Group Gives Couple a Place to Call Home

A 1,000-square-foot box of candy wouldn’t have been a sweeter Valentine’s Day present for newlyweds Robin and Larry Phillips.

The Culver City couple were handed the keys to their new home Friday by operators of a nonprofit group that has begun buying houses for disabled families to live in.

The 7-year-old Home Ownership Made Easy organization hopes to eventually provide permanent homes in safe neighborhoods for as many as 50 such families and couples.

Until now, the group has only offered housing for single clients in duplexes and condominiums around West Los Angeles.

*

Phillips, 43, his 34-year-old wife were celebrating their good fortune at being picked to be first as they moved into their two-bedroom, two-bath condominium near the Fox Hills Mall. Both have a mental disability.

“I’m very pleased. I’m very happy,” said Larry Phillips, who works as a groundskeeper at UCLA and who lived in a group home before his marriage last summer.

“This is a very nice place. There’s so much room,” said Robin Phillips, who does faxing and filing for a travel agency and who for several years has shared a Fairfax-area apartment with another disabled woman.

That’s where the couple have lived since their marriage.

“This day is a special day. It’s helping relieve the stress,” Phillips said with a laugh. “Staying with one woman is hard enough. But two is harder.”

The group used federal, state and private funds to purchase the $115,000 condominium. The Phillipses will pay $300 a month for it.

“We’ll lease it to them in perpetuity,” said David J. Silva, the group’s executive director. “They don’t ever have to worry about moving again.”

*

Home Ownership Made Easy was launched in 1989 by about two dozen parents of adult children with such disabilities as mental retardation, autism and cerebral palsy. The parents were concerned about long-term living arrangements for their grown children--and the lack of independence and permanence that can come with group home living.

Working with the Westside Regional Center, one of 21 private agencies in California that contract with the state to coordinate assistance for the disabled, the parent-run group has found homes for 65 individuals.

But about half of the 100 people on the group’s waiting list are married or have children, according to Silva. And some landlords are reluctant to rent to them, Silva said.

Those placed by the organization are carefully chosen and are likely to be good neighbors, he said.

Pat Blumenthal, a Santa Monica resident who heads the group’s volunteer board of directors, said additional housing units are being acquired as fast as money can be raised.

*

“These young people want so badly to succeed and be, quote, ‘normal,’ ” she said Friday. “It’s their dream to have independence, to have a home of their own.”

Larry and Robin Phillips, meantime, were quickly moving to achieve both.

Larry Phillips was on the telephone with the local power company, making certain electricity would be turned on by nightfall. Robin Phillips was deciding on new curtains, furniture placement and a party the couple is planning in their new home.

“This is a valentine not only for Robin, but for both of us,” he said. “If it wasn’t for HOME, I don’t know where we’d be.”