A federal judge on Friday ordered the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to build more than 2,500 units of housing for low-income veterans on its West Los Angeles campus.
In a 124-page decision following a non-jury trial, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter also ruled that leases to UCLA, Brentwood School and others on the VA property are illegal because they don’t principally serve veterans.
UCLA’s Jackie Robinson baseball stadium is on 10 acres leased from the VA, and Brentwood School’s athletic facility occupies 22 acres.
Carter castigated the VA for falling short of its obligation to use the 388-acre campus to “principally benefit veterans and their families.”
“Over the past five decades, the West LA VA has been infected by bribery, corruption, and the influence of the powerful and their lobbyists, and enabled by a major educational institution in excluding veterans’ input about their own lands,” he wrote.
Carter wrote that the VA has in effect sold off the land by allowing leaseholders to construct concrete facilities on it, then arguing that tearing those facilities down would be wasteful.
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