Dean Torres, 31, is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He spent 14-months in Baghdad in 2004. Credit: Mimi Wells
By Mimi Wells
Nov. 10 – On Monday afternoon Dean Torres hovered over the kitchen table in his parents’ apartment in the Seward Park Housing Project where his 6-year old daughter, Nevaeh, sat with her homework. The first graders at PS 142 were studying the solar system, and Nevaeh’s assignment was to record observations of the night sky every evening for a week. The teacher’s directions filled the front and back side of the her worksheet, and Torres scanned it, flipping the paper back and forth rapidly before calling his 17-year old sister, Leah, in from her bedroom for help.
“See,” he said, pointing at the homework as his daughter colored in her notebook, “that’s one of those situations, it just starts stressing me out, and I don’t know, I can’t…I don’t know.”
Torres, 31, suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, or PTSD. He is a veteran of the war in Iraq, where he was “stop lossed” – that is, his service was involuntarily extended — and served 14 months with the 1st Cavalry Division in 2004. Door-to-door fighting in Baghdad left him with nightmares and an impatient streak. His back, he says, is permanently strained from operating the heavy artillery gun atop a Paladin tank.
When Torres returned from his deployment he found his relationship with Nevaeh’s mother, who is Sioux Indian, in tatters. He spent a year on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota with her, trying to patch his family together. But there, he said, he felt isolated and overwhelmed.
“My mom told me, you know what, ‘come home to New York—you got family here, we can help you,’” he said.
He returned to the Lower East Side with 2-year old Neveah and temporarily moved back into the family apartment in Seward Park Houses. But the house was full: Torres and his daughter shared a single bedroom with a bunk bed—Nevaeh slept on top, and Torres took the bottom.
Unable to keep a steady job and spending most of his days in and out of doctor’s offices at the Manhattan Veteran’s Affairs Hospital, Torres wanted his own apartment, but getting one seemed impossible. There were 135,000 people were in line ahead of him for public housing. The waitlist for federally subsidized housing, known as Section 8, is so long that the New York City Housing Authority, which administers the program, is not accepting new applications.
Yet, in September, Torres signed a lease on a two-bedroom subsidized apartment in Woodhaven, Queens. He is one of 1,300 homeless veterans in New York State who has been awarded a housing voucher by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Veteran Affairs Supportive Housing, or HUD-VASH for short.
HUD-VASH was revived by Congress in 2008, to provide housing for, according to its estimates, the roughly 100,000 homeless veterans in the United States. Over the past three years, Congress has appropriated $225 million to HUD-VASH, funding 30,000 vouchers. In 2008, nearly 10 percent of Congressional funding for the program went to the New York City Housing Authority.
Though the program primarily assists Vietnam-era veterans, a study by the Urban Institute in Washington DC, points out that the vouchers benefit an increasing number of single-parent and low-income veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, who might otherwise be forced to live in shelters.
“Very few Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans come back from the war homeless,” said Raymond Baker, Torres’ social worker at the Manhattan Veterans Affairs Hospital said, referring to veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “They have families who can help them, and they haven’t had enough time to become alcoholics and drug addicts—Vietnam was in the 1960s. They have had more time to develop the evil, so to speak.”
But, he said, 11 of the 35 cases he manages, “fall under the umbrella of Persian Gulf veterans.” Most of them, he said, are low income—the cap for the program is $26,000—and their disabilities “range from PTSD, like Mr. Torres, to physical injuries.”
Torres said that he is managing his PTSD and trying to help his daughter adjust to life in their new apartment. For the time being, he has kept her enrolled in the charter school near his family’s apartment on the Lower East Side, even though he must rise at 6 a.m. to get her there from Queens every day.
“Sometimes Nevaeh misses being here,” he said, opening his mother’s well-stocked refrigerator, “but I like the privacy and the peace and quiet of our house.”
Every day single father Dean Torres picks his daughter up from school and brings her to his parent's house, where they lived before Torres, an Iraq veteran, got a HUD-VASH voucher for an apartment in Queens. Credit: Mimi Wells
