Forty new housing vouchers will help qualifying homeless veterans get into a new apartment complex that’s planned for the edge of the Veterans Administration campus on East Fourth Plain Boulevard. As part of the package, residents will also get easy access to nearby VA case management and services.
The 69-unit project, to be called Freedom’s Path, will be dedicated entirely to homeless and low-income veterans. A spokesman for the developer, a private company based in Florida, has said the guarantee of federal housing vouchers would be a significant step toward financial viability. Planners with the city of Vancouver are still reviewing the proposal, which aims to squeeze into an already tight parking lot at the entranceway to the VA campus.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., announced on Wednesday that 11 state housing authorities will receive 335 new housing vouchers for homeless veterans from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It’s part of a nationwide addition of over $62 million in rental assistance and case management for veterans: $57 million for more than 8,000 portable vouchers that tenants can use on the private rental market, and $5 million for 730 vouchers that belong to specific properties.
Vancouver’s 40 new vouchers will be entirely dedicated to the Freedom’s Path building, according to Sasha Nichelson, the director of voucher programs for the Vancouver Housing Authority. They won’t be time-limited in any way, Nichelson said.
It will be the Veterans Administration, not VHA, that takes applications and determines eligibility for residence at Freedom’s Path according to its Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program, Nichelson said. VHA will only verify income and disqualify people who have lifetime sex-offender status.
The building will subscribe to a philosophy called Housing First, which aims to stabilize people’s lives through housing before asking them to start taking other steps, such as getting clean and sober. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, eligible veterans likely will have “medical, mental health and/or substance use disorders.”
Another pending Housing First proposal, a VHA project called Lincoln Place, aims to put a 30-unit building for chronically homeless people across the street from Share House on the west side of Vancouver.
Shrinking problem
These 40 vouchers will bring the total number administered by VHA and dedicated to veterans up to 170, Nichelson said. Other housing authorities in the state that gained large numbers of vouchers include King County with 92 and Seattle with 69. Longview got five.
Freedom’s Path will be one of 38 housing projects developed at veterans facilities around the nation in a concentrated effort by the VA, begun in 2011, to end veteran homelessness. The government announced in August that veteran homelessness has dropped 33 percent since 2010. There are just under 50,000 homeless veterans in America right now; approximately 74,000 have been served by this veterans supportive housing program that’s championed by Murray.
Forty vouchers ought to make a huge dent in veteran homelessness here in Clark County, if the latest numbers compiled by the Council for the Homeless are any indication. In January, a single-day census of the homeless in Clark County found a total of 50 homeless veterans here: 47 men and three women.
A 2012 report on local poverty by Clark County’s Department of Community Services found that veterans only make up a small percentage of those living below the poverty line; generally speaking, it found, veterans have higher incomes than the general population.
But it’s also true that veterans have historically accounted for a huge subset of the nation’s homeless population — as much as one-quarter at the height of the problem, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.
“These vouchers are a huge boost in the effort to end homelessness among veterans in our state,” Murray said. “The HUD-VASH program provides critical support to these veterans and is a key reason why we are making real progress toward the goal of finally ending veteran homelessness.”
