President Donald Trump issued an executive order over the weekend directing the Department of Veterans Affairs to establish a center for thousands of homeless veterans on its West Los Angeles campus.
The executive action ordered VA Secretary Doug Collins to create the National Center for Warrior Independence, which seeks to turn the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical campus into the country’s largest center for homeless veteran housing and care.Â
The order is meant to alleviate the veterans’ crisis in LA and elsewhere. Roughly 3,000 homeless veterans live in the California hotspot, accounting for about 10% of all homeless veterans in the nation— more than any other city in the country. The Trump administration wants to use the center to house up to 6,000 homeless veterans by 2028.
The VA has until early September to present an action plan on how to implement the order to the White House. The plan will be carried out using funds previously spent providing housing or other services for illegal immigrants, according to the executive order.
VA Secretary Doug Collins praised the move in a statement.Â
“After decades of mismanagement, VA has been leasing parts of its 388-acre West Los Angeles VA Medical Center campus to a wealthy and exclusive private school and the University of California, Los Angeles, baseball team,” he said.
“Today’s executive order will enable us to ensure VA’s West Los Angeles Campus is being used as intended: to benefit Veterans,” he continued. “Our goal is to turn the campus into a beacon of hope and a destination for homeless Veterans from across the nation who can travel there to find housing and support and start their journey back to self-sufficiency.”
Trump also ordered the Department of Housing and Urban Development to coordinate with Collins regarding using “vouchers to support homeless veterans in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and around the Nation with respect to this effort.”
The HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program provides vouchers that veterans can use for housing. However, the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System reported last year that only 62% of 8,453 HUD-VASH housing vouchers available in the Los Angeles area were being used.
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The Los Angeles-based Veterans Collective, an organization seeking to develop the nation’s largest supportive housing community for veterans experiencing homelessness, “enthusiastically applauded” Trump’s order.Â
“We support any initiative that will provide safe and supportive housing for veterans who bravely served our country,” the organization said in a statement to ABC News. “We agree with the White House: Our heroes deserve better.”
