Skid Row Home for Mentally Ill OKd for L.A. Commercial Area

A Los Angeles city zoning board voted 3 to 2 Tuesday night to give a four-year permit for the operation of a Skid Row residential treatment facility for the chronically mentally ill, over the opposition of neighboring business owners.

The Board of Zoning Appeals was torn during a four-hour hearing between the fears of business owners, who said the project would bring more homeless people into an area that should be for commercial and light-industry buildings, and what members consider the needs of the mentally ill.

Board member Joseph D. Mandel, voting against the proposal, said, “We are not vested with the power to be social architects.” He said he thought he had to follow what he considered “the strictures” of zoning law rather than “come out where my gut wants me to come out.”

But in the end, board members John Mack and Ilene Olansky, chairwoman, backed a compromise by Nikolas Patsaouras to grant a zoning variance to the project on condition that it be limited to four years.

It was a victory for Mayor Tom Bradley, who appoints the board and who, along with county officials, had strongly backed the project. The permit had been rejected by a zoning administrator, whose decision was appealed to the Board of Zoning Appeals by the Bradley Administration’s Community Development Department.

The dispute was symptomatic of the government quandary in dealing with growing numbers of the homeless, many of them mentally ill, in an area of increasing business activity and added jobs.

The San Pedro Avenue project would house 50 chronically ill men and women, 10 of them drug users. It would be operated by the Los Angeles Men’s Place, which already runs a facility for the mentally ill nearby.

The facility would be located in a city-owned building that is now used as a temporary shelter for the homeless and also houses a drug treatment center.

But the area is zoned for light industry, and a zone change was required for the facility for the mentally ill to be built.

Leading the opposition was the Central City East Assn., a group of about 50 business owners in the area.

Laurie Flack, representing the association, said the group does not oppose the idea of treatment facilities in the Skid Row area, but does not want them in the San Pedro Avenue industrial area. She asked the board to allow time to complete negotiations on an association proposal in which commercial interests would buy the warehouse from the city and the city would use the money to buy a building in a portion of Skid Row zoned residential.