AIDS Hospice Stirs Concern in Neighbors

Alex Hensel’s daughter was going away to college, so he and his wife thought they would lease out their three-bedroom home on Ogden Drive in Hollywood and move next door, into a smaller house that happened to be for rent.

Hensel placed a newspaper ad and received a call from Ron Wolff, executive director of an AIDS hospice program. Wolff was wringing his hands. He had been striking out for nearly a year trying to find a sympathetic landlord who would rent his organization a house in a residential neighborhood in the Hollywood-Wilshire area, where nearly half of the 2,600 Los Angeles County residents killed by AIDS have lived.

The lease was fine with Hensel, a 59-year-old self-employed printer. His house, now repainted and refurnished by Wolff’s nonprofit Hospice Los Angeles/Long Beach, eventually will be home to six AIDS patients in their last weeks of life, providing physical therapy, emotional support and a commitment to death without respirators or other life-prolonging equipment.

Neighbors Not Pleased

The deal was not fine with almost everybody else on the block.

The day after Hensel and Wolff struck a verbal agreement, the news began to spread through the neighborhood, which lies north of Fountain Avenue just inside the City of Los Angeles’ border with West Hollywood.

Soon dozens of residents were meeting weekly in an attempt to kill the lease or pressure Los Angeles officials to block it. They failed, and on Monday, as operators of the hospice held a press conference to publicly announce the opening, resentment among residents was still simmering.

It is not, opponents say, a matter of anti-AIDS hysteria. Rather, it is concern about seeing the quiet, comfortable neighborhood invaded by the sorrowful trappings of the disease: the periodic visits by ambulances and hospital-supply trucks and, ultimately, wagons from the county coroner’s office.

The conflict is symptomatic of why Los Angeles County has so few AIDS hospices, where patients can die in an environment far more sympathetic and less expensive than a hospital. In addition to a lack of governmental assistance--it was only late last year that the county Board of Supervisors voted to release $1.5 million to support alternative-care AIDS programs--the few existing hospices created with private funds or contributions have been placed in commercial areas or low-income neighborhoods.

The attempt by Hospice Los Angeles/Long Beach to place AIDS patients in a more attractive setting runs into the teeth of something much older than AIDS: the generations-old demand by homeowners in residential neighborhoods to reserve the area for families only.

“It’s a very tough issue,” said Michael Bowen, who last year moved his family into a house almost directly across from Hensel’s. “Everybody is sympathetic to the AIDS movement, but this just isn’t appropriate. It wouldn’t be so bad if it had been between a bicycle shop and a laundry, but not here.”

Coincidentally, the Bowens put their home up for sale a couple months before the hospice deal was signed. Now they fear that prospective buyers will be turned off, or offer less money.

“You spend all your life saving money to buy a house and then you find you’re living across the street from a mini-hospital,” Bowen said.

It is an argument Alex Hensel, a resident of Ogden Drive for 15 years, has heard many times.

Telephone Calls

“As soon as people heard about the lease, I started getting telephone calls,” he said. “Ten, 20, 25 a day from neighbors. What I found out is that except for the two closest neighbors, who were concerned about AIDS, the rest were only concerned about property values--’After so many years here, I’m going to lose . . . .’ Where do you get that? This isn’t a hospital. It’s just a chance for people in their last few days to have some warm feeling in their hearts. What I heard really shocked me.”

The hospice on Ogden is called the Hughes House, dedicated to Shawn Hughes, the first City of West Hollywood employee to die of AIDS. Hughes’ mother, along with more than a dozen people active in gay-related causes, attended Monday’s press conference.

Three patients have already moved in, and the other three will follow soon, Wolff said. The average stay is expected to be about 60 days. Different members of Wolff’s organization are providing continuous supervision at the hospice. A home-care agency sends nurses and social workers when necessary.

Wolff estimated that 200 to 300 AIDS patients in the county would be better served by living in a hospice than a hospital or their own homes.

Hospice Los Angeles/Long Beach runs two other hospices, able to house 21 people, in Long Beach. It plans to open another facility in Culver City and two additional hospices by the end of the year. It is counting on obtaining more than $200,000 of county government’s new alternative-care funding.

Facilities Elsewhere

Few other hospices exist in the county. Barlow Sanatorium in Elysian Park has developed a plan that would bring dozens of now-vacant buildings on the 20-acre campus back into use as an AIDS facility. Barlow officials hope to open a 25-bed hospice this year.

Back on Ogden Drive, small knots of neighbors milled around the fringes of Monday’s press conference, which drew numerous television crews.

“The press conference was as much a surprise to us as the signing of the lease,” said Charles Belden, who lives one street over on Genesse Avenue and, like many neighbors, is upset with City Councilman Michael Woo’s support of the hospice.

Neighbors said Woo’s office had provided conflicting information on whether the hospice required a zoning variance, which would have necessitated formal city notification of surrounding residents. On Monday Woo said he had obtained an opinion from the city attorney’s office stating that hospices could be operated in residential zones as long as they are no larger than six beds.

‘Not a Hospital’

“A hospice is not a hospital,” Woo said. “It is a place where (AIDS patients) can die with respect and dignity.”

Belden was unmoved.

“Our problem has nothing to do with AIDS,” he said. “It has to do with R-1 (single-family zoning) conformity. . . . It’s the same as if somebody put in a body-and-fender shop in your neighborhood.”

He acknowledged there is little residents can now do.

“The barn door is open and the horse is gone and the people are in,” he said.

A reporter asked Alex Hensel if the controversy had cost him any friends.

“I want to wait six months,” he said.