Homeowners vs. Drug Center Aided by Nancy Reagan : Savvy Neighborhood Groups Face Tough Fight With Phoenix House

It’s been, on one level, a standard neighborhood development dispute--angry homeowners in Lake View Terrace trying to block an outside organization’s project in their area.

From the start, however, the nature of the project has made emotions more intense than usual. At issue is a proposal for a drug treatment center, raising residents’ fears that addicts will be running loose near their homes.

And then there’s the kicker. This is to be the Nancy Reagan Center, meaning that the project is supported by a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser, an influential lobbyist--providing his services free of charge--as well as by one of the most powerful names in America.

So it has not been like past battles fought by Lake View Terrace homeowners’ groups, which in recent years have polished their own lobbying skills by successfully defeating proposals for a juvenile detention center, a church and a move by the city to tear down public horse stables.

“This is the most difficult fight I think we’ve faced because there are so many powerful people involved, so many Ivory Tower people who think they are above all this sort of public outcry,” said Phyllis Hines of the Lake View Terrace Improvement Assn.

Phoenix House Proposal

The battle lines were drawn in the northeast San Fernando Valley foothill community last May when New York-based Phoenix House proposed establishing one of its facilities to house recovering drug users in the defunct Lake View Medical Center.

Phoenix House, a private nonprofit organization with six drug treatment facilities in New York and four in California, offered an ambitious plan for the 15-acre hospital property, calling for a 150-adolescent treatment center and high school, a 60-person live-in adult program, an after-school program for up to 30 local teen-agers and a research and training center.

At Phoenix House’s request, Nancy Reagan lent her name to the project and would have an office there from which she could continue her anti-drug crusade.

Mitchell S. Rosenthal, founder of Phoenix House, said he has not asked the former First Lady to get involved directly in the neighborhood fight because “as an institution, this is our job.”

But the benefits of the former First Lady’s involvement have been quite tangible. Through such events as the $1,000-a-plate Beverly Hills gala Jan. 4 that welcomed the Reagans back to California, Phoenix House has raised nearly $5 million in cash and pledges, half the estimated cost of buying and renovating the hospital buildings.

While movie stars, politicians and Fortune 500 denizens enjoyed the event, a handful of representatives of two Lake View Terrace homeowners’ groups marched outside the Beverly Hilton, carrying signs with a ready-made slogan: “Just Say No to Phoenix House.”

The community groups, meanwhile, have raised about $4,500 for their war chests through hotdog, T-shirt and garage sales. They plan a $25-a-plate spring supper.

Cleared First Step

On Friday, the homeowners lost the first round of the fight. City Associate Zoning Administrator Darryl L. Fisher ruled that Phoenix House will not have to prepare an environmental impact report for the center--meaning the project cleared the first step in a lengthy approval process.

The community groups, which fear the center would trigger declines in property values along with increased drug sales and crime, hope to quash the project through City Hall or court appeals.

Group members already have crowded a hearing on the project, collected 1,100 signatures on protest petitions, hired a planning consultant and won support from Los Angeles City Councilman Ernani Bernardi and county Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

The homeowners also have been encouraging hospitals and other businesses to offer counter bids on the medical center property, on which Phoenix House holds a short-term option to buy.

But Phoenix House officials have had 22 years of experience in dealing with opposition to their centers on both coasts. Phoenix House, which claims to have never lost a zoning fight, “sticks it out and one of the reasons they can is that they have a lot of corporate backing, they have a lot of wealthy people behind them,” said Charles Schweiss, a member of a citizens group that failed to block Phoenix House from taking over a Jesuit seminary in Shrub Oak, a suburb of New York City.

Among those helping Phoenix House in Los Angeles is attorney George J. Mihlsten, regarded as one of the city’s most effective planning lobbyists. In recent years, he played key roles in killing a proposed moratorium on high-rise buildings on Wilshire Boulevard and in smoothing the way for an eight-story Cedars-Sinai Medical Center building.

Mihlsten has collected more than $100,000 in fees just for his lobbying at City Hall each of the last two years, according to city records. Mihlsten said he is volunteering his services for the Nancy Reagan Center--not due to the involvement of the former First Lady, he said, but because of his belief in the anti-drug effort.

