Sitting on a low wall outside the large Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles, Deavin Sessom says trauma stemming from his time in the Army 50 years ago still affects him today.
“I’m disabled,” he says. “My brain isn’t there no more. My body’s not there.”
Post-traumatic stress disorder has contributed to years of instability in Sessom’s life, according to interviews and court documents, including substance abuse, divorce, and chronic homelessness. Sessom lives in a temporary shelter on the West LA VA campus.
He’d like to move into permanent housing. And in recent months, the VA opened hundreds of new apartments on its West LA property for veterans just like him. Three newly renovated buildings with a combined 179 units for unhoused, disabled veterans come with subsidized rents and wraparound services. The buildings are part of a long-delayed plan by VA officials — promised seven years ago — to transform the West LA campus into a national model for ending veteran homelessness with at least 1,200 permanent, supportive apartments for unhoused vets.
There’s one major catch for Sessom, however. He makes too much money to live in the new apartments.
Sessom takes home over $3,500 a month in VA disability compensation for severe PTSD as well as social security, which puts him over the income limit for housing intended to help the neediest veterans. At the same time, the high disability payments reflect a massive need for help. The VA bases this type of compensation on a percent rating system, and has deemed Sessom 100% disabled by PTSD. He’s in a catch-22 that John Kuhn, deputy medical center director for the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, calls a “perverse consequence” for many homeless veterans seeking housing.
“The people who are the most disabled, who need the help the most, are disqualified,” he says. “It’s self-defeating.”
Income limits and other restrictions around who can live in permanent supportive housing make sense when it comes to LA’s unhoused population in general, Kuhn says. It’s a way to parcel out scarce resources to those most in need. However, he argues, it doesn’t make sense for veterans, who make up only about 6% of the county’s homeless population and have their own pool of dedicated resources, including federally subsidized Section 8 rental vouchers.
“For veterans, we don't have to ration,” he says.
As it is, frequently the only thing that stands between a homeless veteran and a stable place to live is red tape.
Case in point: One of the recently opened apartment buildings on the West LA VA campus required tenants to have some combination (depending on the unit) of the following characteristics: older than 62, chronically homeless, mentally ill, and earning less than 30% of the area median income. “We have to find unicorns to fill that building,” Kuhn says. In the end, the VA was able to fill the building only after the developer who built the project returned some funding to the City of Los Angeles in order to double the income limit for some units.
In another instance, a 35-unit building in South LA for chronically homeless veterans called the Broadway Apartments had so much trouble finding tenants that the developers swapped out their veteran-specific supportive housing vouchers in order to open it up to non-veterans too, according to the Los Angeles Housing Department.
U.S. VA Secretary Denis McDonough (center) and other officials on May 2, cutting the ribbon on a new affordable housing project at the West LA VA. Photo by Anna Scott.
Some local and federal politicians are working on a fix.
In March, the LA City Council passed a motion by Councilmembers Traci Park and Katy Yaroslavsky to raise the income limits for tenants on affordable housing projects funded by city bond measure Proposition HHH.
During a ribbon-cutting celebration in May for two more permanent supportive housing projects on the VA campus, U.S. Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough said he’s also working on resolving the income issue, though he stopped short of any specifics.
“We're talking with our federal partners about a range of fixes,” he said. “Under no circumstances should a vet be denied an opportunity simply because that vet’s getting the benefits that that vet has earned and so richly deserves.”
One of the federal partners the VA is talking to is the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, which issues the rental vouchers that subsidize buildings like the ones on the West LA campus. Veterans Affairs officials have floated a proposal for HUD to stop counting VA disability compensation as income. But HUD officials have raised concerns, saying it could complicate their goal of assisting the neediest renters if other non-veteran disability payments still count as income.
Whatever the eventual resolution, if any, the problem is bigger than a couple of federal agencies squabbling over how to house homeless veterans. It stems from the way affordable housing usually gets funded.
Affordable housing developers generally cobble together money from a variety of public and private funders, who often impose different, sometimes clashing requirements on projects. For example, LA Family Housing President Stephanie Klasky-Gamer says her organization once built a project for veterans with some funding from the County Department of Mental Health. That meant the tenants had to be clients of the county, which made leasing difficult because most qualified veterans received healthcare through the VA.
“Some of our lease-up challenges have to do with our capital financing structure,” she says, “which includes so many varying sources of funding, and they might have different tenant eligibility criteria that don't mesh with each other.”
“You end up with the tail wagging the dog in a lot of cases,” says John Maceri, executive director of The People Concern, a homeless services organization that staffs some permanent supportive housing projects. “As a result, units often sit vacant longer as you’re trying to match people who qualify for the units.”