Captain Rick Palatucci, who served as a marine in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968, attends a ceremony honoring Vietnam veteran James E. Gosselin at the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Wall in Holmdel on Oct. 22, 2023. (Julian Leshay, nj.com/TNS)
(Tribune News Service) — When family financial hardship meant 85-year-old former U.S. Air Force mechanic John Walter Furgeson faced eviction from his Boonton apartment, he said he was lucky to have a son as a full-time advocate to research what veterans’ benefits were out there and prove he was eligible for them.
“I think half of the (veterans) don’t even know what’s available,” said Furgeson, an airman 2nd class from 1958-62 on bases in Texas, California and Bermuda, whose quest for benefits was previously reported by FoxNY.com. “If they’re available and you’ve earned them, why not utilize them?”
State officials feel the same way, and this month launched a program to make it easier for veterans like Furgeson to get the benefits they need to stay in their homes or help others get off the streets if they’ve already ended up there.
The Bringing Veterans Home program aims to end homelessness among Garden State veterans by July 1, 2026. That means housing the 764 homeless veterans that officials said were sleeping on the street or in emergency shelters as of this month and preventing the tally from running up again.
“The goal is to clear the slate, if you will,” New Jersey Department of Community Affairs Commissioner Jacquline Suárez told NJ Advance Media. “We are coordinating all of our resources for the first time.”
The program is jointly administered by the DCA and the New Jersey Department of Military Veterans Affairs, known as MAVA. Suarez described the program as a “surge” of resources combined with reforms to make benefits more accessible.
They include a relaxation of qualifications for and expedited processing of benefits like rental assistance vouchers specifically for veterans; enhanced coordination among public and nonprofit veterans’ services providers, including training in the new measures for providers; and $30 million in state funding to pay for the initiative.
Suarez spoke to NJAM following the March 13 announcement of the Bringing Veterans Home program at the state National Guard Training Center in Sea Girt, where caseworkers underwent two days of training for the program.
The state’s adjutant general, U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Yvonne L. Mays, who serves as MAVA’s commissioner and commander of the state’s Army and Air National Guard, joined her Mays called the program “a groundbreaking step toward ensuring that no Veteran endures the hardship of homelessness.”
Officials said the program would also incorporate services provided by MAVA and DCA’s federal counterparts, the U.S. Veterans Administration, known as the VA, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, though Mays acknowledged there was “a lot of uncertainty” amid the ongoing federal government shakeup under President Donald Trump.
If officials are able to declare mission accomplished next year, it would be a notable legacy for Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, who will step down when his second term as governor expires in January, six months before the program’s target date to end veterans’ homelessness in the state.
“Our veterans have sacrificed so much to uphold our nation’s freedom and deserve our deepest gratitude and respect for their service,” Murphy said in a statement when the program was announced this month.
John Walter Furgeson, the Air Force veteran in Boonton, came close to being out on the street after having lost the DD 214 discharge papers that qualified him for housing assistance, said his son, John Paul Furgeson, a non-veteran who lives with his father. The government’s copy of Furgeson’s DD 214 had perished in a 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis that destroyed countless veterans’ records.
The Furgesons had an eviction hearing scheduled for last Thursday before it was cancelled when they finally got emergency rental assistance and proof of the father’s honorable discharge that would entitle him to benefits going forward. John Paul Furgeson gave special thanks to the nonprofit veterans’ group Project Kind in Rockaway, adding that his member of Congress, U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D- 11th District), was “a big help.”
“It’s all resolved now,” the son said Friday.
He agreed with state officials that navigating state, federal and nonprofit veterans’ bureaucracies can be especially difficult for former service members who may already be homeless and lack computer skills and other resources or who may be dealing with lingering physical or emotional impacts of their service.
John Walter Furgeson said he would have fought for himself had his son not been available. But neither man was sure how things might have turned out if the old soldier didn’t have a younger family member to advocate for him. That’s why, the son added, the Bringing Veterans Home initiative was so welcome.
“It’s a full-time job advocating in that situation,” he said.
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