Helping Homeless Help Themselves : North Hollywood: A firm will still put up apartments even though it can’t get insurance to allow future tenants to help build them.

Three homeless families will not be able to build their own housing in the first project of its kind in Los Angeles County because they cannot get liability insurance, housing officials said Thursday.

But a construction company, working from dawn to 10 p.m. five days a week, will go on trying to build the three-unit apartment building in North Hollywood by Christmas, said Arnold Stalk, executive director of the Los Angeles Family Housing Corp. The corporation, a nonprofit private group, is developing the project with financial support from the Los Angeles City Community Redevelopment Agency.

As workers raised the wood-frame walls Thursday in the 6800 block of Gentry Avenue, Stalk said the insurance company for All Creative Housing, the construction company hired for the project, had refused at the last minute to insure the families because they were not permanent employees. Stalk declined to identify the insurance firm.

The adult members of the families would have been limited to stacking lumber and performing other unskilled tasks anyway, Stalk said. Their participation was intended to instill pride and self-esteem, not to lower the cost of the $180,000 project, he said.

In addition, one couple selected to live in the two-story apartment house already have jobs and would not have been able to assist in the construction, he said.

Although the North Hollywood project is the first of its kind in Los Angeles County, the concept of employing homeless future tenants as construction helpers has been tried in other areas. In Moorpark, for example, 62 farm worker families built their own homes under a federal program for low-income people.

Construction of the Moorpark project was supervised by People’s Self Help, a nonprofit group based in San Luis Obispo that carries its own insurance to cover the families, said Moorpark City Councilman Bernardo Perez, who helped develop the project.

Stalk said the North Hollywood project will prove that housing for the homeless can be built very rapidly--in this case, in six weeks. He said other residents of the working-class neighborhood have agreed not to complain about construction continuing until 10 p.m. weeknights, a violation of city regulations.

“It doesn’t matter because there is usually noise around here until 2 or 3 in the morning anyway,” said Fabio Hearrte, 17, who was sitting on a nearby curb Thursday with several friends.

Dexter Porter, 26, whose family was selected to live in one of the units of the North Hollywood triplex, said he and his wife and three children fell on hard times last fall when they moved to Los Angeles from a small town in Florida. They stayed with a relative until they were asked to leave because of a dispute over child-rearing methods. The family moved into a housing shelter and then into one of the mobile home trailers the city provides as temporary shelter for the homeless.

“This is a real blessing,” said Porter, who works as a security guard and hopes to go to trade school to become a diesel mechanic. “To be homeless is a very scary feeling.”