VA Homeless Programs
Message from Monica Diaz, Executive Director, VHA Homeless Programs Office
November 2024
We always say that one Veteran experiencing homelessness is one too many. Every year in late fall, we anxiously wait to see if we succeeded in our goal to bring the number of homeless Veterans closer to zero.
Why late fall? Because we get two important pieces of information at this time of year.
First, we find out if we’ve reached our yearly goals for the number of Veterans housed, percentage kept in housing, and number of unsheltered Veterans that we reached out to.
Second, we learn the results of the annual Point-In-Time (PIT) count conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
We’re excited to report that we have good news to report on both counts!
In fiscal year 2024, we housed nearly 48,000 Veterans — smashing our goal of 41,000 and marking the highest number of Veterans housed since 2019. Because it only includes the Veterans who have interacted with VA homeless programs, it doesn’t paint quite the whole picture, but it was an encouraging start, nonetheless.
Once we got that news in October 2024, we became even more eager to receive the annual PIT Count data. We wanted to see if we had been able to move the needle in the right direction again, since the 2023 PIT Count showed an increase in the overall number of homeless Veterans.
Now, we know we have!
The PIT Count revealed a record low in Veteran homelessness since measurement began in 2009 and a 7.5% decrease since 2023. Overall, the data shows an 11.7% reduction in Veterans experiencing homelessness since 2020 and a 55.6% reduction since 2010.
The data show there were 32,882 Veterans experiencing homelessness in the United States in January 2024, 13,851 of whom were unsheltered — down from 35,574 and 15,507 in 2023, respectively. This represents a 10.7% decrease in unsheltered Veteran homelessness nationwide in the last year.
While the PIT Count can’t definitively identify every Veteran experiencing homelessness, it gives important insights into the trends. This year, it shows that the trend of the last decade-and-a-half is continuing — that each year, fewer and fewer Veterans are finding themselves without a place to sleep at night.
I encourage you to give the latest episode of our Ending Veteran Homelessness podcast a listen if you’d like to really dive into the methodology of this great achievement.
We still have work ahead of us to ensure that instances of Veteran homelessness are infrequent and brief, but it’s important to stop and celebrate successes like these in our campaign to end Veteran homelessness. It is, after all, a marathon and not a sprint.
We could not have achieved any of this without the tireless work of our homeless programs staff. They deserve full credit for all the progress we have made.
Every day, with empathy and commitment, our teams live out the VA motto of caring for those who served and, because of them, more Veterans than ever before have a safe place to call home.
