Homeless Boon or Area Blight? : His Boardinghouses Are Lauded, Lambasted

John Hunt, say his supporters, is a man who gives the unhoused and unwanted a roof over their heads and a second chance. The 51-year-old businessman, once homeless himself, says he’s prepared to take on the homeless problem single-handed.

But many residents who live near Hunt’s Board and Care in South-Central Los Angeles say he represents a growing blight in their neighborhood. Hunt’s willingness to buy and convert neighborhood homes into boardinghouses alarms them, as does his goal to house 2,000 boarders by 1990.

Despite his altruistic words, they say, he runs a profit-minded operation that has brought crime and drugs to their back doors and front yards, where neither they nor their children feel safe.

Authorities Investigating

“His business totally changed the well-being and safety of an entire community,” said a mother of two teen-agers who lives in the surrounding half-mile-square neighborhood of modest, single-family homes.

After numerous complaints, city and state authorities are investigating if alleged code violations and other problems justify shutting down an outpost that accepts hundreds of Los Angeles’ outcasts few others seem to want.

“Whatever they (officials and neighbors) are saying is a lot of rhetoric,” Hunt said. “I wish one of them would stay here, it would make it a hell of a lot easier.

“The people in this neighborhood fight everything,” Hunt said in one of several interviews. “They assume that homeless people are tramps or something that shouldn’t be housed. I say homeless people need a break too.”

The source of the controversy, Hunt’s Board and Care, is an innocuous yellow duplex at 12430 S. Vermont Ave. In that duplex, Hunt operates a board-and-care facility for six clients and an office from which he manages an expanding room-and-board business. In addition to the seven houses located east of Vermont between 124th Street and El Segundo, he said he owns or operates at least eight other such properties as far north as the USC campus. He said three new properties will soon expand his sleeping capacity from 300 to 400.

Reserved for Homeless

Hunt said his accommodations are reserved entirely for the homeless. General relief and Social Security pay the rent for most of the men and women from the ranks of parolees and street people who stream into Hunt’s boardinghouses.

A doorstep away from several of the room-and-board houses is Hunt’s lone board-and-care facility, authorized to hold no more than six mentally disabled adults at one time under a license first granted in 1982.

It is this licensed board-and-care facility that is falling under the scrutiny of the Community Care Licensing Office, the city Building and Safety Department and the city attorney.

“I don’t get to see the best facilities,” said one community care licensing inspector, who asked not to be named, after an early summer site visit. “But on a scale from 1 to 10 . . . he’s a minus-1.”

Hunt has applied to get his board-and-care limit raised from six to more than 100. He could also lose his license altogether. A community care licensing investigation last July found Hunt’s Board and Care guilty of six violations, and at least one building and safety inspector believes that Hunt breached residential zoning restrictions. “I don’t think the state intended for him to dominate a neighborhood with his people,” said the building and safety inspector, who asked not to be identified.

One community care licensing supervisor summed up the infractions by saying that Hunt, in essence, illegally combined the operation of his board-and-care and room-and-board operations.

The licensing office ultimately cited Hunt last July for “operating without a license,” because it concluded that he took in more board-and-care patients than the six his license allowed.

As evidence, officials cited Hunt’s contract with the state parole office to set aside 25 beds for parolees who required board-and-care service. Hugh Nelson, field parole administrator for the state Department of Corrections, said he canceled the arrangement when it became clear “Hunt wasn’t licensed to provide the services required in our contract.”

An angry neighbor put it more bluntly. “He’s using that one license to care for six people to run hundreds through his board and care,” she said.

Invaluable Resource

Yet other officials consider Hunt’s operations an invaluable resource. “Mr. Hunt has a very high standard for the people that stay there,” said a Social Security claims representative, who asked not to be named. “No drugs, no illegal activity or you’re out. I’ve never seen any evidence to the contrary.”

Hunt maintains that the licensing office is making an issue out of nothing. He said people mistake his regular boarders, who legally require no supervision, for board-and-care patients. He said he would close his doors to needy board-and-care patients before violating state ordinances.

“One guy took two days to walk here from downtown and we had to turn him away,” Hunt said. “There was nothing I could do for him. If we had the license (to house more board-and-care clients) we could take in 20 more people per day.”

Even without the parole board contract, Hunt said, referral agencies and their parolees still seek him out.

“Mr. Hunt is one of the few who accept parolees,” said the Social Security claims representative. If not for Hunt, she said, some of the these down-and-outs “would be out on the street robbing people.”

People who know and like Hunt say the shoot-from-the-hip style that makes him successful sometimes gets him in trouble. But they maintain that the South Carolina native’s accomplishments speak more loudly than his legal scrapes.

“Mr. Hunt has a heart as big as this city,” said Brenda Wilson, Hunt’s director of internal operations.

“We’re not running the Hotel Hilton here,” field operations director Dennis Gray said, “but we do keep them (the homeless) off the streets.”

