Over the last decade, Los Angeles County housing authorities have received nearly 4,500 rental vouchers to get homeless veterans into permanent housing.<\/p>\n
If all of those vouchers had been put to use, veteran homelessness would be a thing of the past.<\/a> <\/p>\n \u201cThere are certainly enough available vouchers to eliminate veteran homelessness in Los Angeles County,\u201d said Emilio Salas, executive director of the county housing authority.<\/p>\n Instead, chronic failures in a complicated system of referral, leasing and support services have left those housing authorities treading water. About 4,000 vouchers are gathering dust while an estimated 3,400 veterans remain on the county\u2019s streets or in its shelters.<\/a> <\/p>\n The county\u2019s 11 housing agencies that receive vouchers through the federal HUD-VASH program have obtained leases for only 59% of them, a rate 20 percentage points below the national average.<\/a> <\/p>\n Salas and other housing authority officials say they could do much better if the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs would send them more applicants. In a segmented system, the housing authorities manage the leasing but the VA is responsible for identifying qualified veterans and helping them find a home. <\/p>\n \u201cGetting them through that process to me to issue the voucher is where the problem lies,\u201d Salas said.<\/p>\n The chief executive of L.A. city\u2019s housing authority, Lourdes Castro Ramirez, said the agency would need 25 referrals a week, three times what it has historically received, to use its vouchers effectively.<\/p>\n But a Times review of records from the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Development Authority, the two agencies that hold 87% of the vouchers in the county, shows a much more complicated picture. Nearly half the veterans referred to them since 2020 dropped out without obtaining a lease, and the leases secured were offset by almost as many terminations.<\/p>\n \u201cThe process is ridiculous,\u201d said Rob Reynolds, an Iraq war veteran who has spent years assisting veterans at the Department of Veterans Affairs West Los Angeles campus, which is the starting point for many veterans seeking housing.<\/p>\n Reynolds, who helps up to 10 veterans at a time navigate the system, said he sees them fall through the cracks at every step along the way.<\/p>\n After supplying discharge papers and income records to VA case managers to pre-qualify, applicants go through a second vetting with the housing authority and usually have to produce more documents such as bank records and utility bills. That can take weeks, Reynolds said. Then landlords may require more documents before agreeing to a lease. Among a population of veterans who have a high incidence of mental and physical debilities, some get discouraged and drop out of the process. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen there are issues, getting in touch with HACLA is one of the hardest things,\u201d Reynolds said. \u201cThey don\u2019t have phone numbers. They only accept emails because they have such high caseloads. You won\u2019t hear from them for weeks.\u201d <\/p>\n A spokeswoman said HACLA maintains a hotline for voucher holders, including veterans, to get support but that, due to a 2023 policy change, veterans do not currently have phone numbers to directly call their caseworkers. New leadership is reevaluating that policy. <\/p>\n Besides the toll the system takes on veterans, vacancies in apartment units reserved for veterans play havoc with the bottom lines of subsidized buildings that were financed on the basis of guaranteed revenue from vouchers. <\/p>\n Monica Mejia, president and chief executive of the East L.A. Community Corp., said the organization lost $190,000 in revenue while 14 units sat vacant for a year in its 96-unit Sun Valley Senior Apartments.<\/p>\n Matilde Soto Lopez, director of asset management, said one veteran has just moved into a unit that had been vacant since December, but 13 veteran units remain vacant, the longest since last May. <\/p>\n Soto Lopez said she received only two referrals in the last month, and both fell through. One was determined to need more intensive care than the building provides, and the other turned the unit down, a common occurrence, she said.<\/p>\n Filling veteran units in new buildings can be a challenge with even greater financial risk, said Kevin Murray, president and chief executive of the Weingart Center Assn. With $1.5 million in tax credits in jeopardy as it faced a deadline to fill 40 veteran beds in its new 19-story Skid Row tower, <\/a>Weingart had no choice but to convert 10 of those units to non-veteran vouchers, a switch that the VA is reluctant to approve.<\/p>\n Fortunately, the former state senator said, \u201cI was able to get access to a relatively senior person.\u201d<\/p>\n Filling units reserved for veterans is only half the problem. The housing authority records show that for every three units leased, two become vacant. <\/p>\n \u201cAs people come in, we have people dropping off, so we\u2019re not making progress,\u201d Salas acknowledged.<\/p>\n Leases can be terminated for several reasons. In a population with a high incidence of physical and mental illness, mortality is disproportionately high; an LACDA breakdown shows that deaths accounted for 20% of its lease terminations over the last five years. About 7% no longer needed subsidies, and 28% left voluntarily for unexplained reasons. The largest group, 29%, left facing eviction for failing to complete their annual eligibility paperwork \u2014 a presumably avoidable outcome for veterans whose vouchers include case managers provided from the VA.<\/p>\n Some veterans advocates fault insufficient follow-up by VA social workers after a veteran moves in.<\/p>\n \u201cMy impression is that it\u2019s a staffing issue,\u201d said Anthony Allman, executive director of the nonprofit Vets Advocacy<\/a>. \u201cIf the VA had the adequate case management staff they\u2019d be able to make the referrals and more importantly provide the intensive case management to keep veterans in permanent housing.\u201d<\/p>\n Last year, Reynolds helped defuse a crisis when dozens of veterans living on the West Los Angeles campus fell in arrears and received eviction notices. Tenants, many needing wheelchairs or walkers to get around, had to trek across the campus to a nearby bank to get money orders.<\/p>\n After Reynolds raised alarms, an electronic payment system was set up, and the VA replaced the private contractor managing the building. But support services, provided by homeless services agencies contracted to the VA, are still uneven, Reynolds said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a lot more successful when they have somebody advocating for them every step of the way,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Veteran homelessness has been a slippery problem for L.A. officials, going back to former Mayor Eric Garcetti\u2019s 2014 pledge <\/a>to end it within two years. The number, then 6,300 countywide, was down to just under 3,900 by the end of his two terms. Since then it has fluctuated between 3,400 and 3,900.<\/p>\n His successor, Mayor Karen Bass, took on one of the inexplicable bureaucratic obstacles to housing veterans<\/a>. The most severely disabled seeking rooms in new apartments constructed expressly for them on the West L.A. campus were being denied because their disability compensation exceeded income limits required of the subsidized housing.<\/p>\n Joining members of Congress and even a federal judge who took up the cause, Bass led a national campaign of mayors successfully lobbying the Biden administration to change the policy so that disability compensation would not be counted as income.<\/p>\n In January, Bass sought to address another obstacle \u2014 landlords\u2019 resistance to take disabled veterans as tenants \u2014 announcing a landlord recruitment drive in cooperation with the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles. <\/p>\n