After Vincent Tourville deployed to Iraq in 2009, he was angry and out of control with what would later be diagnosed as combat PTSD. Tourville tried to outrun his problems, all the way from Maine to California.
"I went from truck stop to truck stop, just drinking and just begging for money and didn't have any, and just whatever it takes to get from Portland, Maine to LA," he says.
"And I finally made it to Venice Beach and I just sat there and I felt like I accomplished something. But I had no idea where I was going or what I was gonna do. I ended up at the VA."
To be precise, Tourville ended up at the West LA Veterans Affairs Campus, a 387-acre plot bequeathed to this country's veterans in 1888, nestled among some of California's most expensive zip codes. Lawsuits, homeless encampments and corruption scandals have dogged the campus for decades, but luckily for Tourville, the West LA VA has come a long way. He says going there saved his life.
"I went from sleeping on the beach and sleeping in my car, to a safe parking program," he says.
That was the first step: a program where he parked on campus and slept in his car, got one hot meal and drove out in the morning. Next he moved into a program where he could sleep in a bed, no questions asked. Then it was a room in a building, but he needed to be drug- and alcohol-free. Along the way VA staff got him diagnosed, helped him get his disability benefits, and finally, an apartment for him and his 2-year-old son.
"I'm still grateful. And it's such a conflicting feeling, because they saved my life," he says.
He's conflicted, because the West LA Campus, for all its progress helping vets like Tourville, has some serious challenges. Cockroaches have infested the building Tourville lives in. He's found them in his son's crib. There's open drug use and prostitution.
"You can't come in demanding something when you're asking for help, but if you're part of this big organization that has all these resources and all these funds ... there's certain standards that I feel that should be met," he said.
High hopes from Trump's promise
The Trump administration delighted veterans groups here a year ago with an executive order promising, among other things, to house 6,000 veterans at a new National Center for Warrior Independence on the LA campus. Trump kept hopes high when he abruptly terminated long-held leases on the campus that had nothing to do with veterans. But then the message got muddled.
Vets' housing construction, and delays, on the campus go back through four presidential administrations. LA veteran groups won two lawsuits in the past 15 years mandating that the VA immediately build more housing on the campus. The Biden administration appealed a 2024 court ruling and lost. So it shocked veterans groups when the Trump administration appealed that ruling again in February, despite having declared its own intention to build. And when the proposed budget finally came out in April, it included zero dollars to build new housing for any of the 6,000 veterans the president had promised.
A hearing this month in the House Veterans Affairs Committee provided some answers, but also more questions. California Democrat U.S. Rep. Mark Takano said that with VA staff cuts, there isn't enough support staff for the more than 1,200 billets for veterans on the campus now, much less the 6,000 proposed by the White House.
"This concentration of veterans without adequate supportive services jeopardizes tenant safety, sobriety and mental health. If we do not act ... I fear we will doom this property to become a vast West Side skid row," said Takano.
There's never been a public explanation for Trump' s 6,000 figure, which is far more than any homelessness expert would recommend to house in one place. It's twice the number of homeless vets in all of Los Angeles and some wondered if Trump planned to bus in homeless vets from around the country. The administration has required VA officials and local advocates to sign nondisclosure agreements, leaving even Congress in the dark about those details. The committee had received the plan for the National Center for Warrior Independence just the night before the hearing, some eight months after it was due.
" Do you believe you are above congressional oversight?" the Republican head of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Mike Bost, asked VA officials at the hearing.
"Transparency should be a priority, not an option. If agreements, planning decisions or delays are hiding behind NDAs, the committee will demand answers. The American taxpayers and our veterans deserve to know how the land is being used and why progress has been so slow," Bost said.
Danielle Runyan, senior counselor to the VA secretary, blamed lawsuits over the land use for the failures to brief Congress.
"We have been embattled in litigation, litigation that we inherited when this administration took over. …Going forward we're happy to provide monthly updates to the committee," she told lawmakers.
Runyan testified that housing capacity on that campus had grown from 955 to 1,377 beds for veterans during the first year of the Trump administration. But none of that stems from the executive order.
Runyan and other officials at the hearing did not respond to questions about why the administration's budget request asked for zero funding of new beds on the campus. When NPR asked for comment, VA Press Secretary Quinn Slaven said VA has added VA police officers and extra lighting to address security concerns.
"VA is hard at work implementing President Trump's executive order to create a National Center for Warrior Independence (NCWI) on the campus to restore its capacity to house thousands of homeless Veterans. This includes reclaiming sections of the campus that had long been irresponsibly leased and licensed to private companies," Slaven said in a statement to NPR.
Slaven said VA would release requests for proposals of thousands of additional housing "in the coming days" and at least one request for new temporary housing was announced since the May 13 hearing. But gaps and inconsistencies in the plan for the National Center for Warrior Independence drew bipartisan fire.
" There's no way in hell you're gonna come here and say $500 million is a down payment, and you can't tell me what the actual cost is," Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin said at the hearing.
"We're not doing this any longer," he said. "This is corruption, and it's gonna stop now."
Many longtime watchers of the West LA campus share his skepticism.
"I heard Mr. Van Orden's comments regarding the project being a boondoggle. I think there's some validity to that," said Anthony Allman, with the group Vets Advocacy.
"We've seen large amounts of money dedicated to this project over various administrations, and we can't really account for where that money goes," he said.
Allman pointed out for example that $98 million in the budget goes to renovate a building that VA already said it had funds to renovate in 2019. The VA did not respond to NPR's query about where that money went.
Allman has monitored the West LA Campus project for 11 years now and he's lost faith in the VA as a builder.
"The VA is really a healthcare agency. It's not designed to be a community developer," said Allman.
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