Homeless veterans find a home in Ward 18
by Joe Narkin

(Plain Press, June 2008) The formerly homeless veterans living at the Transitional Residency (TR) Program of the US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) at 94th and Lorain are “100% a part of our community,” said Ward 18 Councilperson Jay Westbrook. In fact, according to Westbrook, the veterans served by the TR program have become a vital asset within Ward 18 through the many voluntary public services that they perform.

In addition to activities such as participating in street clean-ups, helping neighbors move furniture, painting the homes of seniors, assisting merchants during neighborhood activities, caroling during Christmas programs at social service agencies, and setting up for the Clifton Boulevard Arts Festival, the veterans living at the TR have made significant contributions to young people and their parents in Ward 18 during periodic curfew sweeps. During such sweeps, TR residents are deployed to provide supervision and positive guidance, based upon their personal experiences with street life, to detained youths awaiting parental pickup at the Denison United Church of Christ.

Westbrook says that TR Director Bob Darby has been a  “guiding force who has been totally committed to the well being of veterans” since well before the first 4 veterans were admitted to the program in late 1996. While Westbrook speaks of Darby and the veterans living at the TR in admiring terms, Darby and the veterans are very grateful to Ward 18 for welcoming them to the neighborhood.

Darby says that, when Congress gave the VA six months to identify sites at which to establish a pilot TR program in 1994, the barriers that other communities created in fear of homeless veterans nearly killed the program. Westbrook and Anita Brindza, Executive Director of Cudell Improvement, saved the TR program at the “the final hour,” according to Darby, when they facilitated the purchase of a property that was perfectly suited to the veteran’s needs. The property was not located in some hidden away industrial corner of the City, but is at the “Gateway to the Lorain Avenue Station Historical District,” a primary development target area for Ward 18 retail and residential development, said Darby.

The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty reports that there are at least 700,000 homeless individuals in the United States.  A study conducted by the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless estimates that there are 2,000 homeless people living on the streets or in shelters (and another 2,000 living in tenuous, temporary housing) on any given night in Cleveland. While veterans make up 11% of the general population, they constitute 25% of the homeless in the U.S. The number of veterans who are homeless within the United States is expected to significantly increase due physical and emotional trauma among veterans returning from the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While homeless veterans experience a number of problems such as poor health, addiction, untreated mental illness, and post traumatic stress disorder, their ability to effectively address their problems is impaired by increasingly hostile economic circumstances throughout Northeastern Ohio. “No one becomes homeless because they have problems,” wrote Darby in an informational video for the TR program, “they become homeless because they do not have the economic resources to deal with their problems.”

Since the first veterans were admitted to the TR program in 1994, the TR has provided services to over 1,000 homeless veterans. With a capacity to serve 24 veterans at any given time, the TR program links veterans with the full array of primary treatment, rehabilitation, and aftercare services available through the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center. While at the TR, residents are expected to regularly participate in aftercare treatment, recovery support groups, skills building training, financial management, program maintenance activities, and community service.

While looking for a job and permanent housing in the community, TR residents participate in the VA Compensated Work Therapy (CWT) Program. The CWT program provides residents with paid employment at VA and other federal facilities. This employment allows them to pay a small program fee of $220 per month and to save money at a local bank in order to secure housing and have a cushion for self-support following completion of the TR program. By the time they leave the TR, most residents have around $5,000 in savings, have secured permanent affordable housing, and are employed full-time in the community, according to Darby.

While jobs are very tight in the Cleveland area, a number of employers have begun to seek out TR residents to fill job openings. Employers have found TR residents to be sober, work ready, and highly motivated to succeed in maintaining a productive lifestyle in the community, said Darby. Employers have also begun to realize that the aftercare support, including workplace visits and interventions, that veterans continue to receive from the VA following discharge from the TR helps to smooth the adjustment to the workplace and life in community.  

If Darby is the guiding force behind the TR program, Claude Carter can be considered a primary example of its success. Carter was a participant in the TR even before it opened. While he was a resident in an aftercare residence at the VA Hospital in Brecksville (following intensive substance abuse treatment), his CRT assignment was to assist in the clean up, interior demolition, and build out of a newly purchased facility. Carter said that his job during the construction of the TR facility was the first constructive work that he had done for many years.

Carter was also the first official resident of the TR, has been sober since 1993, and is now employed in a job that allows him to seek out and help homeless veterans as a Rehabilitation Technician/Outreach Worker with the V.A. Carter is “grateful and humbled” to have found employment that allows him to share the “experience, strength, and hope” of his own homelessness, addiction, and recovery in the interest of helping other homeless veterans in Cleveland who are “still suffering on the streets” of Greater Cleveland.

Carter, 62, says that was he born “dirt poor for sure” in Mississippi and lived with his grandparents until the age of 5 while his mother sought work in Cleveland. Although his grandparents would have liked to keep Claude with them, the farming town in which they lived had only a single room schoolhouse and his grandfather, the family patriarch, sent him to live with his mother in order for him to get a good education. In Cleveland, Carter was an honor student until he dropped out of high school to volunteer for military service. While in the army, he was stationed with the “Can Do” Company in Germany, where he became the 3rd Infantry District boxing champion. This was the Army Company made famous by Audie Murphy, the most decorated veteran of the Second World War.

While in the Army, Carter learned from his “first true love” Linda that he was to become a father. Coming home “young and foolish,” he did not honor his commitment as a father and went to work in a steel foundry where he began a pattern of substance abuse, lived the life of an “outlaw,” became unemployed and homeless, and lived his life, not living, “but playing with death,” said Carter.

The VA and the TR program not only saved his life, according to Carter, but also allowed him to begin the long process of repairing the damage that had become his life. Carter said that he “created much damage in my life, family included,” through his active addiction, but he now lives a life in which “I don’t just have to see that wreckage was all that I had to look back on.” His recovery through the VA provided him with the opportunity to attempt to make amends and find peace in the relationships of his life.

The father of four adult children, Carter has developed a close relationship with two of them, while coming to an acceptance that the relationship with two others may have been irreparably damaged. His oldest son suffers from active addiction and is in constant trouble with the law. Carter says that, while the record of his past is still painful to look back upon, now, “when I replay it, it does not sound so screechy.”

In sobriety, Carter met his father, now deceased, who he had not known since birth, and he is grateful that he was able to develop a close relationship with him. He also has a sound relationship with half brothers and sisters in Michigan that he never knew existed prior to sobriety and he visits with them regularly. He was married for 8 years to a VA employee, Carol, until the time of her death. The support that he found in sobriety helped him deal with the death of Carol without resorting to drugs or alcohol. Carol’s death also provides Carter with a constant reminder that “sobriety does not guarantee total happiness in life,” but merely gives him the opportunity to “deal with hardships when they come” and “to find happiness where it can be found.”

Carter is now engaged to his pre-military sweetheart, Linda, the mother of his eldest son, and he is certain that “Linda will be my last love.”

“The VA has saved my life,” said Carter and, while his sobriety does not guarantee him a pain free existence, it allows him to “face life on life’s terms.” Sobriety allows him to recognize his past and work humbly in service to others. At one time, it used to trouble Carter when people said that he was a “good guy” because he did not believe it to be true or possible.  “Now, I shave every day and talk every day to the guy in the mirror,” said Carter, “It humbles me.” With all the pain of his past and the daily troubles of life, Carter is able to see what the TR was able to see in him all along – “a basically good guy” who needed a little help to become a valuable contributor to life in Cleveland, a person who is firmly committed to the growth and development of those in great need of community care and support.

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