Skid Row Women’s Center Under Way : Facility Will Provide First Permanent Housing for Females in Downtown Area

Joe Kloiber and his 10-man crew are building more than a hotel for some women of Skid Row, although that in itself is a feat.

Safe and sanitary accommodations for women in that sector are as scarce as homes for the homeless in general, and the Downtown Women’s Center residential project at 333 S. Los Angeles St. will be the first permanent housing for women in the area when it is completed in a few months.

Rarer yet, though, is the good will that Kloiber, a foreman for R .W. Stanhope Co. of Los Angeles, and his team, along with others in the construction industry and involved in the rehabilitation project, have been generating.

At a small ceremony the other day marking the raising of a sign announcing that construction had begun, Brenda Levin, project architect, reflected on this, saying, “The unions have been mobilizing their forces, the general contractor isn’t taking any profit and there is a massive effort by the construction industry in general to see this happen.”

Levin herself is donating her personal time, and her staff worked at reduced wages for more than a year as 14 variances were being secured through the volunteer efforts of Century City real estate attorney Roger Horwitz.

The variances were necessary to transform the old three-story building, which once housed an artist’s loft and a ground-floor mission, into 48 units of modern housing. “It was a commercial building, so the variances will allow a nonconforming use,” Levin explained.

Built in 1909, the reinforced concrete structure with freight and passenger elevators already met current seismic and accessibility standards when the Downtown Women’s Center purchased it last year for $830,000, but there was still much to do. Construction costs were estimated at $900,000.

However, at the ceremony, Wayne Ratkovich, whose firm, Ratkovich, Bowers & Perez, is the project developer, announced that “because of the volunteer efforts of this group of contractors--between donated materials and labor and the forgoing of profit--$500,000 has been saved on construction.” (Ratkovich is also vice president of the women’s center.)

The center is building the hotel with private contributions--contributions like those solicited and matched by Clay Dunn of Air-Tec, who is installing the air conditioning and heating.

One of his vendors donated exhaust fans for the bathrooms, and he matched the value of the fans in cash. Another vendor gave him a $500 check for the project, and he matched that.

“Now I’m trying to get the furnaces donated,” he said.

As Kloiber observed, “The big problem on this job is getting the materials. We need all kinds of things--dry wall, metal studs, air conditioning and electrical equipment, plumbing supplies, roofing material, windows, stucco, door jams, light fixtures, to name a few.” He and the other workers are also soliciting donations.

Ratkovich acknowledged this at the ceremony, saying, “It’s not just that you are generous with materials and time, but you’re such a nice group of guys to be around.”

Smiling, enthusiastic, happy to befriend the less fortunate who frequent the center’s day facility next door, the construction workers have been giving of themselves since July when they started gutting the building.

“They’ve learned the ladies’ names,” Jill Halverson, director of the center, said. “They don’t eat the noon meal with us because they start at 6 a.m. and eat at a different time, but they’re in and out of here all day, and they have become part of our family.”

Jill’s Family. Jill’s Place. She started the daytime facility seven years ago and has dreamed for several years of opening a residential hotel where, as she put it, the women could “sleep at night without one eye open.” However, she claims that none of this was her idea. No, she emphasizes, it was Rosa’s.

“Rosa is the reason I started all of this.”

After a stint in India with the Peace Corps, Halverson went to Skid Row in 1972 as a welfare worker helping men alcoholics. One day, someone introduced her to Rosa.

“Rosa had lived for 10 years on that parking lot over there,” Halverson explained, waving toward a nearby lot. “She had two shopping carts, that one (a cart filled with Rosa’s belongings) and one downstairs.

“Rosa said, ‘Hey, you do all these things for the men around here. Why not do something for the women?’ And I thought, why not?”

Halverson then founded what has been described as “the first organization to bring care and shelter to the women of Skid Row.”

Situated in a rented one-story, 3,200-square-foot building at 325 S. Los Angeles St., the center provides Skid Row women with a daytime place to nap, shower, eat lunch, play scrabble or cards, watch television, read, study for the high school proficiency test, and even learn math and Spanish--all through volunteers and private contributions.

“I think the government has a duty to provide for people who can’t provide for themselves,” Halverson explained, “but I just don’t want to deal with the red tape.” So she has worked to develop private resources, including the volunteers.

Among them is actress Loretta Young, who spends a day with the women every three or four months, talking with them and sharing beauty tips.

“She’s really special to these ladies,” Halverson said. “Most of them know her.” The average age of the women who frequent the center is about 50.

Food for the noon meals comes primarily from women’s groups all over the city, and Halverson and her assistant, Brenda Mitchell, take turns cooking. “Brenda does it on Saturdays, and I do it on Sundays,” Halverson said. For the past couple of weeks they have served lunch to 50 women nearly every day.

The center also has a volunteer drama teacher (“We do a play every year,” Halverson said) as well as a volunteer psychiatrist and volunteer psychiatric nurse, who each spend a day a week at the shelter, open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day including holidays. “We celebrate holidays in grand style,” Halverson said.

Success of the center gave Halverson courage to pursue her dream of creating a permanent, safe place for Rosa and other women to spend their nights.

Halverson and Bettina Chandler, president of the center’s 15-member board of directors, led a drive to get private financing to buy the vacant building next door. They are in the process of buying the day facility. And now the workers are hoping to have the hotel ready for occupancy by Christmas.

When completed, the building will be known as a single-room-occupancy hotel. “It will not be a flop (house),” Halverson said. “It will be occupied on a long-term, not a nightly, basis.”

Each unit will be home to one woman. As Levin explained it, “There will be no pets, husbands, boyfriends or friends living with them.” There will be no hot plates, either, though each room will have a small refrigerator, a sink, built-in lighting and storage areas, a double bed, a desk and an armchair.

On each of the 2,500-square-foot floors there will be community bathing facilities and toilets and a community room, which may serve as a dining area when the day facility is closed.

“The concept will be a home within a home,” Levin explained, “and there will be a light over every door and a mailbox outside each room.

Commercial-grade materials will be used in the decor, she said, but they will be in bright, warm colors “so they will be durable but non-institutional.”

Rents will be $135 or $150 a room. “Rent everywhere else in the area is $200 to $250 a room, so there will be an incredible savings,” Halverson noted. Women of Skid Row often subsist on Social security and other governmental payments.

“Most are disabled, a lot with psychiatric disabilities, and usually they have a history of illness and being in the hospital,” Halverson explained. “They don’t have much involvement with their families anymore. So we are their family. That’s why the spirit these men who are working on the building have shown has been so important.”

That spirit was probably fueled by an experience that two of them had. Halverson shared it with the people attending the ceremony:

“This is not the easiest place to do construction, and one night--when the project was just getting started--a couple of the men stayed here all night to keep the building safe.

“That was a good experience, they said, because they usually leave here at 3 p.m. By staying all night, they could see people sleeping on the sidewalks and in the parking lots. Now the men know that there is a need for this.”

The Downtown Women’s Center is dedicated to improving the quality of life, she added, “and I want to thank you fellows for helping us to do that.”

Said Koiber later:

“I think it’s a great thing that Jill is doing, and every one of us is proud as hell to be part of it.”