Brady sits on the sofa now, but the mattress on the bed has never been used. He prefers to sleep on the floor.

Brady has coronary artery disease and just completed treatment for prostate cancer, but he went to radiation every day on his own and takes his medication religiously, Perez said.

How’s life off the streets?

“It’s OK,” he said, on the couch with a blanket over his lap and his walker nearby. “I think the streets have wonderful things for people. Adversity? Why be afraid? I have faced adversity. I’ve had a couple of breakdowns and I discovered myself … What the streets taught me is self-reliance.”

It’s this kind of language that crystallizes the challenges that lie ahead.

“Now we‘ve got all these vets housed, but they’re not used to budgeting, paying the rent,” said Matt Rayburn, a regional manager at the main Los Angeles PATH center, who listens in on Hauser’s interview.

“The challenge is, how do we identify that this guy is going to have problems paying his rent before his landlord calls? How do we get them to make social connections?”

Caseworkers ask landlords to alert them before starting the eviction process and then try to intervene before the veterans are forced to return to a life on the streets.

“We have a moral obligation to help these people,” Rayburn said.

There is no question the Obama administration’s effort to house homeless veterans is groundbreaking, Holmes said.

“But just as much effort has to be put in to keep them housed,” he said. “We found out the hard way that it takes an average year and a half to get them in a house and three months to get evicted. And once evicted, it takes five years to get them back. We’re not even scratching the surface.”