AIDS Hospice Hospitality? : Neighbors Aloof as Archbishop Opens Diocese-Run Facility

When Archbishop Roger Mahony opened the first hospice-style shelter for AIDS patients to be sponsored the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, along with a health-care consortium, on Thursday, he praised the “different kind of neighbors” surrounding it.

Unlike so many others who have vociferously opposed such facilities in their neighborhood, the people on 12th Avenue, Mahony said, “have enthusiastically received this concept and . . . welcomed us.” They would be “the example for the future,” he added.

But several neighbors said they did not welcome Casa Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles, and had no idea that the two-story house undergoing renovation over the last two months was going to be a residence for those suffering from AIDS or AIDS-related complex.

Flyer Distributed

They did not learn this, they said, until a flyer was distributed Wednesday in the Crenshaw-area neighborhood of tidy, single-family homes and apartments, populated by Latinos, blacks and Koreans.

While Mahony--accompanied by Mayor Tom Bradley, representatives of the six hospitals sponsoring the consortium, and several nuns, priests and volunteers who had helped create the facility--marked the dedication at 1428 12th Avenue, the neighbors watched, most from their lawns and porches, a few from their windows.

They had been invited, 22-year-old Rudy Sanchez, an assistant teacher’s aide, said, but chose not to go.

“They should have told us what they were going to do,” he said. “They told us after they finished building it.”

The community was close-knit, he said, because it had recently banded together to “stop the drugs on the corner.” He predicted: “We’re going to fight this. They should have told us.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” Mildred Morris, a retired teacher, said of the presence of an AIDS hospice on the block. “It’s just the way it was done. I don’t think something like this should be a secret.”

But Sister Jane Frances Power, president of the board of directors of the consortium, Serra Ancillary Care Corp., said, “There was no attempt to deceive anyone.”

It was another example of community sensitivity versus an overwhelming need. The new, six-bed facility joins nine hospices in Los Angeles County, with a total of about 60 beds, according to John Schunhoff, a staff analyst in the county’s AIDS Program Office.

But he estimates as many as 10% to 15% of the 1,878 reported AIDS patients in the county need such care. It is the second hospice to open in the city of Los Angeles, at a time when the future of the first, Hughes House, which has encountered intense opposition from its neighbors in the Fairfax district, is in jeopardy.

Decision Appealed

Earlier this month, Los Angeles’ chief zoning administrator, Franklin P. Eberhard, likened a hospice to a hospital and thus ruled that the 5-month-old Hughes House, located in a residential neighborhood zoned only for single-family homes, was violating zoning laws and should be closed.

His decision is being appealed by Hospice Los Angeles/Long Beach, which runs that facility.

The Crenshaw residential shelter is the first of several that Mahony said last February the archdiocese would sponsor in the county. Officials said they were not worried that they would face what Hughes House has, spokesman Gregory Coiro said, because it is in a neighborhood zoned R-4, for multiple dwellings.

Eberhard said Thursday, “If it’s a nonprofit situation, it would be OK in an R-4.”

Sister Sue Schaad, who will be the resident manager at Casa Nuestra, which will start accepting male residents in about two weeks, said the flyers distributed in the neighborhood did not specifically mention AIDS, but invited the neighbors to an open house Wednesday evening.

Positive Reception

The dozen who attended were told what the hospice was trying to do, she added, and described the reception as positive.

Despite what the neighbors said, several in the community knew before that, she said. But the entire community was not included from the beginning, she added, because “we felt we should have something to show them, so we waited. To do that (before) was like asking their permission.”

The six health-care facilities in the co-sponsoring consortium are Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood; Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance; St. John’s Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica; St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank; St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach and St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles.