It was a cool night in April when James Bell, a veteran of the Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom, found comfort in Curtis Hixon Park in downtown Tampa. Wearing flipflops and shorts and carrying a bag of his possessions, he wandered from the Greyhound station until he found a bench in the park. There, he talked all night by cellphone to his wife and kids — now staying with his in-laws back in Atlanta — forgoing sleep as he contemplated an uncertain future.

Bell was homeless and jobless in a city he barely knew. The next two nights he endured the same ritual, sitting on a park bench at night but too scared to go to sleep. During those nights he thought about all of the jobs he had held, successfully, in the Army: ranger, drill sergeant, Airborne. Like anybody who has fallen from grace, he thought about where he had been and where he was now, and wondered: How did this happen?

"I'm college-educated, in the military for 15 years, worked my whole life," he says. "Now you gotta pick up the pieces."

Flash forward a month, and things started looking up. His third night in Tampa, he met someone who told him where he could go for food and clothing. He eventually found his way to churches that offered other essential services, and, because he was in the military, to the James A. Haley Veterans' Hospital. That's where he was told he might qualify for assistance from Tampa Crossroads, a local social service provider in Tampa's Seminole Heights.

When CL met up with him, Bell was completing an 11-page assessment form, documenting his life and explaining how he had ended up at their agency.

There was a good chance he could find help, because Tampa Crossroads is one of a handful of local agencies working with the federal government and the Homeless Coalition of Hillsborough County in a new program that's investigating how people like himself and other military veterans become homeless — and how to prevent it in the future.

According to the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Veterans Affairs departments, nearly 76,000 veterans went homeless for at least one night in 2009 — and 136,000 spent at least one night in a shelter.

That's obviously a serious concern — so serious that in 2009, President Obama and his Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Eric Shinseki, declared a goal to end all homelessness among veterans by 2015. Shinseki recently said so much progress has been made on that front that he's now upgraded his ambitions and moved the goalposts forward to 2014. And funding has now been made available to study specifically why military veterans become homeless in the first place.

In what may be an unprecedented collaboration among federal agencies, HUD, the VA and the Department of Labor are all joining forces to study the issue. Last summer Tampa was selected as one of five sites around the country to receive $2 million in funding for the three-year project, which officially began in March. HUD is working on short-term rental assistance, the VA is working on medical services and case management, and the Labor Department is providing job training and counseling.

In addition to being a military community, Tampa was chosen because it has a "significant homeless veterans population here, and a significant homeless population overall." That's according to Mark Johnston, deputy assistant secretary for special needs programs with HUD.

(The other four cities selected for the program are San Diego, CA; Killeen, Texas; Watertown, New York; and Tacoma, Washington, all home to military bases.)

The process for veterans begins at James A. Haley, the hospital in north Tampa. Once their identity is confirmed and their needs assessed, the Veterans Homeless Prevention Demonstration (VHPD) Project steps in. If the homeless vet appears eligible for the program, he or she will be sent to one of three "sub grantees": Hillsborough County Services, the Agency for Community Treatment Services (ACTS), or Tampa Crossroads.

Of those three, Crossroads had picked up the most referrals as of late May, with 40 different people having already gone through their system — though that doesn't mean that all of them qualified, says Stephanie George, the project coordinator at James Haley. "But we've been able to do some sort of connection with other programs that Crossroads has or the community has in general."

A recently completed homeless count in Hillsborough County found more than 7,000 people living on the streets, about 5 percent of them veterans. The last national count taken in 2009 reported that 12 percent of all homeless people counted as veterans, and reported that close to half of those vets — 45 percent — are either black (34 percent) or Latino (11 percent).

William Sermons, director of the Homelessness Research Institute, told the website BlackAmericaWeb that "Some of the risk factors affecting African-American men are high unemployment rates (almost double that of whites) and highly disproportionate rates of discharge from prisons and the foster care system."

But James Bell is a black man who has never been incarcerated. He was gainfully employed until the Great Recession hit America, causing him to lose his job as an information technology manager at IBM in 2008, and when he could no longer pay the mortgage, his house. After months' learning the hard way how dried-up the job market was in Georgia, he began casting his net throughout the southeast.

When he was contacted by the defense contractor Northrop Grumman for a job supervising software programs in Tampa, he thought his frustrating search was over. He came down with his pregnant wife, intending to relocate. But that prospect proved a cruel tease when he was told that he already had to be a Florida resident.

So now what? As he and his wife returned to Atlanta, he decided that she and their two kids would stay there and he would return to Tampa on his own to continue his job search. It wasn't until those first few nights on the park bench, looking across the river at the UT minarets, that the full weight of his situation sank in: Here he was, an educated man, one who'd never done drugs, barely even drank, yet he was walking the streets of an unknown city without a dime.

"That was the low point," he remembers. "I never ever didn't have money in my pocket."

And that's part of the reason he decided to seek a job here rather than in Georgia with his family. He doesn't want his kids seeing him in his current situation — and besides, once he does get a job, he'll have his family join him in Tampa Bay, where he says he now wants to live.

Federal officials say that, historically, veterans who become homeless usually don't fall into destitution until six to 10 years after their return from duty. But it's different now that two wars have been going on concurrently for nearly a decade.

Vince Kane, the Tampa-based director of the National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans, says there's been a huge movement to get the message out to Afghanistan and Iraq veterans about treatment services. He says that there is "something about the transition of leaving the military and coming back to civilian life that veterans have consistently been telling us is challenging." He adds that more is known now than after Vietnam about post-traumatic stress disorders. But whether vets are diagnosed with that ailment or not, "There are stress-related symptoms that need to be addressed."

Local officials say their goal with the three-year grant is to assist 300 people before its July 2014 deadline.

But on the larger issue of wiping out veteran homelessness, as per Secretary Shinseki's goal — isn't that a pipe dream?

Tampa Crossroads head and former state Legislator Sara Romeo thinks it might be.

"I know the homeless population of vets has receded, while the rest of the homeless population has increased dramatically in two years," she mused recently in her Nebraska Avenue office. But the fact is, there are veterans she meets almost weekly who don't want to move into housing, but actually prefer to live on the street.

And what does she think of the study to determine what can prevent homelessness in the future among American vets? "It's about identifying who they are, and how this near homelessness occurred," she says. "Is it because you're just lazy and would rather stay home and drink beer? Or was it because there were some real issues, and as soon as we gave you a bit of assistance and kind of pulled you up by your bootstraps, you caught on and now everybody's hunky-dory again?"

Anthony Love is with the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness out of Washington D.C. He says poverty is a large reason vets go homeless, but veterans are also dealing with severe disabilities and possibly with substance abuse. "But we still have a lot more to learn in terms of what truly propels a person into homelessness."

As for James Bell? Officials with Tampa Crossroads say he does meet the criteria for need and will be assisted by the VHPD Program as well as another program, the Veterans Employment Network. He continues to make daily treks to WorkForce Tampa Career Center, where he writes cover letters and thank-you notes to human resource directors at jobs he's applied for. And he's preparing to resume his work toward a masters degree in information technology at the Florida Institute for Technology in Melbourne.

Dealing with homelessness remains a challenge. "It's like a culture shock, I'm not used to it, I'm not used to the cursing, out of nowhere… A lot of people are sick, you're in the midst of a lot of negativity."

But he's determined to rise above it, and feels like others in his situation can, too.

"There's definitely help for veterans, for anyone here," he says. "I think a lot of people aren't proactive."

This article appears in May 26 – Jun 1, 2011.