CRENSHAW : Homeless Service Is Broke and Homeless

Bondage Busters, the homeless services organization that not long ago was flying high with spacious new quarters and ambitious programs, finds itself homeless this holiday season.

Bondage Busters founder and director Charles Hudson had been hoping to work out an arrangement with property owner Robert Wilson since the organization shut down four months ago, but a change in tenants is most likely to happen next month.

Hudson said he was forced to close up shop because he couldn’t make mortgage payments on the property at 4433 Crenshaw Blvd. Hudson had entered into an agreement with Wilson to take over payments on a $300,000 mortgage, but Hudson said sluggish funding led to a speedy demise for the organization.

“We have no money now,” said Hudson, a nondenominational pastor. “We were acting on good faith that this would work out. . . . It’s been a struggle.”

Wilson called the financial failure of Bondage Busters “unfortunate.”

“It became obvious that a nonprofit organization like this one wouldn’t work,” Wilson said.

In September, 1993, Bondage Busters moved into its new home with high hopes and a financial boost from Wilson, who admired the cause and donated $25,000 toward rehabilitating the two-story building and its six apartments. But after that initial help--the building needed $75,000 in improvements--Hudson said donations were scarce and he could only secure $4,500 in private grant money to cover operating expenses and the renovation. Telephone bills alone ran nearly $2,200 a month, he said.

Hudson’s trouble began not long after Bondage Busters moved into the building, the former site of a secretarial school. Wilson signed the deed over to Hudson with an agreement that Bondage Busters would become financially solvent and begin mortgage payments in nine months. That didn’t happen, Wilson said, and though he extended the deadline for payments several times, Bondage Busters was never able to make one.

It’s a hard blow for the 47-year-old Hudson, an energetic man who started Bondage Busters seven years ago. Last year he was running his agency out of a small back office in the Crenshaw Chamber of Commerce.

His vision was always the same: providing the basic needs of food, shelter, and job referral and training to the homeless. Hudson had a van to pick up and help individuals who called the Bondage Busters hot line.

The new quarters enabled Hudson to initiate several new components he had planned for a long time, including computer classes, retail checking classes, youth art workshops and gang intervention services.

Hudson remains optimistic about resuming operations. From his home in the San Fernando Valley, he still helps those in need by phone and with a car temporarily standing in for his van.

“The needs out there don’t stop,” he said. “You can’t just stop working because you don’t have a place.”