Biked around the VA
West LA contains a very large Veterans Affairs property - the VA Medical Center north of Sawtelle, between Westwood and Brentwood.
The property spans both sides of the 405, and also straddles Wilshire Boulevard, putting it right at the center of multiple major transit corridors. It contains not only the hospital but also housing for homeless vets, an obscene number of parking lots, a baseball diamond used by UCLA, and a huge cemetery (where a relative of mine is apparently buried).
If you don't have a reason to go inside, however, it remains mysterious. When I lived in Westwood in 2010, I lived basically 3 blocks away, drove past it every single day, and never once attempted to get inside. Now, however, I have a bicycle, and a maniacal desire to bike on every road on the west side of LA (I am currently at 44.86%). So I can go inside!
I don't have a lot of good pictures of the place, but it was a fascinating ride and I'm glad I did it. This is a surprisingly gigantic property. It was incredibly busy while we were there - around 10 in the morning - but the traffic is pretty slow on VA property, so it's easy to roll around and take everything in. I was surprised to see a lot of buildings that looked fully dilapidated. Like... "rusted metal machinery visible through broken windows" level dilapidated? There's also a number of boarded-up properties that look like single family homes - checking a map later revealed that these were probably preserved for historical reasons.
Here's a gigantic mural under Wilshire that we stopped to take pictures of:
The number of parking lots we saw was fully baffling... though we did notice a massive parking garage conspicuously under construction near the entrance. On top of all this, a lot of the property is also completely empty, parklike space. It seems natural that some of this land should be used for a park... but it's crazy to roll around in so much fully unused land in a place as dense and expensive as west LA.
One of the reasons I wanted to go inside was because the VA has been at the center of a couple land use lawsuits for the entire time I've lived in LA. The VA was leasing land to an oil well company, UCLA (for the baseball diamond), some kind of transport company (for the bazillion parking lots), and a couple other tenants. A bunch of veterans sued to compel the VA to stop doing this and to build more housing on the property instead.
It's hard to argue that the best use of this land was for parking cars; it's also hard to argue that the leases the VA was honoring were not a kind of corruption. When you got as many homeless veterans in the city as LA has, it seems like the VA's mission should have led it in a different direction, and that any responsible leadership team would have prioritized completely different things over the last few decades. Last year, the plaintiffs actually won the lawsuit against the VA and a judge actually voided all those leases.
I don't know enough to tell exactly what they were building, but there is now an extremely intense amount of construction going on all over the VA. There's also an under-construction heavy rail station right in the center of the property, along Wilshire, planned to open in 2027. It seems completely natural that the VA should be building pretty dense housing here - anyone who needs to live here could get direct transit all the way to downtown by 2027, if everything opens on time, which would be an incredibly convenient situation for anyone who needs to get back on their feet and can't afford a car.
Anyway... if transit or LA's homeless services issues are interesting to you at all, I recommend biking around the VA and seeing this stuff for yourself. There are a lot of pretty big government properties in the LA area that you cannot just bike into, but you can bike into this one!
You used to be able to bike into it from more directions, actually - and this lies at the center of another hyper-local transit issue. Since I've started living in Westwood over the last few weeks, I've familiarized myself with some of the insane traffic patterns in the area. If you're on a bike, there are very few places to safely cross the dreaded 405 - pretty much, your only option is to take Ohio Avenue, which is a cut-through also used heavily by cars.
To be safe on Ohio, you have to be a pretty confident cyclist who knows when to take the lane. But before 9/11, it was also possible to cut under the 405 by biking through the LA National Cemetery and into the VA, then out the other side onto San Vicente, which has robust bike lanes. It's a much safer situation than biking on Ohio in mixed traffic and taking the lane constantly. Here's the example route:
In response to 9/11, the VA closed the gate on the top right of this image, completely preventing anyone coming from Westwood - like UCLA students - from crossing the 405 at that spot. If that gate was open, there'd be a safe 405 cuthrough for cyclists available quite literally 3 blocks from UCLA's campus/downtown Westwood.
If you want to read more about it, there's an article about the fight to reopen that gate here, on the blog BikinginLA, which I recommend for anyone who bikes in this city and is interested in bike policy.
I've biked on Ohio several times in the last few weeks, and it's not the worst road to bike on in LA... but it could be a lot better. And having another option with zero cars on it, through the cemetery into the VA, would be even better.
Anyway!!! I highly recommend checking this entire area out. Knowing this kind of stuff about your city is super important!