Shelter for Families Is Dedicated to Restoring ‘the Sense of Dignity’

Eight children stood in a Boyle Heights parking lot singing, “We are the world. We are the children.” Or at least as much of the song as they could remember.

The kids, all formerly homeless, joined Mayor Tom Bradley, Councilman Richard Alatorre and Supervisor Ed Edelman at the opening Friday of Chernow House, a new shelter for homeless families on Breed Street.

The 80-bed facility has been set up by the L.A. Family Housing Corp., a nonprofit group that works to build low-income housing. Chernow House is its third transitional shelter for families.

‘Sense of Dignity’

“For those who come here, we can restore the sense of dignity and decent, safe and sanitary housing,” Bradley said. “How long we have promised that in this country, yet it still eludes us.”

The new shelter will offer housing for 60 days and at the same time provide transitional services like medical care, child care, job counseling and housing relocation assistance.

Of the 6,000 shelter beds in Los Angeles County, according to Ruth Schwartz of the Shelter Partnership, about 2,000 are available to families with children. Of those, she added, about half provide such additional services.

“It makes no sense simply to give people food and shelter and not help them get back into the mainstream of society,” Edelman said.

Transitional services have been part of a growing trend in new shelter programs over the last three years, Schwartz said, as is a trend not to place such shelters in the downtown Skid Row. “Families ought not to be on Skid Row,” she added.

This $900,000 project was funded by state, city and county money as well as several private foundations and individual donations. It was named after one of the private sponsors, the late Alex Chernow, a former executive with the Zenith National Insurance Co.

Run 2 Other Facilities

Arnold Stalk, executive director of L.A. Family Housing and also an architect, said it took about eight months to remodel the two-story medical building. His group opened the 35-bed Gramercy House, a transitional facility in the Wilshire District, in 1986, and that same year took over the management of the Valley Shelter, a 77-unit former motel in North Hollywood.

The eight children who came to sing at the opening were from Valley Shelter. The first families will not actually move into Chernow House until next week, officials said.

One of the children, 12-year-old Mimi Carloss, said she had been told that she and her brother, mother, father and grandmother would be moving to Chernow from the North Hollywood shelter.

She looked around the place and played with the jump rope and the bubble-blower in the recreation room. Then she took some yellow chalk and rendered her verdict on the back of a blackboard, where she figured no one would see it:

“I like it here. Mimi.”