Working

It's the reason we pay taxes, of course, and what we have every reason to expect because we do. But it's always nice anyway to hear of a government program that's helped a real person out of a real jam.

A real person, for example, like Jack Battles. Four years back, reports The Yakima Herald, he was making $52 an hour in the Bremerton shipyards. But then a mooring line "slammed into his knee." So much for $52 an hour.

Even more trouble found Jack pretty fast. He lost his job, his house and all his savings. At the suggestion of a friend, he, his companion and their two boys headed for Yakima. Prospects there weren't much better and they spent most nights sleeping in their car or "surfing couches."

But then Jack got a call from the county's veterans coordinator who told him his Vietnam-era service qualified him for rental assistance under a joint VA and HUD program run by the Yakima Housing Authority. Like Jack Battles. Within days, he found a three-bedroom apartment to which he contributes $250 of the $850 rent. "I kept praying to God and this came through for me," he told The Herald. "I wouldn't want anybody to go through" what he's gone through, he added, and "I don't want to go through it again."

The even better news is that Jack's is not a one-of-a-kind story. In fact, over the last two years HUD has made almost 1,100 vouchers available under its VASH program to provide housing assistance to veterans who are receiving services at 10 Veterans Affairs medical centers across Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington.

"These vouchers offer veterans a permanent home and critically needed supportive services," says HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, "to those who have served our nation."

Travel, for example, a couple of hundred miles from Yakima to the historic Pearl district of Spokane where Northeast Washington Housing Solutions, Inc.. – also known as the Spokane Housing Authority – has just finished renovating a three-story apartment building constructed in the early 1900's. Seven of the 32 one-bedroom apartments will offer an affordable place to live for homeless veterans thanks to the HUD-Veterans Affairs VASH program.,

Or travel to the Lake City neighborhood of Seattle where you'll find a brand-new, 6-story building named McDermott Place. Named after Congressman Jim McDermott, and owned and operated by the Low Income Housing Institute, the 75-unit "green" facility was funded by, among others, Key Community Development, the Washington State Housing Finance Commission, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle, the Seattle Housing Authority, the City of Seattle and the King County veterans and human services levy. Thirty-eight of its units are reserved for veterans and, of these, the Seattle Housing Authority has gotten HUD's okay to fund 10 units through the VASH voucher program.

It's an "affirmation," explains Congressman McDermott, of the "values that matter to us as a community" especially "our determination to honor and care for our soldiers" so that, as Jack Battles might add, other veterans don't have to endure the heard nights he and his family went through.

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