VIEWPOINT: Providing Housing for Veterans in Need Is New York Doing Its Duty

BY RALPH FASANO

Long Island’s housing crisis gravely impacts our neighbors who have sacrificed to preserve our freedom and keep us safe: the brave men and women who have served in the U.S. armed forces.

As is the case in communities everywhere, our returning veterans struggle with myriad challenges — including finding affordable housing and often managing lingering mental health challenges, like post-traumatic stress disorder.

Our responsibility as a community is to ensure that those who have sacrificed for us have access to high-quality resources when they return from service. One way to do that is to create and upkeep affordable and supportive housing designed specifically with veterans in mind, equipped with the services that veterans need to thrive.

I have been proud to serve this community on Long Island for years. Unfortunately, I have also seen how misleading and misinformed narratives about supportive and affordable housing often stand in the way of delivering results to those who need it most — and how those narratives harm our community overall.

It is important to start by considering the scale of the issue.

Right here in New York, more than 134,000 veterans live in homes with one or more major problems of quality, crowding and/or cost, and about 1,250 veterans experience homelessness on any given night.

These harrowing numbers reflect the shortage of over 615,000 affordable rental units for extremely low-income renters. Access to supportive housing is even more limited, with only one available supportive housing apartment for every five eligible applicants.

Make no mistake: That is an emergency. And it is one we need to solve now in every community across New York.

Liberty Gardens, a proposal from my company, Concern Housing, in Southampton, is designed to help Long Island’s veterans with access to affordable and supportive housing. It would create five two-story townhome-style buildings on 5 acres of vacant land behind the Southampton Full Gospel Church. The proposal, as it stands today, calls for 25 affordable and workforce housing units, and 25 supportive units for veterans.

It is precisely the sort of housing that Southampton — and communities across New York — desperately need. But, as is often the case, it has faced bad-faith criticism, including the assertion that the development team misled the community.

One misleading claim is that we are disingenuous when referring to our housing as “workforce housing.” That could not be further from the truth. Time and time again, we’ve seen our residents reach new professional heights once provided with affordable homes, and we fully expect the same at Liberty Gardens.

The residents of our many Suffolk County developments are largely lower-income working people employed in jobs our economy needs. Liberty Gardens would be no different.

More disturbing is the ways in which critics capitalize on the stigmatization of those struggling with mental illness, particularly those experiencing post-traumatic stress after service. This is an abandonment of our duty as New Yorkers and a misinterpretation of the work that supportive housing does.

So, here are the facts:

Affordable and supportive housing helps our veterans in this case, and our community at large in every case. Decades of research prove that housing is health care, and supportive services can help provide resources for veterans experiencing mental health challenges — regardless of their income. Supportive housing is also proven to be the most effective way to address chronic homelessness, with only 5 percent of tenants returning to the streets or shelters.

Rather than letting ideology and fear drive our decision-making, we must work to create systems of support for our most vulnerable neighbors. We have a strong moral responsibility to support the mental and physical health care of our armed forces, and Liberty Gardens provides just one pathway to make this connection.

Concern has served the local veterans community on Long Island for 50 years, and we are proud to continue that tradition in Southampton. We know that, through local support, Liberty Gardens can create housing and health care opportunities for veterans that are far too limited in this community.

Southampton cannot let this opportunity pass — it is critical to help establish a more robust safety net for those who served our country, and it’s inexcusable to abandon our veterans in their moment of need. Veterans live by an ethos that “until they are home, no man is left behind.”

That is a spirit that our community should emulate and embrace. That is no less than our veterans deserve.

Ralph Fasano is executive editor of Concern for Independent Living, based in Northport.