"If Congress wanted to give us the authority, VA would build housing."
A remarkably candid Q&A on housing, unhoused veterans, and what the VA can and cannot do, with Veterans Affairs administrators John Kuhn and C. Brett Simms
Editor’s note: The Home of the Brave newsletter will publish once the Powers v. McDonough class action lawsuit begins. Until then, we’re publishing extra reporting to bring you up to speed on the case, including this fascinating interview conducted by Jasper Craven, who contributed to the feature and also writes his own veteran and military-oriented newsletter, Battle Borne.
Last month, Long Lead published “Home of the Brave,” a multi-part, multimedia series exploring the unhoused veteran crisis at the West Los Angeles VA campus, a 388-acre property that was deeded to the US government to provide veterans housing. Over the last 50 years, that land has been carved up and leased to private interests while development for veterans housing has been painfully slow. This summer, the veterans are fighting to reclaim the land in a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Veterans Affairs.
As an investigative reporter who specializes in covering the VA, I contributed to “Home of the Brave,” a tale marked by death, greed, neglect, and many broken promises.
An epic government scandal hiding in plain sight
It’s the story of a land grab dating back to the U.S. Civil War, bursting with government malfeasance, neglect, graft, and even death.
Experience “Home of the Brave,” now available on Long Lead.
Earlier this year, as part of my reporting, I spoke with two VA officials vital to the future of veteran housing policy. One is John Kuhn, the deputy medical center director at the Greater Los Angeles healthcare system, which includes the West LA campus. Previously, he launched the Supported Services for Veteran Families program, VA’s homelessness prevention and rapid re-housing initiative.
The other is C. Brett Simms, a longtime VA official now overseeing the VA’s Office of Asset Enterprise Management, which oversees the VA’s property portfolio. His jurisdiction includes the housing projects under development on the agency’s West LA campus.
The hundreds of acres they oversee in Los Angeles once hosted the most progressive housing project in American history. Today, much of the campus is in disrepair, and scarred by a long, extractive history from some of the city’s most powerful people. Housing development is moving forward, but at a glacial pace.
I found Kuhn and Simms to be remarkably candid in their reflections on where things have gone wrong, where they find hope, and the many challenges ahead. The transcript of our interview has been edited for length and clarity. —Jasper Craven
As someone who's been involved in housing for so long, do you, John, believe that housing services are a form of health care?
John Kuhn: They are absolutely a form of health care. There’s a whole host of mental health and health consequences to being homeless.
And also, the idea that not serving these folks makes sense economically is just simply untrue. Because these folks have such serious mental health consequences, they end up getting their care in emergency rooms. They end up getting their care in institutions like prisons and jails that cost society a fortune. It is pure self-interest for us as a society to work with folks to get them off the street because the street is a dangerous place to be. It's a traumatic place to be and it's a very expensive place to be.
The agency sometimes takes this tact that ‘we cannot build housing because we are a health care agency and we are very statutorily restricted.’ Now, there are many issues outside of that including the fact that the VA has little experience building housing. But there’s this broader debate about whether VA has a housing mission within its health care mission.
Kuhn: The real feeling at VA is we want to develop housing. It's not that VA doesn't want to create housing; we don't have the authority to do it. If Congress wanted to give us the authority, VA would build housing.
In the last several years, we in Los Angeles have gotten $140 million that we've spent to develop the infrastructure on the ground. So, although we're not directly building the housing, we are doing everything possible to make it easy for developers to come in and do it by making sure all the infrastructure is there. And there’s the free land — it is worth quite a bit. We are doing all we can to create the pathway to permanent housing and we're seeing the results. The Enhanced Use Lease Authority, has led to the development of 233 units today with 347 under active construction. The North campus is an active construction site. There's work going on all across the campus.
C. Brett Simms: The Enhanced Use Lease Authority was specifically put in place to develop housing. It’s a mechanism for us to leverage our assets and our property to help provide housing for veterans.
West LA is by far one of the biggest engagements, but we have housing through the EUL program across the country, well over 2,000 units of housing and operation across the country at different VA medical centers, some big, some small, but all geared toward that permanent supportive housing mission.
“The real feeling at VA is we want to develop housing. It's not that VA doesn't want to create housing; we don't have the authority to do it. If Congress wanted to give us the authority, VA would build housing.” —John Kuhn, deputy medical center director at the Greater Los Angeles healthcare system
Would your job be easier if there was actually the money coming from the federal government to fund this building? Thomas Safran and the other LA developers are finding the money themselves, which seems to be slowing things down. Why hasn’t the VA asked Congress to give it money that is directly for housing construction?
Simms: I'll give you a slightly different perspective. Right now, VA is severely underfunded with an aging infrastructure across the country. Our average building age is 60 years old. We have challenges funding the work that we need to do with the current health care mission. Adding a new, different mission to start building housing would actually make our job even harder. It gives us another critical priority in our infrastructure that we already cannot fund appropriately. So, Congress would not only have to give authority, but Congress would have to give significantly more money to VA for that to actually have a positive effect on our ability to deliver that type of mission.
