When a team from Volunteers of America found Melissa Degnan living on the streets of Orange County in February 2016, she was cleaning the bathroom at an RV storage yard in exchange for a place to sleep. She’d had a close call with a roving band of teens who were beating up homeless people.
“Things were getting pretty hairy at the place I was hiding out,” Degnan says. “They had their sights on me.”
Outreach volunteers persuaded Degnan to get into their car by offering her a burrito – “it was my first hot food in years,” she says – and took her to a former Navy housing complex in Long Beach called the Villages at Cabrillo. Here the Army veteran receives medical and mental health care and stays in a studio apartment with donated furniture, including a side table where she keeps the picture of her late parents she managed to hang onto while living on the streets.
Homeless advocates hope the same partners that run the Villages can transform neglected buildings and overgrown grounds at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center campus into a therapeutic community with permanent supportive housing for approximately 1,200 veterans. There’s a lot riding on U.S.VETS, Century Housing and Thomas Safran & Associates, who formed the West Los Angeles Veterans Collective and were selected to oversee redevelopment of the VA campus.
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Author: caLegion Contributor
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