Route Fifty, the national publication covering state and local government, reported on New Jersey reaching Functional Zero for veteran homelessness and on the systems the state used to get there. Reporter Kaitlyn Levinson interviewed Gavin Rozzi, described in the article as director of DCA’s Division of Housing and Community Resources Data Center, along with Jaclynn Trakalo, the department’s project director for the initiative.
What the article covers
The piece traces Bringing Veterans Home from its late-2024 launch through the July 1, 2026 target that the Department of Community Affairs and the Department of Veterans Affairs set in March 2025. It reports more than 2,500 former servicemembers connected to stable housing over roughly a year and a half, supported by $30 million in state and federal funding, coordinated across six regional hubs.
For national context, the article cites HUD’s estimate of 32,495 veterans experiencing homelessness nationwide in January 2025, about 40 percent of them unsheltered.
Trakalo framed the problem the initiative was organized around:
“One of the biggest things we recognize is that government bureaucracies and red tape often make it hard for people to navigate these homelessness systems, so what we need to do as a state is organize ourselves around the outcome and deploy our resources to achieve that outcome.”
On the data infrastructure
Rozzi described the direction of the work as “moving … toward a vision of data for action,” and told Route Fifty that standardizing housing information across state staff and service providers is what lets veterans receive accurate and timely assistance.
The article covers three pieces of the technology stack: a web-based operations platform from Civic Roundtable that gives partners a shared home for policy documents, referral information, forms, and provider directories; an internally built platform that tracks program analytics such as referral counts by organization; and the Simpligov self-referral form, which measures how providers respond after a veteran reaches out.
Providers are expected to make contact within 24 hours and reach a plan of action toward housing within 96 hours, which Trakalo said gives the state a way to measure speed and accuracy.
On building it out, Rozzi told the publication: “What was really amazing to me was how, with a relatively small team here and working with some of our external tools, we were able to really keep cranking out solutions for a lot of the complex needs that came up with standing up some of the referral infrastructures and being able to follow the journey of the veterans through the system.”
Sustaining the milestone
The article closes on what comes after the announcement. “A number is just a number, and we need to make sure these systems are enhanced so we can sustain” the result, Trakalo said, pointing toward applying the same approach to other populations at risk of homelessness, including children and survivors of domestic abuse.
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