House of Yahweh Plans Stir Turmoil : Redevelopment: A City Council hearing on the charity’s proposed new building is scheduled Thursday.

Sister Michele Morris is in the middle of a phone call when Angie, an Inglewood widow suffering from diabetes, comes in with her latest problem.

The 52-year-old woman, who cannot read or write, has just received notice that her Social Security check has been cut by more than $100 a month. She also has a cold but no money to buy cough syrup.

Sister Michele gives her $20 for some medicine, and runs next door to ask a co-worker to get in touch with social welfare officials about the reduction in Angie’s benefits.

On her way back to the office, Sister Michele meets a homeless youth whose car will not start and an elderly man who was mugged last week and needs help getting new identification.

“My entire life is an interruption,” says Sister Michele, the executive director of House of Yahweh, a private, nonprofit social service agency in Lawndale that provides free meals, clothing, groceries, furniture and referrals for the poor and homeless.

“The minute I stick my head out the door, I’m always besieged,” she says, breezing into the cramped cubbyhole of an office she shares with two other people. “There’s always someone who needs something. . . . Sometimes it’s fine but sometimes it wears me out.”

By any standard, it’s an emotionally draining occupation, but one for which the 57-year-old South Gate woman has four decades of training as a member of the Catholic order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, a religious sisterhood devoted to performing acts of mercy.

The most demanding part of her job, however, encompasses something far removed from the human dramas that daily cross her doorstep. The biggest challenge she faces today is winning political and community support for the two-story building she wants to erect next to the agency’s soup kitchen and thrift shop at 4430 W. 147th Street.

Set in the heart of the Lawndale Civic Center, the 9-year-old agency is just steps from City Hall, a public library that is slated for expansion and a local shuttle stop. The area is considered a prime target for redevelopment.

Sister Michele says the Mediterranean-style building she has proposed was designed to fit in with the city’s vision for the neighborhood. It would also provide badly needed storage space on her 9,600-square-foot corner lot and would include bathrooms and showers for the homeless men and women she serves.

“It’s not like I’m trying to create a monument for myself,” Sister Michele says. “There’s a need.”

But the planned improvements have mired the House of Yahweh in controversy for months.

The charity, which weathered a series of public hearings before winning approval to build the new facility, finally celebrated a groundbreaking ceremony in April, 1990. But just days after workers had begun to dig trenches to lay the foundation, construction was halted when city planning officials discovered they mistakenly had overlooked landscaping and setback requirements.

Despite a loss of more than $35,000, House of Yahweh was forced to start over and submit new plans, which were approved by the Planning Commission. Neighbors, however, appealed the decision, and the matter is scheduled for a hearing before the City Council on Thursday.

Residents opposed to the project contend that the showers and bathrooms would draw more street people to the agency, which feeds between 125 and 200 people six days a week. And nearby business owners say customers are afraid to come in when scruffy-looking people--some smelling of alcohol or appearing to be on drugs or mentally ill--loiter in front of their shops.

While some neighbors say the new building would be a welcome alternative to the dusty, open-air patio where Sister Michele now stores old refrigerators and sofas under tarps, others say the agency would be more suitably situated in an industrial area, out of the path of the children and elderly people who use the nearby community center.

Sister Michele, who wears a large silver cross and a clamor of keys dangling from her neck, is a petite but sturdy-looking woman who eschews makeup and keeps her gray hair sensibly short.

When she smiles, which is often, her blue eyes twinkle like a child’s. In her oversized sweat shirts, Birkenstocks and jeans, the former Catholic schoolteacher looks a little like Peter Pan dressed for a Grateful Dead concert.

A native of South Dakota who moved with her parents to Los Angeles when she was 8, Sister Michele says she was drawn to the religious life as a teen-ager because she “loved being around happy people (and) you can’t find a happier group of people than priests and nuns.”

