The differing visions for Building 13 are part of a larger tussle over construction plans that will shape the character of the veterans’ land for decades.
There is almost universal support for an — uppercase — Town Center as essential to serve a community that will one day have 3,000 or more veterans living on site in temporary and permanent housing and potentially thousands more visiting regularly from around Southern California.
But what is a Town Center?
The developer contracted by the VA to build 1,200 units of new housing sees it as a Main Street radiating west of Building 13 and lined by four new buildings containing hundreds of units of supportive housing over ground floors occupied by veteran-owned businesses and services for veterans.
A veterans oversight board created to monitor the campus development vigorously disagrees. It opposes supportive housing in the Town Center and has advocated for uses that would serve veterans both living on the campus and attracted from far and wide, in particular a hotel.
“Nobody is advocating that VA not build housing,” said Anthony Allman, executive director of Vets Advocacy, a nonprofit created to monitor development of the VA grounds. “The immediate question at hand is where to locate that housing in relation to everything else that belongs on campus to make it a genuine community.”
Allman and other critics say the VA is killing the notion of a real town center because it can’t, or won’t, pay for it. Without money for a grand hall, fitness center or library, let alone a hotel, it is allowing its developer — which has access to capital for housing — to substitute housing where it isn’t needed, they say. The VA did not grant Times requests to interview officials about the Town Center.
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