Campus for Homeless Gives Them Houses, Doctors and Job Training

Los Angeles, in the U.S. state of California, is undergoing one of the country’s most ambitious plans of ending veteran homelessness: after years of negotiations, a 388-acre complex in the city is now offering new housing for veterans.

The Department of Veterans Affairs, initially a home for disabled volunteer soldiers after the Civil War, will not only house the veterans, but will also offer them job training and services addressing issues such as mental health, alcohol addiction or drug abuse.

“We did follow a strategy that at the time was controversial,” says Robert A. McDonald, secretary of veterans’ affairs when Barack Obama was president. “The idea of ‘Housing First’ is that you create a sort of hierarchy of needs. If you have an addiction, I need to get you in a place to be safe, then work on that.”

The project is in major part thanks to legal victory of a lawsuit by ex-mayor of Santa Monica, Bobby Shriver, who couldn’t understand why the complex could not house some of the homeless veterans in the past generation. The victory has affected other sites in the state too: A Veterans Affairs campus in Menlo Park, for example, is now using its 60-unit space to house veterans in need.