Ground Broken for Senior-Citizen Units Troubled by Dispute

Construction will begin within a month on a federally funded senior-citizens housing complex in Van Nuys that only recently had seemed doomed because of administrative conflicts and a city zoning mandate to reduce its size, project officials said.

But, three funding extensions and a redesign later, ground was broken in a ceremony Tuesday for the $6.7-million Valley Presbyterian Hospital Retirement Center.

Officials said they had feared that the project would fall through last November when, days before the deadline to receive federal funding, the Los Angeles planning department ruled that the proposed seven-story, 99-unit building was too big and did not conform with zoning regulations.

The ruling stunned project administrators, who said their engineering firm had led them to believe that the city would grant the zoning variance needed for the building in the 15200 block of Sherman Way.

“Generally in this business it takes a minor miracle to get a project through. This one has taken a couple of major miracles,” said Clark Harshfield, executive director of the Retirement Housing Foundation, a national nonprofit organization that develops housing for senior citizens.

$5.6 Million Committed

Valley Presbyterian Hospital, which formed a nonprofit foundation more than two years ago to seek money for a retirement home, received a $5.6 million funding commitment for the project in 1982 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Los Angeles City Council voted in September to provide $400,000 in additional funding.

The hospital lent its name to the project, but arranged for it to be developed by the Retirement Housing Foundation. The Retirement Housing Foundation and the Valley Presbyterian Hospital also contributed funds for the project.

The development, as revised to meet city planning department guidelines, will be a six-story, 84-unit apartment building. The one-bedroom units will be completed in about 10 months, Harshfield said.

“We finally got what we wanted when they reduced the number of units,” said mid-Valley Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who had criticized the project when developers were seeking a variance for the larger building. “It’s not that I didn’t want more housing. I didn’t want overdevelopment.”

Rents in the units, which would be about $600 a month in a comparable private project, will be federally subsidized. Low-income, elderly residents will only pay 30% of their monthly income toward rent, said Fred Stillions, a HUD spokesman in Los Angeles.