"Can you help a homeless vet?"
EDITORIAL: It's Veterans Day, and time to acknowledge a sad truth — the VA is unequipped to solve an unhoused veterans crisis of its own creation.
Just after Labor Day, while taking an afternoon stroll through the streets of Austin, I was walking on air. Hours before, a federal judge in Los Angeles had handed down an opinion on an issue we had been covering at Long Lead for years, and it promised real change. It was a moment journalists dream of, when years of reporting indelibly impact the lives of victims of a clear injustice.
In the landmark ruling, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter declared that the Department of Veterans Affairs had violated its fiduciary responsibilities to LA's unhoused veterans across a span of decades when it had leased out parts of the massive West LA VA campus to outside groups for uses unrelated to the care of disabled service members. Specifically, the judge ordered the termination of VA leases with UCLA and the Brentwood School and the construction of thousands of housing units for homeless veterans on the property.
Get the whole story: An epic government scandal hiding in plain sight
Home of the Brave is a multi-part, multimedia series exploring the unhoused veteran crisis at the West LA VA campus, a 388-acre property that was deeded to the U.S. government to provide veterans housing. Over the last 50 years, that land has been carved up and leased to private interests, while development for veteran housing has been painfully slow.
This feature tells the rest of the story of a land grab dating back to the U.S. Civil War, a tale marked with government malfeasance, neglect, graft, and even death. Read it today.
I looked down at the weather app on my phone. Figuratively and literally, it was 72 degrees and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. When I looked back up from the screen, a rail-thin man was walking towards me. “Can you help a homeless vet?” he asked. The truth is, I couldn’t.
“Sorry, I don’t have any cash,” I told him, but the full reason flashed through my head in an instant: I was a visitor in an unfamiliar town, so I didn’t know where to send him for homeless resources. I also didn’t have any food — I usually carry granola bars in my bag for exactly this reason, but I didn’t have any on me. If I were in my car, I could’ve given him some of the bottled water in the trunk, but I was walking.
Most importantly, though, I knew that despite our best efforts at holding the VA accountable for its underwhelming support of unhoused veterans, the department was unlikely to change on its own. And that’s not a dig at the people who work there. Despite being the second-largest department in the federal government with more than 400,000 employees, the VA — at least as it organizes its homeless services — is under budgeted and understaffed.
Every day court has been in session, Long Lead has been reporting from Powers v. McDonough, the disabled veterans’ class action lawsuit against the federal government seeking permanent housing on the West LA VA campus. To get updates sent direct to your inbox as soon as they publish, subscribe here:
For the past three years, our team has reported on the history of the West LA VA, a vast, incredible property situated on some of the most valuable real estate in the world. This land had been donated to the federal government in 1888 specifically to house disabled veterans. Within decades, the idyllic green space became a home for the nation’s battle worn, an ‘Old People’s Paradise’ filled with retiree barracks, amusements, and palm trees. At its peak in the 1950s, around 5,000 veterans lived there. Then, after the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, the VA evicted the veterans from the property and began leasing it out to private groups. Now LA has around 4,000 unhoused vets, the most of any city in America.
Our report tells the full story — from the property’s founding to the legal fight to take it back — of a centuries-spanning land war between the U.S. government, local forces, and generations of wounded veterans seeking support, justice, and a place to call home. In reporting it, we met veterans paralyzed by a quagmire of bureaucracy that kept them on the streets, while well-funded schools put ballfields, pools, and parking lots on the land that once housed them. It left the VA — claiming it did not have the congressional authority to build housing — flatfooted for the pandemic, when the sidewalk outside the West LA VA became lined with tents, each bearing the American flag and occupied by unhoused veterans seeking shelter near the facility where they got vital medical services.
The VA’s unhoused veterans crisis is a scandal in plain sight, complete with government malfeasance, neglect, graft, and even death. What’s worse, it is a problem that Abraham Lincoln solved the month before his assassination, when he established National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, which ultimately became a network of more than a dozen facilities nationwide that housed and served vets. The VA’s rise over the past century brought about the fall of the Soldiers Homes, and no president since Eisenhower has stepped in to fill this gap, which is more jarring than ever.
This election year, presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle claimed they had done great by the vets. That's debatable, especially considering this lawsuit consisted of veterans living in the streets around Kamala Harris's Brentwood home and suing the Biden administration after the Trump administration refused to shelter them during the pandemic.
But the nation's unhoused veterans crisis goes beyond housing. Our sources — including VA experts — say that services, not just shelter, are essential to solving the problem. “A veteran community must include not only housing units, but the ‘connective tissue’ essential to healing, thriving, and then reintegration,” notes Judge Carter in his ruling.
Long Lead is proud to announce that “The Promised Land” is an official selection for The Veterans Film Festival. The 25-minute film provides an unflinching look at LA’s homeless veteran crisis, letting unhoused heroes give a street-level view of what life is like when your government leaves you behind.
The documentary short is part of Home of the Brave and was directed by Bronze Star Army veteran and documentary filmmaker Rebecca Murga.
The Veterans Film Festival is Nov. 14–15 at Bob Hope Patriotic Hall in LA. For more information, click here.
So on Veterans Day, as the VA is appealing Carter's ruling ordering the government to house vets on land gifted to the federal government for that specific purpose, it makes sense to ask Congress, President Biden, and President Trump a question only they are able to answer: “Can you help a homeless vet?”
The federal government's decades-long, claim that the VA cannot build and maintain housing has resulted in miles of red tape, an absence of accountability, and the deaths of countless service members on the streets of America. And as the VA's legal resistance to this reality slowly grinds through the courts, we'll lose more. A decade of litigation has yet to solve this life and death issue — but legislation and leadership can.
It's past the time to build a future for these forgotten heroes. It's time, as Judge Carter said in his ruling, to bring them home.
So long for now,
John Patrick Pullen
Founding Editor, Long Lead