Homeless veterans, mentally disabled or traumatized as a result of their service, and their advocates waged a long legal battle to force the Department of Veterans Affairs to stop using parts of the sprawling VA campus in West L.A. for non-veteran enterprises and return to the campus to the use for which it was originally intended: housing veterans.
In 2015, former VA Secretary Robert McDonald halted his department’s legal bickering and entered into a settlement with the veterans. That led to an ambitious master plan to transform much of the 387-acre campus from a clinical setting, dominated by a hospital on the south end and decrepit unused buildings on the north end, into a vibrant community of at least 1,200 units of permanent supportive housing for homeless and at-risk veterans along with gathering spots. The health centers would still be there but the campus would get a warm infusion of cafes, stores, barbershops and hair salons to attract all veterans.
That was 2016.
Five years later, a grand total of 54 units of permanent supportive housing for homeless veterans are open. The master plan timeline called for about 480 units to be constructed by September 2020.
So what happened? A lot of things.
The VA had to conduct an environmental impact study of the entire campus. That took two years and wasn’t finalized until September 2019. A year before that — in November 2018 — the VA hired a consortium of three developers to function together as a principal developer to oversee the implementation of the master plan.
The principal developer group was partially hamstrung by the discovery that utilities under the VA grounds — water, sewer, and stormwater systems — needed to be fixed to create 1,200 units of housing, and the repairs would cost between $10 million and $14 million. But the VA had to apply for the funds within its own system. Repairs are now underway.
But the most difficult part has been raising the money to build the housing. According to the inspector general’s report, as of July 2021, the principal developer had secured just over 25% of the funds necessary for its initial phase of housing. One official says it has since raised millions more in state and philanthropic funds, and it’s waiting on an additional $50 million in applications to various financial programs.
And that is the larger problem — waiting on money. The current systems for doling out public dollars are bound up in bureaucracy and cumbersome rules that slow projects and make them more expensive to build. If we want to have affordable housing everywhere, we need to make it easier for qualified developers to get financing.
Meanwhile, the principal developer has now advanced its community plan, which is supposed to be a more realistic take on the master plan. Now the developer is saying that 237 units of housing will be completed in 2022 and 682 units will be completed in 2027. Veterans will have to wait until 2031 for all 1,200 units to be done.
It’s unacceptable that Southern California will have to wait another decade for the promised 1,200 units of housing on the VA campus, while about 3,900 veterans sleep on the street or in shelters.
This editorial first appeared in the Los Angeles Times last Tuesday. This commentary should be considered another point of view and not necessarily the opinion or editorial policy of The Dominion Post.
