On a cool weekday morning last month, just steps away from some of California’s fanciest boutiques and bistros, Irving Webb was desperately trying to break camp as sanitation workers with shovels cleared the sidewalk he’s been living on for the last few nights. The Iraq war veteran sweated through his white T-shirt, heaving his belongings into a shopping cart.
“I’ve been here for five years,” he says, “and they’re freaking killing me. This is like the fifth time in the last month.”
“Here” is outside the gate of the VA’s sprawling West L.A. campus. Los Angeles has the highest number of homeless veterans in the country — which is surprising, since it’s also got a massive, 388-acre Veterans Affairs campus that was donated in 1888 as a soldiers’ home.
In recent decades though, it’s been used for some questionable leases, including athletic fields for the private Brentwood School and UCLA’s baseball stadium. Lawsuits have forced the VA to start building housing, but it’s been slow. Political pressure resulted in a sort of refugee camp temporary shelter on a parking lot inside the gates. If those tiny homes are full, overflow beds get assigned as available.
“I used to do that all the time. It doesn’t work for me. This is what works for me,” says Webb, even as his camp gets swept off the sidewalk and into a garbage truck.
“You’ll have veterans that show up in the evening, and there’s not enough room. There’s nowhere for them to go,” said Rob Reynolds, an Iraq veteran and advocate for L.A.’s homeless vets.
It’s often the neediest veterans that are hardest to help, Reynolds said. He says if the VA had moved faster building housing on the property there would be more options for vets of different eras, or with problems like mental illness or substance abuse….
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