A “5 year plan”?
So Veteran’s Day has come and gone; there’s so much veterans hype the last couple of years I think I’m becoming numb to it. We seem to go through cycles of ignoring veterans and lionizing them.
Most veterans themselves don’t give much thought to their military service; just another chapter in a long life. However, there is a core of (mostly) men for whom veteran status is the primary identity they present to themselves and everyone else on an daily basis. And there is a segment of the general population who buy into an idealized notion of what a veteran is and what being a veteran means. In the Navy, folks who bought into this kind of foolishness were accused of having “smoke blown up their ass”. I guess we’re all guilty of that to a certain extent. So the VA says it’s time to put up or shut up.
Now homeless vets are a hot item and the secretary of veterans affairs has announced a five-year plan to end homelessness among veterans. Those of us who work with the homeless think this is a worthy goal, but from our experience with a local ten-year plan it seems a bit ambitious. To be certain, it is possible to do this. You count and register all the homeless veterans, you put them into apartments with no strings attached, provide wrap-around case management services, and the problem is solved, right?
We know this “housing first” model works. We know that it costs almost 3 times as much to leave a homeless person on the street and at the mercy of social service agencies and the legal system for a year than it does to put them into an apartment for a year. The City of Denver has data that overwhelmingly supports this. Fine. The fiscal side of the equation makes sense, but what about the chronically homeless veterans who do not wish to be helped, do not wish to contribute to this worthy social goal. Don’t believe there are homeless folks who don’t want to be “helped”? Here in Denver we are personally acquainted with 800-900 homeless veterans who have no intention of “coming in from the cold” under any circumstances. At this point it becomes a moral issue. Do we say: well, it’s a choice-based society so they made their choice; or do we say: these are folks who served their country, there’s got to be something we can do.
I don’t know and I’m supposed to.