The West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs campus is one of the largest VA campuses in the country, made up of around 388 acres. It was originally given to the federal government at the turn of the 20th century, a donation from a wealthy socialite to house veterans, and was once even a fully functional township with its own post office and trolley system. Along with the health-care services it provided, it once housed as many as 5,000 vets at its post-World War II peak.
Today, much of the land is unused, filled with dilapidated buildings left over from its glory days. The rest of the land is home to the West Los Angeles VA hospital, the Los Angeles National Cemetery and a few tenants that are now a center of controversy. Over the years, the VA rented the space to companies that have nothing to do with veteran care: Fox Studios rented storage space for its sets there, Marriott had a laundry facility for its hotels, and UCLA even built a baseball stadium on the land.
Meanwhile, homeless veterans are camped out in tents outside the facility grounds, prevented from making any kind of home on this land supposedly reserved for them. Rebecca Murga is an Army veteran filmmaker who recently produced “The Promised Land,” a documentary about the facilities and the veterans trying to force the VA to live up to its motto.