Veterans Housing

American Village of Hope Housing Division will provide transitional housing for the disabled veterans, women veterans, special need veterans, and homeless veterans, AVH will provide rap around service to address the veteran total needs within the AVH campus.

AVH will offer an entire continuum of housing options available depending on the needs of the clients. Short term housing options such as emergency shelter or transitional housing may be very appropriate for what they were intended to serve, short term emergency housing needs. However for those with the most complex set of service needs and significant challenges in establishing housing stability, permanent supportive housing may be the most appropriate housing intervention. Supportive housing works well for individuals and families who are not only homeless, but who also have very low incomes and serious, persistent issues that may include substance use, mental illness, and HIV/AIDS.

The Veterans Administration 2007 CHALLENGE Report estimates that nearly 154,000 Veterans are homeless on any given night and more than half a million experience homelessness over the course of a year. It is also estimated that Veterans account for nearly one-third of all homeless men in America, although they comprise only 13% of the adult males in the general population. Veterans are twice as likely as other people to be chronically homeless. Nearly half suffer from mental illness, and nearly 70% struggle with alcohol and drugs.

Without a stable place to live and a support system to help them address their underlying

problems, most homeless Veterans bounce from one emergency system to the next--

from the streets to shelters to public and VA hospitals to psychiatric institutions and detox centers and back to the streets--endlessly. The extremely high cost of this cycle of

homelessness, in human and economic terms, can be seen in the lives of many Veterans.

The ever-increasing momentum of government, corporate and philanthropic

investment in supportive housing has been bolstered by research documenting its

effectiveness. To date, these studies have documented:

• Positive impacts on health: Decreases of more than 50% in tenants’ emergency room visits and hospital inpatient days; decreases in tenants’ use of emergency detoxification services by more than 80%; and increases in the use of preventative health care services.

• Positive impacts on employment: Increases of 50% in earned income and 40% in the rate of participant employment when employment services are provided in supportive housing, and a significant decrease in dependence on entitlements – a $1,448 decrease per tenant each year.

• Positive impacts on treatment of mental illness: At least a third of those people living in streets and shelters have a severe and persistent mental illness. Supportive housing has proven to be a popular and effective approach for many mentally ill people, as it affords both independence and as-needed support.

Copyright 2010