For years, advocates have pushed for more veteran housing on a large campus in West LA that was gifted to the government to house soldiers and veterans.
Here are five key facts to understand that campus and what the future holds:
What is the West LA VA campus?
It’s a sprawling property nearly half the size of New York’s Central Park, near UCLA and the Brentwood neighborhood of L.A. The campus is owned by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and hosts a major regional hospital and medical offices for veterans.
Throughout much of the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was known as an Old Soldiers’ Home — and at its peak was home to about 5,000 veterans in the early 1950s.
The government stopped allowing new residents there in the 1960s, and many of the buildings went into disrepair.
By 2015, there were no homes for veterans to live on the campus permanently, though several hundred lived in temporary beds at the time.
About 4,000 veterans were unhoused at the time across the country, the largest population of unhoused vets in the nation
What has the land been used for in recent decades?
In addition to the hospital, VA officials leased out much of the land for mainly private uses, including oil drilling, a laundry for Marriott hotels, a private school athletic facility, private parking lots and the baseball stadium for UCLA.
In 2018, a VA official pleaded guilty after prosecutors accused him of taking bribes to look the other way while a parking lot operator stole more than $11 million in revenues from its leases at the campus.
A 2016 law — the West Los Angeles Leasing Act — requires that any leases at the campus primarily…
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