A federal judge on Friday ordered the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to build more than 2,500 housing units for low-income veterans at its West Los Angeles campus.
In a 124-page decision following a bench trial, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter also ruled that leases to UCLA, Brentwood School and others on VA property are illegal because they do not primarily serve veterans.
UCLA's Jackie Robinson baseball stadium sits on 10 acres leased from the VA, and Brentwood High School's athletic facilities occupy 22 acres.
Carter criticized the VA for failing to meet its obligation to use the 388-acre campus to “primarily 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 has been enabled by a major educational institution to exclude veterans’ views on their own land,” he wrote.
Carter wrote that the VA in effect sold the land by allowing tenants to build concrete facilities on it, and then argued that tearing down those facilities would be wasteful.
“VA must remedy its mismanagement of this resource so that the land can once again be made available for its intended purpose: veterans housing,” Carter wrote.
Carter's order requires the VA to build 750 temporary housing units within 12 to 18 months and to formulate a plan within six months to add another 1,800 permanent housing units to the roughly 1,200 units already in planning and construction under the terms of a previous lawsuit settlement.
Carter ordered the VA to increase its street outreach staff and to increase the number of referrals it makes to local housing authorities to qualify veterans for housing subsidies.
Carter also requires the VA to begin construction of a town center, including amenities such as a cafeteria 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 further hearings.
In a closing statement at the trial, Justice Department attorney Brad Rosenberg argued that the VA has been making progress toward ending veteran homelessness and that the judge's proposal to house more veterans on campus would be financially burdensome and fundamentally alter how the VA houses homeless veterans.
“The plaintiffs want to shift scarce VA resources into a single facility to house people with high needs,” he said. “Whether or not the court thinks that’s a good idea, we think it’s a bad idea.”
The Justice Department declined to comment further. 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 the United States.”
In a statement, Brentwood School said its lease complies with federal law and highlighted the services the school provides to veterans, such as educational programs and access to 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 more than 70-year “public service partnership” with the VA.
“Working with the VA to serve veterans remains one of our key goals as part of UCLA’s teaching, research and public service mission,” he said.
In his closing statement, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney cast the case in stirring moral terms, saying that veterans who served their country “should never have lost precious years of their lives to homelessness.”
“They should never have slept on concrete sidewalks, cardboard sheets 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 tents. They should never have had to share space with rats, gophers and other vermin.”
The three-week trial in downtown federal court rehashed litigation dating back to 2011 that challenged the leases and claimed there was an unmet need for veterans housing. In the earlier case, a federal judge ruled that several leases were illegal. Under the West Los Angeles Lease Act of 2016, some were terminated and others renewed.
The VA inspector general subsequently found that the Brentwood School leases, as well as leases for land containing oil wells and parking lots, failed to meet the law's requirement that leases “primarily benefit veterans and their families.”
The VA disagreed and upheld the leases. A Brentwood official testified at 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 agreement, the VA agreed to develop a master plan for the campus. A draft plan, completed in 2016, called for 1,200 housing units 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.
“Since 2011, the Obama Administration, the Trump Administration, and the Biden Administration have all promised to act swiftly to end veteran homelessness in the United States,” 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 campus parking operator.
The government accused the parking lot operator of bribing the official to look the other way while the operator pocketed more than $11 million in revenue. The lots were used for events such as UCLA baseball games, the Wadsworth and Brentwood theaters and the PGA golf tournament at the Riviera Country Club.
Prior to trial, Carter had issued two rulings in favor of the plaintiffs. Last year, he determined that the 1888 land deed held by Sen. John P. Jones and his business partner, socialite and businesswoman Arcadia Bandini Stearns of Baker, for “a branch of [the] “The National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers” established a trust and Congress assumed a fiduciary duty for said trust.
Addressing another element of the case, Carter ruled in May that federal housing policy discriminated against veterans by counting the disability compensation they received from the VA as income, which then disqualified them from accessing low-income housing on the VA campus.
Carter ruled that the campus housing plan must include units that do not count disability benefits as income.
Acknowledging the plaintiffs' argument that a lack of enforcement had allowed the rulings to occur, Carter said he would appoint a judicial monitor to ensure the terms of his ruling are followed.
In a rebuke of the VA's practice of hiring 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 for its housing projects.”
During the trial, the plaintiffs recounted the story 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 on Veterans Row but became an advocate for those who did, testified about the misery, despair and deaths there, as well as the neglect by VA staff who never stepped outside the fence to offer help.
Reynolds traced the evolution of the VA's response from initial neglect to a plan to move veterans inside a tent village and then to their current accommodations in tiny 8-by-8-foot homes, which he described as “the boxes they live in.” He attributed the VA's increased attention to media coverage.
On Friday, Reynolds said he was grateful for the decision.
“I always felt that if this were to go before a judge, they would see what we’ve all seen for years,” Reynolds said. “The facts are indisputable. I think this is a great start to ending veteran homelessness and returning this property to its original use, as a soldiers’ home.”
