Tearful Decision by Board Saves AIDS Hospice

Turning aside neighbors’ complaints about living in what one of them called a “sad shadow” of death, a Los Angeles zoning board voted Tuesday to allow a Hollywood hospice for AIDS patients to continue operating in a single-family neighborhood.

“I am going to ask the neighbors to sacrifice and give compassion to their fellow man,” said Nickolas Patsaouras, chairman of the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals, after an emotional 3 1/2-hour hearing.

Fellow board member Ilene Olansky, who was brought to tears when a volunteer at the hospice described her dying patients, confessed to the dozens of neighbors opposed to the facility that “I don’t know if I am right or wrong” in voting to keep the hospice open.

“None of us are God,” she said. “I sure am not. I don’t know where people should die or shouldn’t die. But I know one thing: that the . . . people coming together (at the hospice) need each others’ support.”

Several dozen residents from the neighborhood, which lies just north of the city’s border with West Hollywood, appealed to the board to close the Hughes House hospice, which opened in a three-bedroom wood-frame house on the 1300 block of Ogden Drive in January. The residents argued that the hospice--which they described as a medical facility--does not belong in a single-family neighborhood.

Terry Lindenthaler, who lives with her husband and son directly behind the hospice, said the facility has transformed the neighborhood into a tearful scene of “recurring death.” Since opening, 22 patients have died at the hospice.

“My child has to grow up accepting death,” she said. “He has seen constant ambulances. Is that necessary? . . . I came here to live. I didn’t come here to accept someone’s death from some other neighborhood.”

Barbara Eich, another nearby resident, said neighbors do not lack compassion toward people suffering from AIDS. She said, however, that residents should be able to enjoy their homes and neighborhood without the constant reminder of death.

“We aren’t asking for the demise of Hughes House,” she said. “We are only saying that it doesn’t belong in our world.”

But supporters of the Hughes House, one of two AIDS hospices in the city of Los Angeles and the only one in a single-family neighborhood, urged the board to consider the needs of the terminally ill. Many of them--wearing pink buttons bearing the words, “There’s no place like home”--said the hospice acts as a surrogate family for dying patients during the last three or four weeks of their lives. AIDS victims, they said, should be able to die peacefully in a quiet residential environment.

“We have sought in all manner and ways to create a family,” said Ron Wolff, executive director of Hospice Los Angeles-Long Beach, the nonprofit group that runs the facility.

After the board’s decision, Wolff and other supporters of the hospice declared the ruling a victory for the rights of the terminally ill.

“I hope the community will now start the healing process,” he said.

The Hughes House first rattled nerves in the Ogden Drive neighborhood in January shortly after Alex Hensel leased the home to Wolff.

As word of the deal spread, residents attempted to squelch it by urging Hensel to back out and by pressuring city officials to declare the neighborhood out of bounds for that kind of facility. About 60 neighbors met several times in January and February to organize opposition to the hospice.

Undeterred by his restive neighbors, Wolff called a press conference in February at the home and announced that Hughes House was open. Three patients were already living there, he said, and two others soon moved in. Meanwhile, Councilman Michael Woo, who represents Hollywood, turned aside neighbors’ complaints and declared his support for the hospice.

City inspectors, responding to residents’ complaints, visited the hospice three times but found no violations. Inspector R. L. Steinbach concluded in a report that while the hospice was “albeit a little unusual for the average single family neighborhood,” it did not violate zoning laws.

But the neighbors did not give up. They kept detailed logs of activity at Hughes House, noting when medical supply trucks made deliveries and new patients arrived. In March, they formally appealed Steinbach’s determination, arguing that the hospice was a medical facility not permitted in a single-family neighborhood.

Ten weeks later, in a decision that he said caused him “a great deal of anguish,” Chief Zoning Administrator Franklin P. Eberhard overruled Steinbach. He likened the hospice to a hospital and said a strict reading of city and state laws prohibited such a facility in an area zoned for single family homes. While he personally supports facilities for AIDS victims, Eberhard said this case was a zoning issue and not an AIDS issue.

Hughes House then appealed Eberhard’s decision, setting the stage for Tuesday’s decision by the Board of Zoning Appeals, which has the final say in such matters.