A Street of Their Own: Brandon Wilke's Plan to House North County's Veterans
Updated: Sep 20
On any given night in Florissant, there are veterans sleeping without a roof over their heads. Not in some distant city, not in a statistic on a national news segment — on the same streets where Brandon Wilke grew up, went to school, and now hopes to represent as Missouri's next State Representative for District 75.
For Wilke, that fact isn't abstract. It's personal.
“We have homeless veterans right here on our own streets in Florissant, and that should never happen,” Wilke said. “It takes away their dignity. These are people who've seen and done things most of us can't imagine, and whatever a veteran needs, they should get it — no questions asked."
It's the kind of line that could sound like a platitude coming from most politicians. Coming from Wilke — a 26-year-old former HVAC technician running his first campaign in a district that hasn't elected a Republican in decades — it reads more like a promise he intends to keep, not a talking point he's borrowing for the campaign trail.
A System Veterans Say Failed Them
Wilke didn't arrive at this issue through a briefing book. He got there the way he's gotten to most of his positions this cycle: by knocking on doors and listening to what people in Florissant and Black Jack are actually dealing with. And when the conversation turns to veterans, Wilke says the same complaint comes up again and again — a VA healthcare system that, for years, made men and women wait months for basic care.
“Before this administration, veterans were waiting three to six months just to get a VA appointment,” Wilke said. “That system was broken, and our veterans paid the price for it.”
It's a claim that tracks with years of well-documented complaints about VA wait times nationally, and it's shaped how Wilke talks about the issue — not as a slogan about “supporting the troops,” but as a specific failure of a specific system that he believes state government has a role in fixing, even though the VA itself is a federal agency. His argument is that Missouri doesn't have to wait on Washington to act. There's a state-level piece of this problem, he says, and it starts with something more basic than healthcare policy: a place to live.
The Proposal: A Cluster, Not a Waiting List
Ask Wilke what he'd actually file as legislation in his first term, and veteran housing is the answer that comes fastest. His model draws direct inspiration from the Tunnels to Towers Foundation, the nonprofit best known for building mortgage-free homes for veterans and first-responders' families. Wilke wants to take a version of that idea and build it into how Missouri's legislative districts operate.
“Every district should have a place set aside — a few townhouses or apartments where veterans who need it can stay while they get back on their feet,” Wilke said. “Put them in one area where they can access services together and be around each other, because that shared experience matters. That's the kind of thing Tunnels to Towers has already proven works.”
The idea, as Wilke describes it, isn't a single mega-shelter or a distant facility — it's smaller, localized clusters, ideally built on undeveloped land within each district, close enough that veterans stay connected to the community they served rather than being shipped somewhere out of sight. The clustering isn't incidental to the plan; it's the point. Wilke argues that veterans often find more value in being around others who understand exactly what they've been through than in any single service a caseworker can offer.
It's a notably concrete proposal for a candidate who, on several other issues, talks in terms of principles and priorities rather than bill language. Housing clusters. Undeveloped land, identified district by district. Services delivered on-site rather than veterans having to navigate a maze of appointments across the county. It's the kind of specificity that suggests this is the issue Wilke has actually spent time thinking through, not one he's reaching for because it polls well.
Dignity as the Starting Point, Not the Slogan
What separates Wilke's pitch from the standard campaign-trail nod to veterans is where he starts the conversation: not with benefits or budgets, but with dignity. Ask him what “veteran healthcare and dignity” means beyond the phrase printed on his campaign site, and he doesn't reach for a policy footnote — he points to the men he knows are sleeping on the street a few blocks from where he lives.
That's consistent with how Wilke frames most of his campaign: less about ideology, more about what he's actually seen and heard from the neighbors he grew up around. He's not a policy veteran himself, and he doesn't pretend to be. He's a former HVAC technician who spent the last several years knocking on doors for other candidates before deciding, as he puts it, that if he was going to put his name on something, he was going to do it properly.
The veteran housing proposal is a test of that instinct. It's ambitious for a first-term legislator to promise — funding, land acquisition, and service coordination across multiple districts are not small lifts, and Wilke hasn't yet laid out exactly how the state would pay for it. But it's also the rare campaign promise built around a story rather than a poll number: a candidate who says he can point to the exact street where the problem lives, and who wants his first bill in Jefferson City to be about the people he says the current system has already let down.
For a district that has spent decades voting the same way, Wilke is betting that specificity — a street, a name, a plan with actual shape to it — might be what finally gets a different kind of attention. Whether Jefferson City agrees is still an open question. But for the veterans he's talking about, Wilke says the wait has already gone on long enough.
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