Survey of Municipal Veteran Services

Introduction

The Department of Defense (DoD) employs nearly 2.1 million service members (1.3 million activeduty service members and 800,000 reserve forces).¹ Each year, approximately 200,000 service members separate from the military, joining the roughly 20 million veterans living throughout the United States today.² The U.S. veteran population is steadily shrinking, with half of all veterans now residing in just 10 states and an increasing trend of veterans’ moving to Southern and Western states.³ However, communities across the country have residents who are veterans, as shown in Figure 1; in large part they are integrated into communities and often an invisible demographic.

In terms of dollars spent and numbers served, the majority of government programs delivering services to veterans are federal. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) remains the largest provider of health care, disability benefits, educational benefits, home loan guarantees, and other services. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Labor, the Social Security Administration, and other agencies also provide various types of support to veterans. State and county efforts offer a range of services as well, though support varies widely depending on location, size, and capacity.

An underexplored area of research is the role that cities play in supporting veterans. This report represents an initial effort to bridge that knowledge gap by presenting and analyzing the results of a survey of mayors, a research project made possible by the collaboration of Comcast NBCUniversal, the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM), and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

There has been no national survey of veterans since 2010, either by the VA or Census Bureau, and this survey did not comprehensively assess veterans’ needs.⁴ Other research shows somewhat contradictory data on veterans’ status. For example, veterans are historically overrepresented in the U.S. homeless population and die by suicide at rates higher than those who have never served.⁵ However, they also have higher education levels, lower rates of poverty, higher rates of civic participation, and higher median earnings than nonveterans.⁶ Understanding what issues municipalities see as most challenging for veterans is valuable for the broader community of those who serve veterans: It provides important perspective on how veterans are viewed and offers insight into the services and benefits cities plan to prioritize.

The survey sought information from mayors or their designated representative on: (1) demographics of responding cities and their veteran populations; (2) organizational alignment on the city, county, state, and federal levels and with nonprofit and private partners; (3) challenges veterans face at the municipal level and obstacles to addressing these challenges; (4) cities’ successes and best practices. Appendix A includes the complete survey, Appendix B lists all participating cities, and Appendix C shares additional survey results.

This report provides a descriptive analysis of the respondents’ perceptions regarding challenges veterans in their communities face and barriers to supporting veterans that cities encounter. The analysis was not designed to assess the validity of pre-existing theories or whether city-level perceptions of the challenges veterans face align with other data sources. Different-size cities have different demographic and resource challenges and should likely be analyzed distinctly from one another; due to the small sample sizes, this report is unable to assess every issue in this manner. However, commonalities among responses from an array of cities help illustrate challenges cities face as well as identify successes that foster solutions in supporting the veteran population.

The following section explains the development of the survey instrument in partnership with USCM and the completed survey responses used as the basis for this descriptive analysis.