Recovery Michigan

Mr. Shinseki resigned in 2014, undone by health care scandals on his watch, but the administration, undaunted, announced another campaign that year, called the Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness. New name, new strategic emphasis — enlisting state and local governments and philanthropies — but the same promise: a home for all down-and-out veterans in all 50 states by 2015.

The program has succeeded in only two states, Virginia and Connecticut, and a number of localities.

The good news is that the V.A., like states and cities around the country, has at least come to understand what works: “housing first” strategies that avoid the red tape and restrictive conditions that have left too many of the hardest-to-help veterans, unmoored by illness and addiction, in shelters and on the street.

A housing-voucher program that the V.A. runs with the Department of Housing and Urban Development has had much success. In Los Angeles, epicenter of the crisis, the V.A. is finally planning to build 1,200 units of supportive housing for a population it has neglected for generations. It took legal action by local advocates and the cooperation of the new V.A. secretary, Robert McDonald, to get the ball moving there, though the shovel-ready project awaits the passage of legislation stalled in Congress.