President Donald Trump invoked an executive order earlier this month aimed at increasing housing for homeless veterans in Los Angeles. The mandate seeks to establish housing for 6,000 veterans at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center by 2028.
Renaming the facility the National Center for Warrior Independence, the president said he wants to restore the previous housing capacity of the campus, which was roughly around 5,000 veterans in the early 1950s.
In 2024, there were just under 3,000 homeless veterans in Los Angeles County, according to the L.A. County Department of Military and Veterans Affairs.
The nearly 400-acre campus – donated to the VA in 1888 to combat veteran homelessness and rehabilitation and once called the Old Soldiers Home – has been making headlines for three decades amid ethical and legal concerns surrounding the property’s use. The VA’s legal woes came after the center shifted its focus away from permanent housing to rehabilitation and medical care.
Coinciding with this change, the VA began leasing some of its property to external vendors, including UCLA’s baseball team and the Brentwood School.
There have been several attempts to enforce additional housing at the center in recent years, yet pushback and progress delays from the VA have often stood in the way. This executive order could eliminate some of the red tape creating obstacles for development, though feasibility and logistics remain a question.
Last fall, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered that the UCLA and Brentwood School’s land-use leases, along with two others, be voided following a class action lawsuit against the VA from a group of homeless, disabled veterans.
This followed a 2015 ruling from a previous suit that mandated the construction of additional housing at the West L.A. campus. The VA “virtually ignored” its duty to fulfill this housing requirement, according to John Hueston, partner at downtown-based law firm Hueston Hennigan, prompting the more recent lawsuit.
“By the early 2000s, this campus was not in fact anything close to (the) Old Soldiers Home as originally envisioned, but had been largely partitioned away, primarily for the interests of third parties,” Hueston said. “…The leases themselves – which under the law had to be designed ‘primarily for the benefit of the veterans’ – turned out not to be for the benefit of the veterans whatsoever.”
Carter appointed Hueston to monitor compliance with his order, which also called for 750 units of temporary housing by May 2026 and 1,800 permanent units by fall 2030. His work, however, has since been halted in light of an appeal filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the VA. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has yet to make a ruling.
Executive order implications
From Hueston’s perspective, Trump’s executive order “essentially calls for the implementation of Judge Carter’s plans,” with even more housing required to be built. How the ruling and executive order will mesh depends on the outcome of the VA’s appeal.
Due to the general alignment between Carter’s ruling and the presidential executive order, Hueston sees the possibility of Trump coordinating with the Department of Justice and the VA to withdraw their appeal.
VA Secretary Doug Collins, appointed by Trump, said in a statement that the order will “(fix) some of the department’s most vexing problems,” citing “decades of mismanagement.”
Collins, who has indicated he supports Trump’s order, “has the power to redirect resources and to implement this action plan,” Hueston said.
Some have claimed Trump’s executive order was ambiguous relating to the legality of the leases Carter deemed illegal. Nevertheless, based on the fact that Trump ridiculed these leases in the order and identified them as a driver of mismanagement of the VA facility, Hueston concluded that the order “assumes the illegality of the underlying leases.”
“If that appeal is withdrawn, Judge Carter’s rulings on the illegality of the leases will stand, period,” Hueston said. “Alternatively, if the VA does nothing with respect to the appeal, we anticipate an order from the Ninth Circuit fairly soon, which should resolve that question.”
Factors at play
Another thing to consider is the current housing development project already underway at the West L.A. VA campus.
Guided by The West Los Angeles Veterans Collective – a joint nonprofit venture among Culver City-based Century Housing, Brentwood-based Thomas Safran & Associates and downtown-based U.S. VETS – this project will produce at least 1,200 housing units on the campus by 2030. As of April, there were only 448 units completed.
The VA hired the Veterans Collective in 2018 to execute on the 2015 court order to build more housing at the center, though the timeline of progress has come under fire, hence the second lawsuit.
It is yet to be determined if the veterans housed through this project will count toward the president’s 6,000 goal, though it is worth noting that his deadline is 2028 – two years before the Veterans Collective anticipates finishing its project. Still, the Veterans Collective expressed interest in working with the VA to accomplish the president’s order.
