A federal judge on Friday ordered the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to build more than 2,500 units of housing for low-income veterans on its West Los Angeles campus.
In a 124-page decision following a non-jury trial, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter also ruled that leases to UCLA, Brentwood School and others on the VA property are illegal because they don’t principally serve veterans.
UCLA’s Jackie Robinson baseball stadium is on 10 acres leased from the VA, and Brentwood School’s athletic facility occupies 22 acres.
Carter castigated the VA for falling short of its obligation to use the 388-acre campus to “principally benefit veterans and their families.”
“Over the past five decades, the West LA VA has been infected by bribery, corruption, and the influence of the powerful and their lobbyists, and enabled by a major educational institution in excluding veterans’ input about their own lands,” he wrote.
Carter wrote that the VA has in effect sold off the land by allowing leaseholders to construct concrete facilities on it, then arguing that tearing those facilities down would be wasteful.
“The VA must remediate its mishandling of this resource so that the land may once again be available for its intended purpose: the housing of veterans,” Carter wrote.
Carter’s order requires the VA to build 750 units of temporary housing within 12 to 18 months and to form a plan within six months to add another 1,800 units of permanent housing to the roughly 1,200 units already in planning and construction under the settlement terms of an earlier lawsuit.
Carter ordered the VA to increase its street outreach staffing and to increase the number of referrals it makes to local housing authorities to qualify veterans for housing subsidies.
Carter is also requiring the VA to begin construction of a town center, including such amenities as a cafe and general store, on the property within 18 months.
The ruling did not specify what should happen to the VA’s leases with UCLA, Brentwood School and others but said the “court will determine an exit strategy” after more hearings.
In a closing statement at the trial, Department of Justice attorney Brad Rosenberg argued that the VA has been making progress in ending veteran homelessness and that the judge’s proposal to house more veterans on the campus would be financially burdensome and fundamentally alter the way the VA houses homeless veterans.
“Plaintiffs want to shift VA’s scarce resources to a single location to house people with high needs,” he said. “Whether or not the court thinks that is a good idea, we think it’s a bad idea.”
The Department of Justice declined further comment. The VA issued a statement saying it was reviewing the decision and “will continue to do everything in our power to end Veteran homelessness — both in Los Angeles and across America.”
In a statement, Brentwood School said that its lease complies with federal law and pointed to services that the school provides to veterans, such as educational programs and access to the facilities.
“While we are still examining the full implications of the ruling, it would be a significant loss for many Veterans if the extensive services we provide were eliminated,” the statement said.
UCLA’s media office issued a statement saying the university is reviewing the decision to see how it will affect its “public service partnership” of more than 70 years with the VA.
“Working with the VA to serve veterans continues to be one of our key objectives as part of UCLA’s mission of teaching, research and public service,” it said.
In his closing statement, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney cast the case in rousing moral terms, saying that veterans who served their country “should never have lost precious years of their lives because they were unhoused.”
“They should never have slept on concrete sidewalks, sheets of cardboard or thin plastic tarps,” said Mark Rosenbaum of the pro bono law firm Public Counsel. “They should never have spent nights exposed to the elements in sleeping bags or donated pup tents. They should never have had to share space with rats and gophers and other vermin.”
The three-week trial in downtown federal court reprised litigation going back to 2011 that challenged the leases and asserted an unmet need for veteran housing. In the earlier case, a federal judge ruled that several leases were illegal. Under the West Los Angeles Leasing Act of 2016, some were terminated and others renewed.
Subsequently, the VA’s inspector general found that leases to Brentwood School, as well as leases for land containing oil wells and parking lots, did not comply with the leasing act’s requirement to “principally benefit veterans and their families.”
The VA disagreed and retained the leases. A Brentwood official testified in the recent trial that the school pays $850,000 annually in rent to the VA and provides more than $900,000 in “in-kind” services, including meals for veterans and a shuttle service so they can use the campus.
In a 2015 settlement, the VA agreed to develop a master plan for the campus. A draft plan, completed in 2016, called for 1,200 units of housing in new and rehabilitated buildings, with a commitment to complete more than 770 units by the end of 2022. Only 54 of those units were completed by the deadline, and only 233 are currently open.
“In the years since 2011, the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and the Biden administration have each promised that they would act swiftly to eradicate veteran homelessness in America,” Carter wrote in his ruling released Friday. “Yet, today, approximately 3,000 homeless veterans live in the Los Angeles area alone.”
In 2018, a former VA contract officer pleaded guilty to accepting $286,000 in bribes from a parking lot operator on the campus.
The government accused the lot operator of bribing the official to look the other way as the operator skimmed more than $11 million in revenue. The lots were used for event parking for UCLA baseball games, the Wadsworth and Brentwood theaters and the PGA golf tournament at the Riviera Country Club.
Prior to the trial, Carter had made two rulings in the plaintiffs’ favor. Last year, he found that the 1888 deed of the land by Sen. John P. Jones and his business partner, the socialite and businesswoman Arcadia Bandini Stearns de Baker, for “a branch of [the] National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers” established a trust and that Congress assumed a fiduciary duty for that trust.
Addressing another element of the case, Carter ruled in May that federal housing policy discriminated against veterans by counting disability compensation they received from the VA as income, which then disqualified them from the low-income housing on the VA campus.
Carter ruled that the housing plan for the campus must include units that will not count disability benefits as income.
Acknowledging the plaintiffs’ argument that a lack of enforcement had allowed the failures to occur, Carter said he would appoint a court monitor to ensure that the terms of his ruling are met.
In a rebuke of the VA’s practice of contracting with developers whose use of cumbersome tax credits has delayed construction, Carter ordered the VA to “employ the most efficient, affordable, and time sensitive conventional financing of its housing projects.”
During the trial, plaintiffs recounted the history of Veterans Row, a collection of tents that sprang up along San Vicente Boulevard just outside the VA grounds during the pandemic.
Rob Reynolds, an Iraq war veteran who did not live in Veterans Row but became an advocate for those who did, testified to the squalor, despair and deaths there, as well as the neglect by VA staff who never came outside the fence to offer aid.
Reynolds traced the evolution of the VA’s response from initial neglect to a plan to bring the vets inside to a village of pup tents and then to their current accommodations in 8-by-8-foot tiny homes, which he described as “the boxes that they live in.” He attributed the VA’s increased attention to media coverage.
On Friday, Reynolds said he was thankful for the decision.
“I felt all along if this went in front of a judge, he would see what we have all seen for years,” Reynolds said. “The facts are indisputable. I think this is a great start to end veteran homelessness and get this property back to its original intended use as a soldiers’ home.”