Over the last decade, Los Angeles County housing authorities have received nearly 4,500 rental vouchers to get homeless veterans into permanent housing.
If all of those vouchers had been put to use, veteran homelessness would be a thing of the past.
“There are certainly enough available vouchers to eliminate veteran homelessness in Los Angeles County,” said Emilio Salas, executive director of the county housing authority.
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’s streets or in its shelters.
The county’s 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.
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.
“Getting them through that process to me to issue the voucher is where the problem lies,” Salas said.
The chief executive of L.A. city’s 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.
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.
“The process is ridiculous,” 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.
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.
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.
“When there are issues, getting in touch with HACLA is one of the hardest things,” Reynolds said. “They don’t have phone numbers. They only accept emails because they have such high caseloads. You won’t hear from them for weeks.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, Weingart had no choice but to convert 10 of those units to non-veteran vouchers, a switch that the VA is reluctant to approve.
Fortunately, the former state senator said, “I was able to get access to a relatively senior person.”
Filling units reserved for veterans is only half the problem. The housing authority records show that for every three units leased, two become vacant.
“As people come in, we have people dropping off, so we’re not making progress,” Salas acknowledged.
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 — a presumably avoidable outcome for veterans whose vouchers include case managers provided from the VA.
Some veterans advocates fault insufficient follow-up by VA social workers after a veteran moves in.
“My impression is that it’s a staffing issue,” said Anthony Allman, executive director of the nonprofit Vets Advocacy. “If the VA had the adequate case management staff they’d be able to make the referrals and more importantly provide the intensive case management to keep veterans in permanent housing.”
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.
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.
“It’s a lot more successful when they have somebody advocating for them every step of the way,” he said.
Veteran homelessness has been a slippery problem for L.A. officials, going back to former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s 2014 pledge 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.
His successor, Mayor Karen Bass, took on one of the inexplicable bureaucratic obstacles to housing veterans. 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.
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.
In January, Bass sought to address another obstacle — landlords’ resistance to take disabled veterans as tenants — announcing a landlord recruitment drive in cooperation with the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles.
Castro Ramirez, who took the helm at HACLA in October, said she has instituted a policy requiring every referral from the VA to be matched to a voucher in five days.
Despite those efforts, lease rates have improved only incrementally, if at all this year. Through mid-August, HACLA had executed 262 leases, slightly above its 2024 pace. But 186 existing leases were terminated. After receiving 250 new vouchers from HUD, its lease rate declined slightly to 52%.
LACDA improved its lease rate by 3 percentage points to 61%, with 282 new leases through June and 178 terminations.
Records provided by the housing authorities show that the VA has dramatically increased its referrals, sending nearly 1,500 last year and nearly 1,000 so far this year, a rate that comes close to the 25 weekly HACLA requested.
A spokesperson for the VA in West L.A. emailed The Times with an offer to assist with this article, but then did not respond to questions emailed by The Times.
Why the surge of referrals has not yielded a corresponding increase in leases is a matter of conjecture.
Some still see it as as a staffing issue.
“It’s possible the VA needs two or three times the number of authorized VASH staff,” said Allman of Vets Advocacy. “Even though they’re at 90% strength, they need to surge their case management.”
One of the intangibles is the veterans themselves. Often they begin their quest at the VA, where they can get temporary beds in a tiny home village, hoping to transfer into on-campus housing that is being built, though slowly.
With health conditions that require frequent visits to the campus, they may resist distant placements such as Sun Valley.
In regards to the Weingart Center, Murray said he thinks the Skid Row stigma keeps them away. Veterans want to move in once they see the tower’s amenities, including city views, a gym, TV lounge and dog run, but it’s hard to get them there, he said.
Homeless services veteran Amy Perkins, who engages with the VA in her current role as Supervisor Lindsey Horvath’s homeless deputy, said she thinks the case managers inadvertently steer their clients away.
It’s as if they say, “Do you want to live in Skid Row? No? OK, we’ll find somewhere else,” she said.
In talks with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the VA has taken the position that the scale of veteran homelessness is overstated by the annual point-in-time count.
It has pressed LAHSA to acknowledge a lower number based on what is called a by-name list. Derived from the countywide homeless database, it includes every veteran who has been identified by outreach workers and verified as veterans, eliminating some who falsely claim veteran status. During a trial last year, Keith Harris, then the VA’s senior executive homeless agent for Los Angeles, testified that there were about 1,750 names on the list, barely half of the number in that year’s point-in-time count.
LAHSA has delayed publishing this year’s veteran numbers while it confers with the VA on how to present the numbers showing an increase of about 100 veterans this year.
The notion that veteran homelessness is only half what it was thought to be elicited scoffs from Bass, Murray and those close to the ground like advocate Reynolds.
But the glut of unused vouchers has forced housing officials to confront the possibility that they have too many, at least for now.
LACDA, which last received an allotment of vouchers in 2022, will not apply for more in the next round either, Salas said.
“We certainly don’t want to take them from other jurisdictions that can make use of them.”
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