For homeless veterans in Houston, a converted hotel provides shelter and hope

Bob Sikorski is one of many veterans who found themselves without a roof over their head after a medical emergency.

In December 2019, the U.S. Navy Vietnam veteran was living in his 1986 Cadillac after receiving an eviction notice, dodging police who he said were suspicious of anyone they saw sitting in a parked car for too long. He'd come to Upstate New York to escape the heat in Texas. But now it was winter and bitterly cold.

It was too expensive for Sikorski to keep the car running, so he went without heat.

Then the chest pains came.

"I was in the car. I was really cold, I was freezing. And I was like, 'Uh-oh, something's going on.' I almost died in my car," Sikorski, 73, told USA TODAY. He was able to get to the hospital, where he had triple-bypass open-heart surgery.

The "worst part," Sikorski said, was that after the surgery, he didn't have anywhere to go except to return to the lot where his car was parked.

"Imagine having open-heart surgery and two days later you're back in your car," he said.

Houston Veterans Village has 'recipe' for ending homelessness

In Houston, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation is working to reduce veteran homelessness with a new housing and social services site that opened this month. The group's Houston Veterans Village includes a hotel converted into apartments and more than a dozen 500-square-foot homes, including one where Sikorski now lives.

"It's a different story today, where I have all these resources I didn't have then," he said.

The foundation has housing sites planned for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Bradenton, Florida; and Atlanta, with the money coming mostly from donations from individuals and companies.

Across the country, tens of thousands of unhoused veterans came inside to shelter in 2023, including nearly 3,000 at housing sites launched by the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which for decades has funded mortgage payments for veterans and their families. In the past two years, the group ramped up efforts to reduce homelessness among veterans.

"Permanent housing with very good wraparound supports is the recipe for ending homeless. That's true for veterans and non-veterans," said Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.

Veterans who struggle while living on the streets deserve the security and stability that a home of their own provides, as opposed to a homeless shelter, said Frank Siller, CEO of Tunnel to Towers.

"It's going to change their life around drastically," he said. "It is going to give them inner peace, where they know every night where they're going to sleep."

In the first nine months of 2023, the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department also housed more than 35,000 veterans.

"It shows that when you provide housing and services for people, they can successfully exit homelessness, and now it's a question of scaling that work to meet the need," Olivet said, adding that veterans need help to avoid becoming homeless in the first place through measures like rental assistance and eviction protections.

How many homeless veterans are there?

More than 33,000 veterans were experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In all, there were more than 580,000 unhoused people in the U.S. in the same time frame.

Thousands of homeless veterans are being housed every year, but many have also become homeless for the first time in recent years amid a national housing crisis, Olivet said.

"We're hearing from a number of communities that they're seeing pretty significant increases in homeless overall," Olivet said, because of tight housing markets and a lack of below-market-rate housing.

It's "hard to make a dent" in the nation's homeless population, and moving people from the streets to temporary shelters is "not the answer" Siller said, because many people need a sense of stability after living unsheltered.

Homeless veterans in different situations may need different forms of housing and support, Siller said. Younger veterans and those who became homeless very recently may benefit more from transitional housing, he said, because sometimes people just need help to get their life back on track.

But older veterans and those who have experienced chronic homelessness need permanent housing, often paired with substance abuse treatment and mental health counseling, Siller said.

"During this recovery they need a permanent place to live. Could you imagine moving around, being in a shelter and being sent from one place to another? No," Siller said.

Homeless veterans face health struggles, criminalization

Sikorski, who said he struggles with depression and PTSD, said the hardest thing about living in his car was "constantly being watched by police."

In recent years, municipalities across the country and some states have passed laws making it illegal to live in tents or sit or lie on sidewalks, leaving many without homes subject to police homeless sweeps.

"You could be the pope, and if he was homeless and he lived in his car, they'd be chasing him around town in the Popemobile," Sikorski said.

He said it took a long time to mentally recover from heart surgery, as well as the gastric bypass surgery he had in 2018 that first sent him spiraling into homelessness. When he was homeless, he wasn't in his "right mind," Sikorski said.

"I was beside myself. I just wasn't me. You know, the normal me," he said. "Depression will lead you into places where you don't make great decisions."

At the Houston Veterans Village, many of Sikorski's fellow veterans suffer from depression, he said. But medication, doctors' care and "being able to talk with somebody" makes them feel a lot better, he said.

Sikorski said he wants people experiencing homelessness and mental health struggles to know "there is a way out of it; there are people willing to help."

"I didn't think there was any hope for me, and now I'm more joyous than I have been in many years."