For years, advocates have pushed for more veterans housing on a large West Los Angeles campus donated to the government to house soldiers and veterans.

Here are five key facts to understand this campus and what the future holds:

What is the West LA VA campus?

It’s a sprawling property nearly half the size of New York’s Central Park, near UCLA and the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. The campus is owned by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and is home to a major regional hospital and veterans’ medical offices.

For much of the late 1800s and early 1900s it was known as an old soldiers’ home, and at its peak housed approximately 5,000 veterans in the early 1950s.

The government stopped allowing new residents in the 1960s and many buildings fell into disrepair.

By 2015, there were no homes for veterans live on campus permanentlyYesalthough several hundred were living in temporary beds at the time.

At the time, approximately 4,000 veterans were unhoused across the country, the largest population of unhoused veterans in the country.

What has land been used for in recent decades?

In addition to the hospital, VA officials have leased much of the land for primarily private uses, including oil drilling, laundry for Marriott hotels, athletic facilities for a private school, private parking lots and the stadium baseball team from UCLA.

In 2018, VA official pleads guilty after prosecutors accused him of taking bribes to look the other way as a parking lot operator stole more than $11 million in revenue from his campus leases.

A 2016 law – the West Los Angeles Leasing Act – requires that any lease on campus primarily benefit veterans. Current leases are contested over whether they benefit veterans, and a judge recently ruled that existing leases are illegal.

What were the promises for housing construction?

The ACLU sued the VA more than a decade ago alleging the leases were illegal and won a settlement in 2015 in which the VA agreed to build on-campus housing.

Robert McDonald, then secretary of the VA I promised to find beds for all unhoused veterans in Los Angeles by the end of this year.

But the VA is many years behind schedule.

The veterans sued again in 2022, arguing that the VA had a duty to build more housing on the land and house all veterans who need housing to properly treat their disability issues. health.

VA officials said they are housing more veterans than ever before in Los Angeles, with the number of unhoused veterans falling from about 3,900 to 3,000 in the year to January.

What is the final judge’s decision?

Over the past few months, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has issued several key decisions, including:

What does the future hold for us?

Carter is now pushing VA officials to implement his faster housing order, and getting pushback.

The VA is appealing Carter’s housing orders, saying he exceeded his legal authority.

And during a hearing Thursday, VA officials argued that adding the first 100 tiny homes would cost $30 million and take those funds away from crucial services.

Carter rejected this, saying the VA’s cost estimate was too high and question VA officials on “why don’t you work with the Court to get these hundreds of people off the streets”.

“I’m going to ask you to go back and call whoever is in Washington, D.C., hiding behind the curtain of the DOJ and the VA so that we don’t have a specific person here to make these decisions, to really decide if that’s what you want your legacy to be,” Carter told a VA attorney “Start helping these veterans.”

Later that day, Carter issued an order threatening contempt of the VA if it did not enforce his housing order.

If people are found in contempt for disobeying a lawful order of a federal court, consequences may include fines or imprisonment.

Carter gave VA officials until Wednesday morning to tell him why he shouldn’t look down on them.