Homeless Veterans sue over neglected Campus

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LOS ANGELES — It is a 387-acre campus of green fields and low-lying buildings in a prosperous neighborhood, donated to the federal government more than 100 years ago for use as a Pacific Coast home for wounded veterans. But over the last 20 years, as Los Angeles has become inundated with homeless veterans, advocates for the homeless say the campus has become a symbol of a system gone wrong: as veterans sleep on the streets, many of its buildings lie abandoned and one-third of the land has been leased for commercial use.

On Wednesday, advocates for the homeless sued the Department of Veterans Affairs, seeking to compel federal officials to use the campus to care for and house mentally ill veterans.

In the class-action suit, filed on behalf of four mentally distressed homeless veterans, lawyers contend that the department has violated the terms of the agreement in which the property was deeded to the government in 1888. They also contend that the department is required — under a federal statute barring discrimination against the mentally disabled — to provide housing to help mentally ill veterans.

The scope of the lawsuit is, to a certain extent, limited: if successful, it would apply only to those homeless veterans deemed mentally disabled. Yet Los Angeles has the largest population of homeless veterans in the nation — 8,200 of the city’s estimated 49,000 homeless people, by one count — and the number is expected to swell as soldiers return from Afghanistan and Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/us/09veterans.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23