Hudson asks Dalton about rise in veteran homelessness

Okay, although New York City reduced veteran homelessness by approximately 44% between 2015 and 2025, the number of homeless veterans has increased in recent years,

rising from 482 individuals in 2022 to 697 in 2025.

What factors have contributed to this increase?

What specific strategies is the administration implementing to reverse this trend?

And additionally, what policies, programs, or investments were most responsible for the significant reductions achieved between 2015 and 2022?

And how is the administration?

building upon those successes today.

Thank you.

I'll start, and my colleagues may very well want to jump in here.

And I think, you know, it was a tremendous decline in veteran homelessness across the country.

And I think what you saw from both at a national level and federal level, as well as here in New York City, is people just doing the things that they needed to do, providing the vouchers that they needed, prioritizing this population, bringing them into shelter

when that was part of the journey and helping them to move on to housing quickly.

I will say that all of us should be encouraging.

Federal investments to be restored for this group.

The federal VASH vouchers, which I think in our previous history here were a good percentage of the way people left the homelessness system on that voucher, have declined deeply over the past few years.

And so while the current veterans who are on those vouchers, the feds will say are safe on them, the decline for new vouchers has dropped.

I have

Hold on, 93% from its peak.

So the federal government is really leaving us without specific housing resources for this population.

So we as a city are the most...

most generous in the country in terms of providing local funding for rental assistance and payment and support for people exiting homelessness, including the veterans population.

And New York City, again, supports veterans and sees them as eligible entities, whether they are in shelter or in community for programs like CityFAPS.

And so I would say the federal disinvestment or the federal investment really helped us to reduce homelessness during that period.

And the federal disinvestment is hurting our ability to continue to have those strides.

I will say New York City still has one of the lowest or the lowest veteran homelessness in the country.

We find, thankfully, very few people on the street who identify, self-identify as a veteran.

And so to the extent to which folks are homeless here, they are in our shelter system.

But I would encourage all of us to look at the federal government for the support that we need to serve this group.