Employee Spotlight
February 1, 2024
Lucas Vrbsky
Veterans Justice Program Re-Entry Specialist
Durham VA Health Care System
This year, we’re spotlighting VA’s Housing First approach through a series of interviews with VA employees and taking a look at how they’re working to end Veteran homelessness through this approach. Learn more about Housing First.
Q: Can you talk briefly about your role and the work that you do?
A: Veterans returning to the community from institutions are always going to be at higher risk for returning to or entering into homelessness. In my role as a re-entry specialist, I cover 27 counties in North Carolina and go into about 25 state and federal prisons to meet with Veterans at any level of their sentence. I try to make sure that Veterans are aware of what services, resources, and benefits they might be eligible for, particularly as they are preparing for release. There are also some benefits that Veterans can access while incarcerated.
With the folks closest to release, the intent is to help them navigate that re-entry space. So, everything from housing, employment, health care, and linking them with community and purpose. Since it’s a large area, forging relationships with community partners is really imperative to the role as well.
Q: Can you help us understand the unique housing challenges faced by Veterans with a history of incarceration?
A: An issue that contributes to their housing challenges is the stigmatization of folks with criminal records. The mythology is that you serve your time, and you are able to return to free society. That’s not so much the case. There’s this mark that follows folks for quite some time. And race and class figure in, too—the inequities and injustices are more glaring.
So how does that impact folks looking for housing? Particularly in a housing crisis like we’re going through right now, with an extreme lack of affordable housing, landlords can be really picky because there are so many folks who are looking for housing. For example, I’m working with a Veteran who’s had no charges on his record for over 35 years, but it is extremely difficult for him to find somewhere to rent.
One difficulty is that they’ve got to have money to apply for places. A lot of times it can feel like folks with limited income are throwing money in the wind because some companies will know they’re not going to rent to them, but they’ll be glad to take their $50 or $100 application fee.
Another nuance is for folks who have sex registry offenses, which means they can only live in certain places. In North Carolina, it doesn’t matter what the conviction was—even for something relatively low-level like public urination, they still have to abide by policies that they can’t live but so many yards from a school or so many yards from a park. Unfortunately, particularly in urban areas, the majority of affordable housing units are where there are parks and schools. It really boxes folks out. Then they get into the situation where they’re going back to prison for not having an address, for failure to register, when they’ve done everything else they’re supposed to do.
Q: Why do you think the Housing First approach is particularly important for Veterans who have experienced incarceration?
A: I believe housing is a human right. If we look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s hard to get to self-actualization if you don’t have somewhere stable to lay your head.
In my mind, Housing First solidifies that concept of housing as a human right. My perception is that historically, we saw VA really invested in things like domiciliaries and grant per diem transitional housing. And it seemed like those programs required meeting these certain levels or jumping through these hoops. It was dependent on you accessing the services that VA said you should access, not necessarily that you felt were important to your life.
Now, with Housing First, we’re able to emphasize permanent housing and see it as a stabilizing factor in folks’ lives—something that can lay a foundation for stability in other areas of their lives.
Housing First is not only housing. Housing First is about continuous engagement and wraparound supportive services to improve holistic health, grow sense of purpose and connection, and ultimately provide support as people strive towards the goals that that they have identified as important. It’s critical that we offer the necessary supports to help someone maintain housing.
Over 90% of people in prison are going to be returning to the community. If I, as a community member, want safety for my own family, then I should want to make a smoother way for folks that are coming back from institutions. I would encourage all of us to remember that folks living in human cages are a shadow population, and we don’t want to forget our brothers and sisters behind the walls.
Q: Some people describe Housing First as a tool to help bring about broader social justice. Do you agree with that and if so, how do you think it does?
A: It certainly has the potential to do that. On a base level, it’s drawing attention to the inequity that a lot of people don’t have housing. We live in a society that generally tries to push problematic things to the side—like putting those problems in prison or moving that encampment farther and farther away from where people can see it.
Housing First helps bring the inequities of housing to the front. I’ve seen it lead to some empowerment. It can help people feel more comfortable to speak out and to share. But unfortunately, if the broader system is built on inequity, we can fix this little thing over here, but we still have this system that produces disparate outcomes. It’s important to look at intersectionality and be able to tie in some of these social justice things. What about access to reproductive care? What about access to education? It’s nice to think that the largest health care system in the country is engaged in this.
The other thing that’s been really exciting to me is to see the Health Care for Homeless Veterans program nationally start looking at racial justice. That might not be directly about Housing First, but it’s tied in.
Q: What do you think people get wrong about Housing First, and what would you want them to know instead?
A: That again, housing is a human right.
For people who are Housing First detractors, it can be helpful to point out the discrepancies between what they claim are their belief systems and what they actually do. There’s a great story about Bono meeting with Jesse Helms, a longtime conservative senator from North Carolina, trying to raise awareness and get support for funding for HIV/AIDS. What they were able to connect on was this theology thing, and Bono really listened to Helms’ point of view.
This kind of approach can be really useful. Instead of being dismissive or disrespectful, just take the time to listen to what folks are saying about it. And then instead of being reactive, respond with something like, “Hey, you know, this is what Housing First means: It means people have safe housing so they can deal with other issues in their lives.”
It’s really important that we, as providers and people on the front line, have a focused response about the benefits of Housing First and how it’s helped Veterans. Most people are supportive of things that help Veterans, so we’re in a good position to advocate from there.
The National Homeless Programs Office has done great with some of their infographics. Here’s how many Veterans who have been housed. Here’s how many have returned to homelessness. Here’s how many we’ve been able to reengage. It’s important to be able to respond quickly with those numbers that show that Housing First works.
Q: What’s your “why” for the work you do?
A: I feel that, as an individual who has been given so much help in my lifetime from others, I have a debt that has to be paid. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to repay it, but I know that I have an obligation to put some weight on the right side of the scale and to put something back in the pot.
