It took the real estate market to bring a long-running fight between hard-pressed veterans of military service and upscale Angelenos to a head.
And the market’s current housing crunch and the public health crisis of homelessness has brought the law down on the side of the veterans.
The result came in a decision by U.S. District Judge David Carter, who ruled after a non-jury trial that the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs must build 2,500 or so units of affordable housing for veterans on its West Los Angeles campus, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Carter’s ruling also called out the VA for illegally leasing portions of the property to the University of California-Los Angeles and the Brentwood School, a private academy that has counted scions of some of the city’s wealthiest families among its student body for decades.
Carter chastised the VA for failing in its mission to ensure the 388-acre campus — a prime piece of Los Angeles real estate, wedged between the Brentwood and Westwood districts of the city — to “principally benefit veterans and their families.”
The campus currently has a VA hospital and other facilities on site and the agency has worked to try to develop housing on the site.
The federal judge, who also has heard cases related to various aspects of homelessness in the Southern California region, also lumped the VA into the widening arena of public corruption in Los Angeles.
“Over the past five decades, the West L.A. 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 ordered the VA to come up with a viable plan to add 1,800 units of permanent housing to the roughly 1,200 units already in the works at the campus under terms of an earlier legal settlement. He also called for the development of a minimum 750 units of temporary housing in the next 12 to 18 months.
The ruling said that the “court will determine an exit strategy” for the illegitimate leases with UCLA — which has its baseball stadium on the VA campus — and the Brentwood School — after more hearings.
The U.S. Department of Justice, which represented the VA in the trial, declined to comment.
Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, who represented a group of homeless veterans with various disabilities as plaintiffs in the case, said he expects the ruling to reverberate at VA facilities across the U.S.