My point is that housing development would then be on par with every other challenge we have with infrastructure across the system already.
Are there any hard deadlines and deliverables that the developers working on the West LA VA campus need to follow? Have they been penalized for missing some of these? What are the sticks that the VA has at its disposal when it comes to ensuring swift development of this land?
Simms: So, the short answer is there's no direct penalties in there. And that's because the contract itself doesn't have a financial commitment from VA. This was an Enhanced Use Lease, in which, essentially, land is offered with a requirement that they develop the housing.
The stick is not that we would penalize them in some way. It is the ability for them to continue developing the parcels, which is what they signed up to do and what they're required to do.
We do have the ability to enforce rules through the leases for them to meet deadlines or they end up forfeiting the money that they've raised through their various sources.
There are contractual things that we can do, too. We can give them default notices, cure notices, things like that, to correct issues. And one of those issues could be not meeting agreed-upon milestones.
Ultimately, what happens in those situations is VA could essentially end the deal and under these enhanced use leases, if we ever got to the point where we ended the deal, the assets, the property, reverts back to VA, and the developers are essentially left with nothing to show for their investment. That would obviously be a financial impact to them.
John, when you landed in LA and entered this position, I assume that you got up to speed on this saga that is veteran housing on this land. I think there have been periods where real and major mistakes have been made by the VA, and that has engendered a lot of distrust and, frankly, some anger verging on conspiratorial thinking. What’s your assessment of what had happened and what’s your thinking on how to try to move forward in a positive way?
Kuhn: We are really seeing the development pick up pace and the problems that predated my arrival were also solved largely before my arrival. That is, the funding that was necessary to create the infrastructure, and the urgency that came with the new administration to provide that funding.
And then there’s the time it took to get some of the preconditions met. The environmental surveys, for instance, took years. These were things that could not be just skipped, as much as we want to go fast.
We’ve also developed a call center (310-268-3350) which can get people off the street into temporary housing on demand. We've housed close to 250 people since the service started in December. We want veterans to know that if you’re in the street, if you're in a dangerous place, we have a bed for you, that you can come in safely, right now — today.
I'd like to talk about the various entities on campus. The most controversial are probably UCLA and the Brentwood School. UCLA was able to secure congressional language in 2016 that basically exempts them from the ruling that they were on the land illegally by the VA’s Inspector General. That language allows them to stay on this campus.
Brentwood was angling for a similar carveout earlier this year that didn't go through. It's my understanding that the VA supported that language. How do you manage those entities moving forward? Are there additional moves to try and extract more veteran support from them? Do you feel that they're adequately contributing right now?
Kuhn: We’re somewhat constrained as to what we could share here as I'm sure you’re aware there’s an ongoing lawsuit regarding these entities. I will say, though, that if you look at our building plan, we have adequate parcels for everything we have planned for a decade. There's no urgent demand, meaning there's no ability for us right now to use those parcels, even if we had them to develop. And that doesn't mean that at some point in the future it wouldn't be helpful to have those. But for now, we have as many parcels as we can handle in terms of developing housing on the grounds.
Can there be more contributions from Brentwood and UCLA? You know, I think that's for further discussion.
About a decade ago, former California Congressman Henry Waxman tried to understand exactly where all the rental payments from these entities were going — how the money was being used by the VA. And he had a really difficult time tracing that money. Are all the payments for rent earmarked for specific uses? Where is the money going?
Kuhn: There's something called the lease revenue fund. That’s where these payments go. They’re dedicated for uses to serve veterans experiencing homelessness and the infrastructure necessary to do that. So, for instance, some of those payments are used for improvements for our CTRS program [offering tiny shelters]. Some of the payments from Brentwood and UCLA have gone to support that. CTRS now compromises 140 tiny shelters, and we're adding six new drop-in shelters to that area.
To clarify, the VAs believes that it can directly fund these CTRS tiny shelters, but not a building?
Kuhn: Yeah, uh, you put your finger on an interesting conundrum.
VA has the authority now to operate CTRS. What's not clear is: Do we have the opportunity to build additional units? The units we have from CTRS were all donated and then turned over to VA. We didn't actually build these units. We are exploring, now that we have authority to run them and repair them, do we also have the authority to purchase them? And that's an outstanding question.
But there are percolating plans to create six new drop-in shelters. So it seems like things are moving forward in terms of new shelters funded by VA money. Correct?
Kuhn: Those units were replacements from ones that were damaged before. We have limited ability to repair and replace things that were donated. Do we have authority to create new is a separate question.
Update: After publication, VA responded to clarifying questions sent in previously. According to the department, VA says it “can maintain existing [CTRS] units in the program but does not have the authority to build additional units expanding the program. While VA had that authority, which expired with the end of the COVID emergency, VA purchased the six units that were subsequently used to expand drop-in shelters at CTRS from six to 12.”
VA also disclosed that its lease revenue is approximately $1.5 million annually.
Read More: Jasper Craven shares five of his favorite stories on military and veterans’ affairs in Depth Perception
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