked to perform it at the Marsh theater in December.
“I come into a warm, secure home now,” she said quietly. “I feel we all have the right to be safe, but maybe there is a little more to that when you’re a veteran. When you sign that piece of paper to enlist, it means, ‘I will die right now if I have to.’ So now I feel like maybe I’m safe here because I made it safe for everyone else in that time I served.”