Joint Effort Gives Shelter to Homeless AIDS Victims
Scruffy, a fuzzy-faced dog of dubious breeding, bounced from the gray tuxedo couch to the mauve chair and then up the stairs of Our House, where a group of AIDS patients have come to learn how to live and die with dignity.
A little wear and tear on the new furniture is fair exchange for the puppy’s therapeutic value to the home’s residents, said Our House manager Pam Anderson.
Our House is a joint effort of AIDS Project Los Angeles, several government agencies and a coalition of local interior designers and architects who worked for almost a year to turn the 70-year-old home into a shelter for homeless AIDS clients.
The three-story Victorian house in the Pico-Union area west of downtown Los Angeles is believed to be one of the first residences of its type in the country.
Transitional Cases
While several communities, including Los Angeles, have developed hospices for those who are near death, Our House offers temporary shelter and transitional services for homeless AIDS patients recently diagnosed as having the disease. The house opened late last month with three clients. In the coming months another 12 homeless people with AIDS are expected to live in the six-bedroom, five-bath house.
The residents receive a variety of social services, including help obtaining Social Security and other benefits, medical assistance and nutritional advice. After six months of “stabilization,” Anderson said, they will be helped to find a permanent place to live, such as a board-and-care home or an apartment shared with others afflicted with the disease.
“One of our first clients had just finished drug treatment and was getting his life together when he was told he had AIDS,” Anderson said. “He was too sick to work. His relatives couldn’t take care of him.
“A couple days after he was referred here by APLA (AIDS Project Los Angeles) he was sitting here on the couch petting my own dog and broke down and cried. He said that the dog reminded him of the home he had lost when he became ill. It was the first time he was willing to let down and talk about it and start healing emotionally.”
A few days later, Anderson went to the animal shelter and got “the ugliest dog I could find, one that I knew was going to get the gas chamber if I didn’t rescue him.”
Since then Scruffy has been a welcome companion to the AIDS patients, who often are homeless, unemployed and ignored by friends and acquaintances.
“The fact that this home was so desperately needed is a sad testimony to one way in which AIDS has devastated lives,” said Matt Redman, AIDS Project board chairman, at a press conference Monday for the opening of the facility. “But it is also testimony to the enormous outpouring of love that has come from volunteers.”
AIDS Project obtained the $200,000 for the house from grants and loans provided by the Los Angeles City Redevelopment Agency, the state Department of Housing and the federal Emergency Management Agency.
Furniture Donated
All the furnishings--from the Plexiglas tables to the dinner napkins and restaurant-sized stove to the rear-projection television set--were donated by local companies, including wholesale upholstering and furniture firms.
More than 50 designers, architects and landscapers donated time to decorate the home and oversee renovations. About $375,000 worth of repairs, labor and furnishings were donated for the project, AIDS Project officials said.
The 7,900-square-foot home is in a transitional neighborhood on South Lake Street just off Alvarado Street, but AIDS Project officials said that they were not conducting a “door-to-door” campaign in the neighborhood to let people know that the shelter is for AIDS patients.
“We will tell them individually as the questions come up,” said John Wolfe, new executive director of AIDS Project.
Latino Agencies Contacted
The organization has also contacted several Latino agencies in the neighborhood and at their request will provide AIDS education classes in selected schools and social service centers.
Co-chairpersons of the Design Committee that handled the Our House project were Los Angeles interior designer Leslie Harris and Santa Monica architect Robert Johnson.
“We were afraid that we’d end up with a yellow chair here, a green sofa there,” Johnson said. “But everyone put their talents together and came up with enough sources to allow us to have color and style coordination throughout.”
Harris noted that the project had special meaning to her. Her own brother died of AIDS. “I spent nine months in and out of hospitals watching his pain and terror in an environment that didn’t support the human spirit on any level.
“Ever since then, I’ve dreamed of doing something like this for terminally ill people,” she said, gesturing at the comfortable mauve chairs, bluish-gray rugs and sparkling white walls adorned with cheery watercolors.
“I mean who wants to spend their last days in a room painted green, surrounded by orange Naugahyde chairs?”
