In 2009, Bruce Frazier, a U.S. Army veteran who busted up his knee
and back when his parachute didn’t open fully in a training exercise,
became homeless. On Wednesday, Frazier, 60, moved into a one-bedroom
apartment on Bruce Avenue in south Yonkers – a most welcome relief after
bouncing among shelters throughout the metropolitan region over the
past four years.
“Another chapter in the life and times of Bruce
Frazier,” he said, relaxing in his front room, bathed in sunlight. “I’m
so glad to be here. It’s hard in the shelter system.”
For Frazier,
a Harlem high school basketball star who played on the Venezuelan
national team, landing the apartment ended a dispiriting housing journey
that began two decades ago when he acquired a taste for crack cocaine.
Now clean after spending the past 18 months at the VA Hudson Valley
Healthcare System in Montrose, Frazier found placement through
Westchester’s Patriot Housing initiative, begun in August with the goal
of housing 75 homeless veterans within 100 days.
It’s part of the national 100,000 Homes campaign, carried out in collaboration with the Rapid Results Institute
, based in Stamford, Conn. The institute has found that its 100-day
process can be a useful structure through which organizations – both
for-profit and nonprofit – can create change by setting lofty yet
achievable goals, challenging participants to find new ways to
collaborate and pursuing those goals with the 100-day span.
Westchester
is among 226 communities to join the national campaign, including
Phoenix, Atlanta and Salt Lake City. The Westchester effort was launched
with a three-day boot camp led by institute facilitator Evan Smith
of Mahopac [Senior Partner at Schaffer Consulting], which included
representatives from housing organizations, the U.S. Department of
Veterans Affairs and social services officials from Westchester County.
“We
put them through exercises to stretch the bounds of what seems
possible,” Smith said. “It gets exciting to (see) them start mobilizing
around a common goal.”
The boot camp united players in the complex
web of agencies that provide services to homeless veterans. That
three-day meeting also uncovered a trove of 25 federal housing vouchers
for Yonkers veterans, controlled by the VA’s Kingsbridge office in the
Bronx. Westchester officials hadn’t known of the bounty.
“It made
the whole trip worthwhile,” said Phil Gille, Westchester’s first deputy
commissioner of social services. “And the 100-day process has made us
better at making sure nobody slips through the cracks.”
On Tuesday
– Day 82 of Westchester’s initiative – longtime housing advocate Karl
Bertrand told Tax Watch that 57 veterans had been housed, 12 more had
federal veterans’ housing vouchers along with apartments that needed to
be inspected to ensure they were up to snuff and another 22 had very
good possibilities.
On the walls of Bertrand’s Elmsford office
hang framed newspaper articles dating to 1983, when Bertrand, a newly
minted social worker from Hunter College, rallied Yonkers churches to
form the Sharing Community and establish Westchester’s first shelter for
the homeless. Thirty years later, the lack of affordable housing
continues to squeeze low-income Westchester residents trying to make it
in one of the nation’s highest-priced housing markets when the federal
sequester effectively dried up the availability of federal Section 8
vouchers.
Ever the optimist, Bertrand remains committed to the
mission, and emboldened by the results of the Patriot Housing
initiative, as government and the private sector work together to solve
one of our region’s most intractable problems.
Through the
process, the public agencies have cut red tape, reached out to more
landlords and looked at new ways of doing business.
“It’s like the stars aligned,” Bertrand said. “There’s a real openness to doing things in smarter ways.”
On
Bruce Avenue, meanwhile, Frazier was unpacking his books and thinking
about what he might cook for his daughter, Aniger, 22, who lives in the
Bronx. He has missed cooking her dinner in his own kitchen and sharing a
meal at his table.
“She likes her steak medium rare, just like I do,” he said. “Now I have a home that she can visit.”