White House Announces New Actions to Address Veteran Homelessness
Today, the Biden-Harris administration announced new actions to prevent and reduce veteran homelessness as well as the largest-ever single-year investment in communities’ homelessness response systems.
Specifically, the administration is:
- Making the single largest investment in communities’ homelessness response systems in history. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will soon issue a Notice of Funding Opportunity to provide approximately $3.1 billion under the Continuum of Care (CoC) program—the largest-ever single-year investment through this program to help communities address homelessness.
- Providing first-of-its-kind funding for legal services for veterans experiencing or at risk of homelessness. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is awarding $11.5 million to public and nonprofit organizations through its new Legal Services for Veterans Grant Program that helps veterans secure legal representation to prevent evictions and obtain public benefits.
- Connecting veterans experiencing homelessness with jobs. The Department of Labor Veterans’ Employment and Training Service is awarding more than $58 million in grant funding to help veterans experiencing or at risk of homelessness reintegrate into the labor force, including homeless women veterans, homeless veterans with children, and justice-involved veterans.
- Launching new efforts to quickly rehouse veterans. HUD and VA are launching a series of “Boot Camps” to help public housing agencies and VA Medical Centers improve their processes and more quickly transition veterans from homelessness to permanent housing with wraparound supportive services under the HUD-VA Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH) program.
These new investments and actions help to implement All In, the Biden-Harris administration's overall strategy to prevent and end homelessness, and they build on President Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which represented the largest single-year investment in ending homelessness in U.S. history and helped prevent a surge of homelessness during the pandemic.
With the veteran-specific actions, the Biden administration hopes to make even more significant progress toward ending veteran homelessness, which has dropped 11% since 2020 and 55% since 2010 . The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) helped more than 40,000 veterans escape homelessness in 2022 and set a new goal to help another 38,000 veterans this year.
Read the full White House fact sheet.