Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson gave credit to the Trump administration for significant decrease in homeless rates among veterans.
A 5.3 percent drop in veteran homelessness is responsible for there being as many as 3,000 fewer homeless vets this year.
Secretary Carson shard with Fox News that he believes the cause is a combined effort among officials to provide veterans with what they need.
“One percent of our population protects the other 99 percent of us and allows us to live in peace and freedom, so we should be willing to really help them out. Unfortunately, many of them are traumatized and have lots of things going on in their lives so they end up homeless on the streets. What we’ve discovered is that just putting them in a house doesn’t necessarily solve their problem or just giving them wrap around services, clinical services, and things like that don’t work. But when you combine those things together, we’ve had a tremendous impact on reducing the homelessness,” Carson said.
“This is a wonderful model of intra-agency cooperation and that’s one of the hallmarks of this administration. All the secretaries know each other. We work together. We talk about the problems and use our collective resources and powers to solve them.”
Carson also credited the person to person link that’s being made between vets and those providing aid.
“In many cases, you know, you have to establish relationships cause some people are traumatized to the point that they don’t trust anybody. So you know, it may be a matter of going out an establishing a relationship with them, talking to them, getting them to know your name. You know, a sandwich and a hot drink, something like that. After a while, they begin to believe. We have a lot of people who have big hearts who want to help, and we’re finding ways in this administration to allow them to be able to help their fellow Americans.”
