Right now, they hardly seem the makings of living space, the abandoned halls and vacant rooms of Buildings 4 and 5 on the Veterans Affairs campus in the San Fernando Valley.
Electrical cables snaking here and there, patches of what appears to be fake blood on the floor, a kaleidoscope of pink, violet, green and gray walls -- all left over from sets for movies and television programs, including last summer's Accepted.
But the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has not used the buildings for health care since they were damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and two nonprofit groups here hope the filming era is over. They have plans to sign a long-term lease this month that will allow the buildings to be transformed into permanent housing with social services and counseling for disabled homeless veterans.
It would be the first such facility in Los Angeles and one of the few in the nation, department officials said.
Los Angeles has the highest concentration of homeless veterans in the nation, some 20,000, according to the Veterans Affairs Department. Nationwide, there is a need for 27,000 units of permanent housing with support services for homeless veterans, federal officials say, but there are fewer than 1,000 available.
"To have 20,000 homeless vets and have these buildings used for movie shoots, we need to reprioritize about what we are doing in this country," said Toni Reinis, executive director of New Directions, one of the nonprofit groups that would run the facility.
Still, the proposed US$40 million makeover faces some uncertainty.
New Directions must raise the money for it, though Reinis said it is already lining up potential sources, and it faces objections from the congressman who represents the area, Representative Brad Sherman, a Democrat, as well as some people living nearby.
Sherman, while asserting he recognized the need for such a project, suggested the veterans department should have put the project up for competitive bidding, and he balked at New Directions' refusal to guarantee that the facility would be for veterans only and free of alcohol.
Sherman, a former tax lawyer who said he is guided in part by his legal training, has pushed to have many of the promises New Directions has made about the project written into its lease. He introduced a bill last month requiring that the buildings "to the extent possible" be designated for use by veterans only.
Some neighbors of the primarily residential area around the campus are also wary of the proposal.
"Are the vets going to be required to be sober?" asked Lewis Brown, the president of the local neighborhood council, ticking off a list of concerns while maintaining he had not decided whether to support or oppose it. "What's the security arrangement? If somebody goes crazy and goes off campus he's right in the middle of houses. There is no skid row to go to."
Reinis said the facility would have security guards and, while not using random drug testing, would declare itself "clean and sober" and quickly refer tenants showing signs of drug or alcohol abuse to appropriate counseling, possibly at other facilities.
She said that Sherman's bill appeared to overlook the fact some federal and state programs that could help finance the project prohibit a veterans-only stipulation. Instead, on paper, veterans would be given preference over nonveterans and in practice, given the need and interest, she and veterans department officials said they expected veterans to fill all the openings.
"We have always found they run a good program, marketed appropriately to the intended population and filled with the intended population," said Peter Dougherty, the director of homeless services for Veterans Affairs in Washington.
The veterans department said it did not need to seek competitive bids because its regulations did not require it and because of its past close work with New Directions, which specializes in drug and mental health counseling services for veterans.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson recently signed off on the project, after several years of negotiation, and officials plan to sign the lease later this month.
The plan for the new housing, developed largely by New Directions, would seek to take the care beyond the customary short-term treatment. The other nonprofit group involved in the project is A Community of Friends, which has developed two dozen subsidized housing buildings for low-income, disabled and homeless people across Los Angeles.
The two groups plan to convert the buildings, built in the 1950s and used until the 1994 earthquake for mental health treatment, into 147 subsidized apartments for veterans, who would pay rent on a sliding scale and receive mental and substance abuse counseling and other help there.
The residents could also quickly get to veterans department-run clinics and other programs on the campus, known as the Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center, in the North Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, a marriage of services unlike any other on a veterans affairs campus, department officials said.
It would be similar to so-called "transitional housing" that New Directions operates at another veterans complex in West Los Angeles, though that one typically serves people only for a year or two.
Walking the grounds, officials from the two groups pointed to walls, windows and ceilings that would be reconfigured into studio apartments of some 37.12m2 each, with kitchenettes and shared lounges.
"We are going to deinstitutionalize it," said Gigi Szabo, the senior project manager with A Community of Friends. "Right now, it feels like a hospital but it won't."
Dougherty said that the project, if successful, could point the way to more such collaborations for long-term housing, something the department has traditionally left to other agencies to provide. He said that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, provides vouchers to veterans for low-cost housing but added that the department does not provide medical and social services like the Sepulveda project aims to do.
Homeless veterans here said they find the search for housing and services plenty tough.
"A lot of times you try to get your life back on track and then if you do that you wonder where are you going to live?" said Richard Moten, 50, an Army veteran.
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