It is a 387-acre campus of green fields and low-lying buildings in a prosperous neighborhood, donated to the federal government more than 100 years ago for use as a Pacific Coast home for wounded veterans. But over the last 20 years, as Los Angeles has become inundated with homeless veterans, advocates for the homeless say the campus has become a symbol of a system gone wrong: as veterans sleep on the streets, many of its buildings lie abandoned and one-third of the land has been leased for commercial use…

In the class-action suit, filed on behalf of four mentally distressed homeless veterans, lawyers contend that the department has violated the terms of the agreement in which the property was deeded to the government in 1888. They also contend that the department is required — under a federal statute barring discrimination against the mentally disabled — to provide housing to help mentally ill veterans…

By any measure, the lawsuit — the first of its kind , lawyers said — is a significant escalation in a battle that has simmered here for years, as homeless advocates contended that the Department of Veterans Affairs was bowing to residents of the property’s prosperous Brentwood neighborhood and commercial interests by refusing to rehabilitate abandoned buildings and use them to help veterans.

For the first 100 years of its existence, the campus was used entirely to provide housing and services to veterans; that began changing in the 1960s and ’70s, as some of the buildings were abandoned and the Department of Veterans Affairs leased about one-third of the property for use by, among others, a car rental agency, a laundry for the Marriott hotel chain, a golf course, a dog walk and a baseball stadium for the nearby University of California, Los Angeles. It now has a limited number of geriatric beds for veterans.