Homeowners Undaunted

The Lake View Terrace homeowners do not seem to be intimidated by the opposition.

“I think they’ve got themselves into a different situation than they’ve had in other areas,” said Lewis Snow, vice president of the Lake View Terrace Home Owners Assn. “In this instance, they’re going to run into a whole bunch of tenacious people who are willing to spend a lot of time to put roadblocks up all along the way.”

Participation in the two homeowners organizations--Snow’s group and the Lake View Terrace Improvement Assn.--has hit an all-time high since the treatment center fight began, with membership including about 500 of the area’s 10,000 residents. Leaders say it is primarily because “drug” is the word Lake View Terrace residents fear most.

Proximity to narcotics trafficking centers in Pacoima and San Fernando lends a dose of big-city reality to what might otherwise be a half-rural enclave of working- and middle-class families. Last fall, just a few blocks from the proposed drug treatment center, four people were murdered at a house where a drug ring stored cocaine.

Phoenix House President Rosenthal insists that the Lake View Terrace location is ideal for the treatment center because of the drug problem. The center’s doors will not be locked, he said, but that doesn’t mean clients will wander through local streets looking for drugs. Experience in other cities shows that if clients leave, they go straight home, he said.

The community remains skeptical.

“It’s like putting a recovering alcoholic in the liquor store and telling them not to touch,” Snow said. “There are drug gangs located just blocks from this facility. Anyone who wants to sneak out of that center is going to sneak out.”

Over the years, the community groups have earned a reputation for determination and attention to detail. “They do their homework and, boy, they can really raise some hell when they want to,” said Marc Litchman, administrative assistant to Rep. Howard Berman (D-Panorama City).

In 1986, the homeowners thwarted efforts by a Utah company to turn the former Lake View Medical Center into a juvenile detention center. Less than two weeks after learning of the plan, 300 people showed up to protest at a public meeting, six committees were formed and letter-writing and petition campaigns against the facility began, leading the company to withdraw its plans.

A year ago, the homeowners fought the destruction of public horse stables at Hansen Dam after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued an order to raze the run-down, city-leased facilities. About 500 people gathered to protest the order, prompting City Councilman Joel Wachs to order a new inspection of the stables. The inspection found that only minor repairs were needed and led to an agreement to let the stables stand.

Lesson Learned

Such battles taught the homeowners to “play hardball,” Snow said, by getting elected officials involved early and educating the community about worst-case scenarios through meetings, leaflets and newsletters.

“We learned you just don’t walk into these hearings and say, ‘Please, kind sir, don’t do these things,’ ” he said.

On Jan. 20, dozens of Lake View Terrace residents testified at the first public hearing on the Nancy Reagan Center, asking Associate Zoning Administrator Fisher to require an environmental impact study.

The homeowners argued that such a report would show that the center is not suitable for a residential community. But Phoenix House officials said preparing the report merely would delay city approval for several months--and they prevailed in the ruling Friday.

Fisher said he will decide within a month whether to grant the conditional-use permit necessary to operate a drug-treatment center and school on the former hospital property, which is zoned for agriculture. Either way he rules, the matter is expected to be appealed to the Board of Zoning Appeals, the City Council and perhaps the courts.

“We have lost the battle in a long, long war, but we are not mortally wounded,” Snow said.

Phoenix House officials say they have been through all this before with their other centers. The closest is a 40-bed adolescent center on the Venice Boardwalk, which Phoenix House was able to take over without public hearings in 1986 after another drug-treatment company operating there hit financial hard times. “It’s always the same two or three arguments,” said Larraine Mohr, Phoenix House senior vice president.

“Let’s face it, there isn’t any community that we could go into that would say, ‘welcome,’ ” Rosenthal said.

Rosenthal said Mrs. Reagan is kept apprised of developments in the permit process and is “very sensitive” to the neighbors’ concerns.

“She is also aware,” he said, “that everyone agrees that we need to be treating our kids, but they say ‘please don’t do it in this neighborhood.’ ”

Mrs. Reagan’s spokesman, Mark Weinberg, said she is sorry about the opposition in Lake View Terrace “because drug abuse is such a real problem.”