Ruling Overturned : Zone Board to Let Halfway House Remain

A 12-bed recovery home for alcoholic, hearing-impaired women will be allowed to remain in Northridge, the city Board of Zoning Appeals ruled Tuesday after an emotional appeal by supporters of the home and a liberal interpretation of zoning law by most of the board.

The board voted 3 to 1 to overturn a Los Angeles city zoning administrator’s ruling that the home is technically a “boarding house” improperly located in a neighborhood zoned for single-family homes.

Representatives of the Valley Women’s Center, a Woodland Hills organization that runs the nonprofit home, hailed the decision as a reprieve and said they otherwise would have had to shut down the home June 30.

The center, two of its patients, aides to Mayor Tom Bradley and City Councilman Hal Bernson, and other supporters argued that denying the zoning variance would have been unjust because the home provides a needed and valued service. It is the only home for alcoholic, hearing-impaired women in Los Angeles County and the only county-funded recovery home in the San Fernando Valley, said Norma Ehrlich, executive director.

‘Really Is a Boarding House’

Ehrlich asked the board before the vote: “When are we going to make room for facilities like ours that can help” alcoholic women?

But John Parker, a city associate zoning administrator who had made an initial decision to deny the variance, told appeals board members Tuesday: “What the facility really is is a boarding house.”

When city officials make such determinations, the appeals board normally does not grant variances. The lone dissenter on the board, Joseph D. Mandel, expressed sympathy for the home, but warned that to grant the variance would be to step around the law and “run a risk of establishing some very unwholesome precedents.”

Board members Ilene Olansky, John W. Mack and Nikolas Patsaouras disagreed, citing humanitarian reasons in voting for the variance.

Patsaouras noted that Bernson and three other City Council members support the variance. “Why should I wait for them” to change the law, he said of the council. “I’m going to take it upon myself and rule on the law, make the law right now.”

The home was established at its Parthenia Street location in October, 1986, about a year after Woodland Hills residents successfully opposed an attempt to put it in that community.

‘Fallen Through Cracks’

Ehrlich and Pauline E. Amond, a lobbyist for the home, said it had “fallen through the cracks” of city zoning law. The operators had wanted to seek a conditional-use permit to allow the home to operate as a hospital or sanitarium in a single-family neighborhood, but Franklin P. Eberhard, the city’s chief zoning administrator, instead recommended seeking a zoning variance, Amond said.

The problem with seeking a conditional-use permit as a hospital was that the home does not dispense medicine or provide medical care, Amond said Eberhard told the Women’s Center. The center applied for the zoning variance, which Amond said she thought was a less viable method of keeping the home open. It was denied in March.

The home was in a “ ‘Catch-22’ situation,” said Doris (Dodo) Meyer, an administrative assistant to Bradley.

Richard Kavonian, who said he lives across the street from the home, opposed the variance. He told the board that Parker’s original decision “was upholding the law, and we’re a society of principles.”