Although she felt “called” to join a convent in the seventh grade, she says, she tried to ignore the impulse through most of her teens. But by her 18th birthday, four years after her only sister was killed in a bicycle accident, she was ready to dedicate her life to religion.

She became a novitiate in the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, a Catholic community with about 2,000 members worldwide. Among the order’s holdings in the Los Angeles area are Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital and Mount St. Mary’s College. To mark her decision, she dropped the name under which she was baptized, Ann Lee, and took the name Michele Marie. In 1959, after vowing a life of poverty, chastity and obedience, she became a full member of the order.

“I wasn’t one of those shrinking violets,” she says of her choice. “I had a full life. In convents they want regular people, not necessarily pietistic people. . . . You have to be real. That’s what life is all about.”

For the first 20 years of her career, Sister Michele worked as a teacher at Catholic elementary schools. But in 1982, while working as a parish coordinator at St. Catherine Laboure Catholic Church in Torrance, Sister Michele was deeply moved by the plight of a homeless couple that had sought shelter at the church during a rainstorm. She soon had another calling: to open a neighborhood agency for the poor.

At the time, the idea was almost revolutionary for the sisterhood, whose members rarely ventured beyond the nursing and teaching professions, even though nearly two decades had passed since Vatican II, the council of bishops that had modernized the Catholic Church.

It was also new for the South Bay, which did not have a single soup kitchen and which sent all of its needy residents to downtown Los Angeles for assistance.

At first, Sister Michele tried to find support for the agency from other Catholic charities, but to her surprise, she met resistance. “You wouldn’t believe sometimes you have more trouble with your own than with strangers,” she said.

Eventually, she decided to found an agency on her own. She called it House of Yahweh, an ancient Hebrew name for God. Its symbol would be a seed.

“It was something new for our community,” said Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper, principal of St. James Catholic School in Torrance, and one of Sister Michele’s oldest friends. “I would really classify her as a pioneer because she was really one of the first in our community to branch out and try to meet the needs of the poor.”

Convinced that parishioners at St. Catherine Laboure would support a nondenominational agency that would serve people of any faith, Sister Michele promised the pastor that if she didn’t raise $30,000 in two weeks, she would give all the money back.

As it turned out, she raised only $15,000, but when she offered to return the money, “95% of them said to keep it” and House of Yahweh, a nonprofit agency with a five-member board of directors, was born.

Her search for a home ended when a friend in the real estate business suggested a lot for lease near Lawndale City Hall, about 100 yards from a county health clinic. In November, 1982, the soup kitchen opened its doors and served its first meal.

Soon, the agency began providing free groceries to low-income families and set up a referral service to help needy people find jobs and affordable housing. Three years later, the agency had received enough donations and no-interest loans to buy the property outright.

In late 1986, House of Yahweh also put a down payment on a neighboring parcel to house its thrift shop, which sells men’s and women’s clothing for as little as 25 cents. And last year, the agency began operating five units of temporary shelter in a trailer park on Hawthorne Boulevard.

The agency is one of six major providers for the homeless and poor in the South Bay. Advocates for the homeless estimate that between 1,800 and 2,500 people in the South Bay and Long Beach area live on the streets, some finding occasional shelter with family or friends.

At first, Lawndale city officials heralded House of Yahweh for its good works, and then-Mayor Sarann Kruse presented Sister Michele with a statue made of Jerusalem olive wood at a City Council meeting. But the soup kitchen soon came under fire from neighbors who complained that transients were congregating in doorways and urinating in residents’ yards.

In a move clearly designed to put House of Yahweh out of business, the City Council in February, 1986, passed an ordinance requiring special permits for all soup kitchens and job agencies. But after receiving a petition that had been signed by nearly 1,000 House of Yahweh supporters, the council repealed the law the following month.

Mindful of the complaints, Sister Michele says she came to believe that the best solution would be to construct a facility that would provide bathrooms and showers for the homeless, and the agency began saving money for the project.

