Army veteran Chase Fico got good at faking a smile during the 89 days he was homeless and living in motels with his two young children.

He smiled through their daily trips to get breakfast, the hours they spent doing schoolwork, the day they celebrated his son’s third birthday. He tried to make everything feel as normal as possible.

He only let himself cry in the shower.

After months of bouncing between motels and struggling to find a place to rent, Fico connected in 2024 with the program for homeless veterans at Preble Street, a nonprofit agency in Portland. There, he found the help he needed to move into an apartment before buying a house in Aroostook County.

Fico, 41, is among the hundreds of former military members in Maine who have moved into permanent housing amid a push to end veteran homelessness.

The Department of Veterans Affairs announced last month that it permanently housed nearly 52,000 veterans across the country during fiscal 2025 — the largest number in the past seven years. That includes 236 people in Maine, up from 206 in the previous year.

“There are veterans sleeping on a bench in a park and they don’t need to be,” Fico said. “There needs to be less bombs falling out of the sky and there need to be more veterans in beds.”

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2024 Point-in-Time Count, the number of unsheltered veterans across the country decreased by nearly 11% from the year before, to 13,851.

Advocates are keeping a close eye on a lawsuit filed by Maine and other states to try to prevent the federal government from cutting millions of dollars in funding for homeless prevention support. Losing those vouchers could take away stable housing and supportive services from disabled veterans in Maine, they say.

There are now about 156 homeless veterans in Maine, according to Laura Clark, director of Veterans Housing Services at Preble Street, which has an annual $4.3 million federal grant to provide case management and housing support to veterans statewide.

Danielle Mayer, the VA Maine homeless program manager, credits the success in part to a nationwide initiative launched in May that focused on finding unsheltered veterans to connect them with resources and housing.

The VA teamed up with Preble Street, the Bread of Life shelter in Augusta and other organizations to do several “surges” over the summer, with teams going to encampments and shelters, Mayer said.

“The people who do this work are such a dedicated group who really are driven by the mission to end veteran homelessness,” she said. “We usually end our meetings by talking about wanting to put ourselves out of a job.”

VETERANS AT RISK

Fico said he grew up in southern Georgia and Florida before joining the Air Force and later enlisted in the Army, serving as an intelligence analyst. After his service, Fico said he worked in law enforcement and on a large horse farm.

He fell in love with Maine — the cool air, the mountains, the lack of fire ants — on his first visit to the state years ago and moved north with his family. They wanted to stay in Maine, but after having to move out of a rental, they ended up back in Georgia, where the family struggled to find stability.

Fico, who was working multiple jobs, said he walked 2 miles each way to sell his plasma for extra cash to buy milk and formula.

When his marriage was ending, Fico moved back to Maine with his two youngest children, 8-year-old Brighton and 4-year-old Evander. His two older children, now 21 and 17, still live in the South.

When Fico couldn’t find a place to rent and ran out of money, they moved into motels in Dover, New Hampshire, and southern Maine.

He reached out to the VA for help and was referred to Preble Street, where he was assigned a case manager.

“It’s this program full of people with resources who said, ‘Relax, we got you,'” he said. “They grabbed us all and lifted us up.”

Clark said many of their clients ended up in that position because one major thing went wrong. Sometimes they got behind on bills because of an unexpected expense. Others have run into trouble with landlords because of behavioral issues.

“Once they were behind, it kept going because they were stressed or had other things happen,” Clark said.

Preble Street said it served 599 veterans’ households, comprised of 846 people, during the most recent grant year. About half of those veterans are at risk of becoming homeless and the organization works with them to prevent that.

Once a veteran connects with Preble Street or the VA, they work with a case manager to get into a shelter or apartment and staff help them identify and access other resources they need. Preble Street collaborates with a network of 322 landlords across the state to house veterans.

Last year, some of the veterans referred to Preble Street and the VA were newly discharged from the military, Mayer said. The oldest was 77.

“The misconception is that it’s one specific type of veteran,” Mayer said, “and that’s not the case at all.”

FINDING HOMELESS VETERANS

In early August, staff from the VA, Preble Street and other partner agencies spread out across Cumberland, York , Kennebec and Penobscot counties to find homeless veterans and get them into an emergency shelter or transitional housing, Mayer said.

The teams identified 22 people during the three-day surge and were able to get many of them into facilities run by Preble Street and Bread of Life, which has 22 shelter beds set aside for veterans.

Clark saw the effort as a success and said it came as the number of homeless veterans in Maine had started to creep back up. By mid-summer, there were 179 veterans in the state identified as homeless, up from 109 in the spring.

“Back in May, we were so close to ending veteran homelessness,” she said. “We’re making our way back to where we were and hopefully we can keep the trajectory downward.”

There is concern that a Trump administration plan to cut millions in homeless prevention support could impact disabled veterans who rely on vouchers through the Permanent Supportive Housing program, which provides stable housing and supportive services.

In a notice last month, HUD announced it was making “monumental” changes to its Continuum of Care homelessness prevention program and would shift billions from permanent housing support to transitional housing and mental health services.

State leaders have said 1,200 people in Maine, including some veterans, would lose their stable housing as early as January if the change moves forward. Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey joined a lawsuit against HUD and a federal judge in December granted a preliminary injunction to temporarily block the changes.

“We anticipate as those funding cliffs come, we’re going to see an influx of clients calling our referral line and needing our support,” Clark said.

SETTLING INTO A HOME

Fico, the Army veteran, said he thinks the government should be pumping more money into programs that give homeless veterans a helping hand.

Without support, he knows he may not have found his way to Washburn, the tiny town in Aroostook County where he and his kids moved in July 2024. They rented their house until Fico was able to secure a VA loan to buy it.

“God had a real good way of giving back everything we had lost,” he said in his soft Southern drawl.

They’ve settled into their two-story house, with a big living room and a red barn in the backyard. They grow vegetables in their garden and cook together while listening to Italian music. They’ve made friends with their neighbors.

It’s the longest the family has ever lived in one place, Fico said.

“It’s like Mayberry,” he said. “The kids have been safe, the kids have been happy. We haven’t had to struggle. We’ve had time given back to us.”