Hunt said he remembers all too well what the streets are like from when he sold costume jewelry downtown. In those days, he said, a truck transporting service wouldn’t hire him “because I lived at a hotel. This guy was afraid to trust me with a garbage truck,” Hunt said. “Now I could buy his business.”

$11-Million Resort

Just last month, Hunt said, he bought a chunk of his hometown, including a 46-acre tract he plans to turn into an $11-million resort.

“I could be mayor in Ridgeville now,” he said. “I bought a place that blacks weren’t allowed within a hundred yards of. But now John Hunt owns it and you won’t get hanged, white or black, unless you steal something.”

When asked how he financed the real estate transaction, Hunt replied, “I know how to make money.”

Neighbors, officials, current and former employees and residents say Hunt’s efforts to maximize profits cause many of his problems.

Hunt receives $572 each month for each board-and-care patient and about $300 a month for each general-relief boarder. Hunt said he puts up to 42 people in his seven Vermont Avenue houses. But former Hunt employees and residents dispute that, saying the number of boarders sometimes swells much higher, with people obliged to sleep on couches and floors. One resident counted more than 50 boarders in the Vermont Avenue houses on a recent night. Hunt said that, to the contrary, he now has about 50 empty beds in his boardinghouses.

Former residents recall times when singles were roomed with couples and men and women who weren’t intimate had to bunk down side by side.

More than one former employee said Hunt pinches pennies by following the letter but not always the intent of the rules. As one example, they said Hunt would keep two gallons of fresh milk for his clients, as required by law, but never let them drink it. They said Hunt kept the milk, unused, until the expiration date, then poured it down the drain. “I never got anything but powdered milk when I was there,” a former boarder said.

Some former boarders also complained about inadequate professional supervision. Although Hunt said he would expel anyone caught using illegal drugs, more than one boarder said seeing a narcotics transaction was nothing unusual. Boarders called one garage “Vapor Manor” because, in the words of one former resident, “That’s where people go to smoke crack.”

Work Program

Hunt acknowledged that a number of boarders would use drugs if they could. But he pointed out that general-relief recipients have $11 left after he deducts his room-and-board fee from their general relief checks. “You can’t buy many drugs with $11 a month,” he said.

Some boarders earn cash from Hunt’s work program, which consists of sewing and cleaning for women and construction work for men.

“We take a guy in, tell him how to dress himself and offer him a job,” Hunt said. “We have a system to convince them to work. We punish them by not letting them work.”

“He gave you a chance to earn a little money,” said a 19-year-old parolee from Texas. “It wasn’t a lot, but it gave me a sense of pride.”

But several former Hunt crew workers said what Hunt calls a job-training program is Hunt’s way to get 40 hours of unreported construction work out of people for as little as $60 a week, with no benefits. Ann Jankowski, a county general-relief administrator, said that it is illegal for someone to get a full general-relief check and a salary.

Hunt said he couldn’t say if his voluntary pay-by-the-job work program complied with all applicable laws. But “since I’m paying for it all out of my own pocket,” he said, “I’ll make the rules.” He added that he plans to make the program conform to all regulations, which would include starting to report work-crew wages to county and Social Security officials.

Other than the work detail, Hunt said he had no other current programs to offer his idle hundreds, even though his original license application promised health classes, group therapy, recreational therapy, arts and crafts and current events classes.

He hasn’t forgotten his original vision, Hunt said. “We plan to turn this into a real beautiful place, a recreational workshop, outdoor theater, boxing ring, pottery.”

Making Hunt’s operations bigger and better won’t satisfy everybody. “No one community should have to bear the burden of the city,” said a woman who lives near one of Hunt’s homes.

“He claims he’ll buy any house that goes up for sale,” said a woman who has considered moving, but won’t sell to Hunt. “I wouldn’t do that to my neighbors,” she said.

Police Study

“I have seen them at all times of night, constantly walking through the neighborhood and the streets,” said Cleo Jackson, who lives nearby with his young daughters. “You have females in and out of there.”

A police study identified Hunt’s boarders as the source of a noticeable share of that neighborhood’s crime, said a sergeant who helped compile the report. The officer asked not to be named and said he could not release details of the ongoing investigation. An officer at the nearby Lennox sheriff’s station noted that since July, deputies have arrested an armed robbery suspect and a stabbing suspect who resided in Hunt’s houses.

Hunt said it’s unfair to single his boarders out; the greatest source of local crime is a park on Vermont Avenue and the neighborhood itself, he said.

Despite the window bars and gang graffiti, Capt. M. M. Wasson said police don’t consider the area to be an unusually high-crime hot spot for South Los Angeles.

As for Hunt, he considers his neighbors oddly unneighborly. “They are two days away from being clients themselves,” he said. “When you’re paying $1,000 a month in mortgages, all you have to do is get sick and lose your job to become homeless.

“We have 20 of their kids here. They would be on the street and dead by now if they weren’t here.”