LOS ANGELES (CN) — A federal judge issued a final ruling Friday in the legal battle by homeless vets suffering from serious mental illness to force the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs to make the huge VA campus in West Los Angeles serve their needs again.
U.S. District Judge David Carter entered final judgment in favor of the veterans and issued a permanent injunction requiring the department to build 1,800 supportive housing units on the campus within six years so that veterans can have accesses to the services they require without having to live on the streets nearby.
“Plaintiffs in this case, like many generations of American service-members before them, bear indelible physical and mental scars from their time in the armed forces,” the judge, himself a Vietnam veteran, wrote in a separate opinion. “The VA in West Los Angeles, however, has for decades strayed from its mission to care for these veterans.”
“Veterans have seen the government swiftly deploy its resources to send them into conflict, then claim an inability to overcome funding shortfalls and administrative hurdles when they need shelter and housing back at home,” Carter added.
Noting that the VA’s own Office of the Inspector General, federal courts and veterans have long said the administration wasn’t doing enough to house veterans in LA, the judge said, the VA continued to lease portions of the West LA campus to a private school, UCLA’s baseball team, an oil company and other private interests.
Carter issued similar findings early September after a trial on the veteran’s claims.
The evidence provided during the bench trial in August, showed that in order to access the critical services located on the West LA grounds and avoid institutionalization, veterans with serious mental illness and traumatic brain injuries require permanent supportive housing, according to Carter.
This includes case management, education, employment assistance, and mental health services on or near the West LA grounds, he said.
Given the lack of affordable housing near the West LA campus — which is surrounded mostly by affluent neighborhoods such as Brentwood and Westwood — veterans who depend on the VA’s services need to travel for hours sometimes to get to the campus. As a result, many started living in tents on so-called Veteran’s Row near the campus.
Carter has used the bench before to decry the homelessness crisis that has been plaguing the LA area. At a hearing in December he encouraged Congress to get involved in resolving the problem of homeless vets, with many of them having returned severely disabled from tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“We are the homeless veterans capital of the world right now,” Carter said, referring to the 3,500 vets living on the streets of LA. “We can’t let his happen.”
The judge said he didn’t want the lawsuit, first filed in November of last year, to languish any longer. Barring a settlement, he wants the case to go to trial this coming summer, he told the parties.
The walled complex near the wealthy Brentwood neighborhood on LA’s westside takes up 388 acres of land donated to the VA in 1887 to be a “soldier’s home,” a place for wounded veterans to live. But the lush, sprawling campus, which includes a large hospital for veterans, offers little in the way of permanent housing structures for veterans in need.
“There are today more than 100 buildings on the WLA campus, many vacant, closed or underutilized, as well as acres of available land,” the veterans say in their complaint. “In contrast to what once existed and was intended, virtually no permanent housing is available to veterans with disabilities on the WLA campus.”