.png){kind=logo}
Organizing agencies and providers around a single outcome — not housing stock alone — is what moved the number.
Route Fifty's Kaitlyn Levinson reported this week on New Jersey reaching functional zero for veteran homelessness, and on the coordination infrastructure the state built to get there. Civic Roundtable is proud to be one of the tools New Jersey's teams used, but the achievement belongs to the people who did the work.
New Jersey set the goal in March 2025: reach functional zero for veteran homelessness by July 1, 2026. The Department of Community Affairs and the Department of Veterans Affairs made the target public, put a date on it, and hit it. Governor Murphy's office announced the milestone at the end of July.
Functional zero means the number of veterans experiencing homelessness at any moment is smaller than the number the system has proven it can house in a month — a measure of system capacity, not a one-time count.
What stands out in the reporting is where the constraint actually sat. DCA project director Jaclynn Trakalo told Route Fifty that bureaucracy and red tape make homelessness systems hard for people to navigate, and that the state's answer was to "organize ourselves around the outcome" and point resources at it. New Jersey ran that work through six regional hubs, each pulling together state staff, local providers, and partners who had never shared a workflow before.
Coordination at that scale needs somewhere to live. In New Jersey, that meant a single place where every partner across the six hubs could reach the same policy documents, referral forms, provider directories, and case information — so a provider in one region wasn't working from a different version of the rules than a provider in another. Alongside it, the state stood up its own analytics platform to track referrals by organization and used a separate tool to follow self-referrals through to resolution. Providers are expected to reach a veteran within 24 hours and have a plan toward housing within 96 — a standard the state can now measure rather than hope for.
Gavin Rozzi, who directs the data center inside DCA's Division of Housing and Community Resources, described the department's direction as moving toward data for action. More than 2,500 former servicemembers have been connected to stable housing through the state's Bringing Veterans Home initiative, backed by $30 million in state and federal funding.
For context on the scale of the problem elsewhere: HUD estimated 32,495 veterans were experiencing homelessness nationally in January 2025, roughly 40% of them unsheltered.
Read the full article on Route Fifty: https://www.route-fifty.com/management/2026/08/new-jersey-reaches-its-goal-eliminate-veteran-homelessness/415378/
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter below.