In a few months, if a federal judge’s order stands, the parking lot at UCLA’s Jackie Robinson baseball stadium will be filled with modular housing.
U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter on Friday ordered the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to select a vendor within a week and enter into a contract three weeks later.
Thirty-two of them would occupy the parking lot of the baseball complex that Carter ordered closed in September and the rest would be placed on two other parcels on the VA’s West Los Angeles campus.
After pressing VA officials to produce temporary housing in just 90 days, before the rainy season, Carter relaxed his timetable Friday after VA officials agreed to the effort but argued that procurement, Site development and installation could not be completed as quickly.
The order constitutes Carter’s first gamble — in the judge’s words, an “icebreaker” to break through the bureaucratic malaise — toward an ambitious goal. He ordered the VA to create up to 750 temporary housing units in 18 months on its West Los Angeles campus and an additional 1,800 permanent units over six years.
Carter laid out this goal in early September following a four-week civil trial, when he also canceled VA land leases to private entities, including UCLA and the Brentwood private school, because they had failed to meet legal standards of service to veterans.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of veterans by the nonprofit Public Council, the Inner City Law Center and two private law firms, alleged that the VA breached its fiduciary duty to provide housing to disabled veterans and homeless on campus.
In the weeks following his decision, Carter grappled with a tangle of unresolved questions about how it would all play out.
Where would all the housing go on the VA’s already overcrowded campus? Where would we find up to a billion dollars to finance this? How could one of America’s largest bureaucracies become agile enough to do this?
And, on the other side of the equation, what would become of Jackie Robinson Stadium and the Brentwood School’s 22-acre sports complex?, which houses an Olympic swimming pool, a football stadium, a basketball pavilion, tennis courts and baseball diamonds?
Carter expressed hope that the parties involved would find answers. When they didn’t, he blustered through a half-dozen hearings, at one point threatening to bulldoze the Brentwood swimming pool or fill it with sand.
The Brentwood school got the message. Chairman Adam Cohn began attending the hearings, sitting attentively in the gallery as attorney Louis “Skip” Miller assured the court that the school sincerely wanted to reach a settlement.
As the Brentwood talks progressed, Carter backed away from his rhetoric, denying any intent to harm “the children.”
“In a sense, there’s no reason to destroy these facilities if we don’t have to,” he said, predicting that veterans would increasingly use them as new housing brings thousands of people on the 388-acre campus.
The mood turned in September for UCLA when attorney Raymond Cardozo raised the likelihood of an appeal – which they ultimately filed – and presented a unilateral proposal to nearly double the university’s rent. school and to “give away” two of the 10 acres of the lease.
“Cede” did not please a judge who had repeatedly advised lawyers not to suggest that the land belonged to anyone who could return it.
“Unless the 9th Circuit overturns me, this is veterans’ land,” he said.
Finding the proposal inadequate, Carter on September 25 ordered the stadium sealed off until the university presented an acceptable proposal.
Then he focused on the stadium parking lot and another nearby, as a test to see how fast he could make the VA move.
“If I can get 60 or 70 veterans… out of a cardboard box before the rain comes, and this is a quick way to do it, where this field is already paved, that’s exactly what that I suggest we could do,” he said.
He put that plan in order on Oct. 2, requiring the VA to select a vendor that can deliver and install units in 45 days and come up with the money.
Steve Soboroff and Randy Johnson, the Playa Vista developers who testified for the plaintiffs as expert witnesses and were later named by the judge as his housing gurus, had assured him that hundreds of modular units could be put into operation. place in 18 months.
Much to Carter’s dismay, even they paled at his desire to do it in less than 90 days.
“I have to get the homeless people off the streets now,” he told Soboroff. “And you said you wanted to go, so go.”
Soboroff and Johnson returned Oct. 11 with a diagram showing 32 modular units in the UCLA parking lot and 24 on nearby land owned by the National Cemetery Administration.
With the help of Kelly Farrell, Los Angeles co-managing director of architecture giant Gensler, they said they identified 26 prefabricated homes that could be “trucked, installed on site, earthquake-proofed and connected to public services”. »And they were still making calls.
With this promise, Carter upped the ante. With his thoughts changing often, Carter had begun to ponder from the bench the possibility that too much temporary housing could be built.
“I would like to get to 100 as quickly as possible, stop for a moment, take a breath and see what we really need, how many people we are getting,” he said.
On Friday, Soboroff and Johnson returned with a new diagram showing 50 units in a triangular parking lot in the center of campus. The VA objected to this location, where drug-addicted veterans would be welcome, because it was too close to the Domiciliary where veterans practice sobriety. He reluctantly accepted an alternate location on the south side of campus, although he objected that it was too far from other housing.
In a final confusing twist in negotiations, the VA agreed to continue the plan and pay for 106 units, but did not concede its right to appeal the order.
The plaintiffs must now provide pricing and specifications of the units by Tuesday. Johnson estimated the cost at about $130,000 per unit, including transportation and site development.
With the “icebreaker” plan in motion, big hurdles still loomed, chief among them the estimated $1 billion cost for all the housing required in his original decision.
There was also a possibility of reversal. On Friday, two tenants, including UCLA, appealed. Justice Department lawyer Brad Rosenberg told the court that the decision on whether the government would appeal would be made by the Office of General Counsel, not him.
But Rosenberg had repeatedly made clear to the court that the government disagreed with Carter’s underlying ruling that the VA had a fiduciary duty to build veterans’ housing on campus.