“We look forward to working closely with our partners at (the) VA to support the execution of the president’s recent executive order and align on broader efforts to address veteran homelessness,” the organization said in a statement. “The Veterans Collective shares the vision of a thriving veteran community on the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center campus.”
Hueston said he believes that it is “certainly possible to achieve what is set forth in the executive order within the estimated timeframe.”
Others are not so sure.
Feasibility and obstacles
Assuming the units built by the Veterans Collective are not counted toward Trump’s order, Richard Green, director and chair of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, estimated it would take at least five years to build 6,000 units, and that’s if everything went off without a hitch.
“It’s easy to put out an executive order saying, ‘build this much in this amount of time,’ but the reality is it takes a while to build things, especially in California,” Green said. “Everything in Los Angeles takes a long time to get done, and I think that reflects a series of problems that would be no different in the process of trying to build housing for unsheltered veterans.”
These problems include construction labor shortages and the city’s permitting process, as well as financing uncertainty, Green said.
On the labor side of things, Green sees two issues. First, because housing in West L.A. is expensive, Green said most of the construction workers would likely be traveling long distances to work on the site, and thus, they would need competitive compensation as an incentive. And with a development this large, there would need to be a large workforce to handle the project. Secondly, the supply of construction labor is dwindling at the hands of Trump’s immigration policies.
“With Trump’s immigration policy, it’s getting harder to find construction labor because immigrants are just disappearing from job sites,” Green said.
In California, immigrants make up 40% of the construction workforce, according to the Immigration Forum, and slightly more than half of U.S. construction workers are undocumented, according to the Center of Migration Studies.
Despite efforts to streamline permitting processes in Los Angeles following the January wildfires, only 12 building permits have been issued between Altadena and the Pacific Palisades as of May 22. This is “emblematic of how sludgy the process of building things is here,” Green said.
The use of modular buildings was discussed as a method to speed up the VA housing development process, specifically for the initial 750 temporary housing units Carter ordered the VA to build, Hueston said.
In terms of using modular for the entire permanent housing development, Green said the U.S. has physical limitations compared to countries like Singapore and Malaysia, which have greater availability of land and cheaper prices, making them viable hosts for large-scale modular factories.
Without these factories already active in the U.S., Green doesn’t see modular fitting in with Trump’s timeline, especially for projects in metropolitan cities like L.A., where land is even more limited.
“In principle, I think (modular construction) could help, but I don’t know how you make that operational anytime soon,” Green said.
Financing options
Then, there’s the question of financing.
Based on the current market, Green shared “a very back-of-the-envelope” estimate of $4.8 billion to develop 6,000 units at the VA facility. In the event the Veterans Collective’s units are folded into Trump’s housing count, the estimate becomes $3.8 billion for 4,800 units.
According to Trump’s executive order, “funds that may have been spent on housing or other services for illegal aliens” will be used to fund the new housing units, though the details remain uncertain.
As part of the lawsuit against the VA, which settled last fall, the court held hearings on how Carter’s ruling to build 1,800 permanent units could be funded in the event the department was not given additional funding from Congress.
“There are alternative means to build these additional units without obtaining additional authorized funds from Congress, but congressional approval of additional funds would be the most expedient pathway,” Hueston said, adding that he hopes this issue “cuts across partisan lines.”
While these solutions were determined with regard to Carter’s ruling specifically, they could still be considered for executing Trump’s order, according to Hueston.
Some options include having developers use federal, state and local tax credits to subsidize the project. The VA’s developer could also partially subsidize it and then have the VA directly fund portions of the development itself.
The hearings also pointed to the VA’s overall annual budget of $407 billion and that the construction costs would be spread out over six years, deeming Carter’s order feasible.
“(Additionally,) developers can rely on conventional financing, which is free of both the discriminatory eligibility criteria of those tax credits and many unnecessary delays associated with the limited pool of affordable housing financing,” according to the court orders, which suggested the VA use of “a combination of these techniques.”