After years of planning and several public hearings, work began on the two-story building in May, 1990. But construction was suddenly halted when Norm Wilson of Wilson Realty & Investment complained to city officials that the zoning requirement had not been met.

The charity quickly submitted new blueprints, but the Planning Commission’s approval was appealed by neighbor Margaret Monson Rinnert, who claimed that the new building, rather than solving the area’s homeless problem, would only make it worse.

“Lawndale doesn’t have a homeless problem. These people are coming from other areas,” Rinnert said in a recent interview. “It also brings in too much crime to the city, and there’s no parking. I’m not against the poor at all, but it’s just a bad place.”

The council, which held a public hearing that drew a standing-room-only crowd last month, wants to review reports on crime and parking before making its final decision. In recent interviews, at least three of the council members have said they believe that the city would be better off if House of Yahweh performed its charitable acts elsewhere.

“Several years ago, I told (Sister Michele) that she was doing God’s work but that unfortunately, she was doing it in the wrong place,” said Councilwoman Carol Norman. “If I had my druthers, it wouldn’t be there. The way I vote, though, may depend on the legality of other issues.”

Councilman Larry Rudolph, who asked for the crime report, said in an interview last week: “I want to know what’s going on around there. We hired a special officer just to patrol that area. If it (House of Yahweh) is causing crime, then maybe it’s not the best thing for the community.”

But Sister Michele is confident the police report will show House of Yahweh is not responsible for neighborhood crime. And, she said, arguments that the Civic Center is not a suitable location for the agency thinly veil what really motivates city officials.

“It’s a political issue,” Sister Michele said. “We can’t give them (city officials) tax money. They’re not making money off us. Yet, indirectly, they’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars off us because we’re doing what they should be doing.”

Today, with the fate of the new building in the council’s hands and the very survival of House of Yahweh in question, emotions are running high.

One opponent of the new building has been spotted snapping pictures around the agency, apparently in an attempt to obtain evidence that its patrons are a blight on the neighborhood.

Tensions are so high that when Sister Michele recently noticed an empty wine bottle on the property, about 10 yards from a picnic table where two men were playing cards, she immediately suspected that it had been planted by someone trying to discredit the agency.

At the public hearing last month, several residents who live in the area blamed House of Yahweh for everything from neighborhood crime and men urinating on people’s lawns to lower property values. One woman said that two years ago her daughter saw a girl being sexually molested by a man who was later seen standing in line outside the soup kitchen. The Sheriff’s Department, however, was unable to find any record of the incident.

One detractor has gone so far as to question whether Sister Michele is really a nun and accused her of “making millions” off donations intended for the poor.

“She’s not interested in (House of Yahweh) as a way of helping the homeless,” said Mary Ellen Larsen, Rinnert’s sister and a Palos Verdes Estates resident who owns rental property next to House of Yahweh. “She’s interested in that as a way of making money.”

Sister Michele refused to grace such slurs with a response and said in an interview that Larsen is welcome to see her operations and examine her books. Larsen declined the offer.

Noting that about half of the people she serves are Lawndale residents, Sister Michele said House of Yahweh has become “a scapegoat” for the city’s indigenous homeless problem.

The soup kitchen, which is the focus of nearly all of the complaints, represents only a small part of what the agency does for the poor, she said. The vast majority of the people served by House of Yahweh are families whose meager earnings pay the rent but leave nothing for groceries, clothing and other necessities, she said.

Although she acknowledges that problems occasionally come up, Sister Michele remains convinced that most of the neighbors’ complaints reflect simple prejudice against the poor and people “whose only crime is not looking good or smelling good.”

“I think the poor are sort of like the lepers we read about in Scripture,” she said. “The lepers had to wear bells around their neck and if they came near the city, they had to shout, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ ”

“We don’t have any bells hanging around people’s necks today, but we have the same condition,” she said. “People don’t want the poor around.”