Recovery Home Won’t Be in Woodland Hills

Bowing to homeowner pressure, a nonprofit counseling group has dropped plans to open a live-in center for recovering women alcoholics in a Woodland Hills neighborhood.

Officials of the Valley Women’s Center said Friday that they have ended their lease on a 6,000-square-foot home at the southeast corner of Mulholland Drive and Topanga Canyon Boulevard where they had hoped to run an 18-bed rehabilitation center.

Plans for the alcoholics’ center prompted an emotional protest from nearby residents. They charged that the center would attract drunks and prostitutes, create traffic and safety problems and spoil the atmosphere of their neighborhood in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Los Angeles County health officials, who had contracted to finance the center with a $229,000 allocation, disputed those charges and supported the need for the recovery facility.

But Norma Ehrlich, founder and head of the 9-year-old, Woodland Hills-based Valley Women’s Center, said the opposition showed it would “not be advisable” to attempt to open the home.

She said her group will ask the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization, which protested the proposal, to help find an alternate location.

“I’m not bitter or angry,” Ehrlich said. “I’m discouraged, certainly, because we’re here to help and some in the community don’t want us here.”

She said her group needs a five-bedroom home in a hotel zone--or in a neighborhood that will welcome recovering women alcoholics and not oppose a zoning-variance application.