(CNN) — Vietnam veteran Jayson Carter is preparing for his worst-case scenario — having to live out of his car.
Carter, a 78-year-old who served in the Air Force, is homeless and staying in a facility for veterans in Memphis, Tennessee.
He’s one of more than two dozen veterans at facilities run by the nonprofit Alpha Omega Veterans Services who could be evicted if a plan hatched by the Trump administration, which is being challenged in court, is allowed to go through.
Under the plan, which would affect facilities across the country, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is hoping to move many formerly homeless people from permanent housing to temporary transitional housing. Advocates say people could be forced out as facilities convert to transitional housing and take new applicants.
“It would be just disastrous,” Carter told CNN. “I’d be back on the street in my old Buick with no air conditioning.” Carter added that his health challenges would make the predicament even worse. He said he has suffered neurological damage from a series of falls, and that he has end-stage renal disease.
Transitional housing provides short-term shelter to ideally bridge the gap between emergencies and permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness. It is typically offered for up to two years, but homeless advocates say the average length spent in transitional housing tends to be much shorter — only a few months — with many returning to homelessness.
HUD informed Alpha Omega and other facilities last year about its plan to shift more than $3 billion in grant funding to transitional housing, leaving the facilities and those living in them scrambling to find alternatives.
Alpha Omega has been helping veterans in the Memphis area transition out of homelessness for nearly 40 years. Al Edwards, its executive director, runs three housing facilities for the organization.
Edwards told CNN that because of the HUD policy change, he would have to convert one of his permanent supportive housing facilities, the one in which Carter resides, into a transitional housing building.
“I will definitely have to evict everyone,” said Edwards, who says about 30 veterans in that building would have to leave in the coming weeks.
“I have cried tears about this,” Edwards told CNN. “This has been the most stressful period of my life.”
But a federal judge in Rhode Island has temporarily blocked HUD’s efforts, as part of a lawsuit the National Alliance to End Homelessness and other advocacy groups filed against HUD. A ruling could come soon.
If HUD prevails, the decision would affect not only homeless veterans, but also the wider at-risk population.
Ann Oliva, executive director of National Alliance to End Homelessness, said up to about 170,000 formerly homeless people across the US who have been housed by these programs could be evicted and forced back into homelessness over the next year.
“HUD is trying to defund evidence-based, well-run programs all over the country, permanent housing programs all over the country, in favor of short-term interventions that don’t actually keep people housed over a long period of time,” Oliva told CNN.
“We’re just trying to protect people’s homes,” she said.
A HUD spokesperson told CNN that the current federally funded system for homeless Americans is “misguided” and that some homeless people who use it are exposed to illegal drugs and sex offenders.
“HUD fully stands by our objective to overhaul America’s failed homelessness system, which has relied almost exclusively on permanently warehousing the homeless at exorbitant taxpayer cost while ignoring root causes,” the spokesperson said in an email.
A similar version of HUD’s plan can be found in the Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump administration, a political initiative published by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The HUD section of Project 2025 says a new administration should “end Housing First policies so that the department prioritizes mental health and substance abuse issues before jumping to permanent interventions in homelessness.”
A footnote in that section expands the idea, stating that there should be a “shift to transitional housing with a focus on addressing the underlying issues that cause homelessness in the first place.”
Deborah DeSantis, president and CEO of the Corporation for Supportive Housing, a national homeless advocacy organization that is not a party to the suit, said HUD’s effort to prioritize transitional housing is ill-advised.
“What I’m concerned about is the instability this is creating for housing providers who have identified what their local needs are and have built a structure to advance and create opportunities for people. And they are now being asked to create programs that don’t address those local needs,” DeSantis said.
Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify a reference to a VA effort aimed at helping veterans, many of whom are homeless, make medical decisions.
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