Development Uprooting Seniors

Ninety-four-year-old Bernice Soliday has lived at Ventura Estates for 27 years and expected to die there.

But she and about 200 other senior citizens, some more than 100 years old, will be uprooted from their retirement home to make way for 750,000 square feet of commercial development.

The home’s owner, the Southern California Conference of Seventh-day Adventist Church, promises that the residents will be transferred to a new home before demolition begins.

For people like Soliday, who has no living family members, that is small comfort.

“Where would I go from here?” she asked this week. “I hope it’s down under. This is my home and I plan to die right here.”

The home, sprawled across 18 acres lush in evergreen oaks and rose bushes, has been open since the early 1950s. In February, church officials signed a purchase agreement with a retail developer they declined to identify, said Jere Wallack, the church’s assistant president based in Glendale.

If the developer goes forward with the deal, the sale may be completed as early as late summer. The new retirement home would be built on seven acres in the northeast corner of the 350 acres the church owns north of the Ventura Freeway.

“I want it clearly understood that even in the purchase agreement, we have informed the potential buyer that they cannot take final possession of the property until the senior citizens can move directly into a new facility,” Wallack said. “Our No. 1 concern is to care for these elderly folks in a very difficult time of transition.”

But before a new facility can be built, zoning on the seven-acre site must be changed from light industrial to residential.

“We have to go through the hoops before we can do that,” Wallack said. “We just hope the city will not make it too difficult.”

A city planner said a standard zone change can take about four months to obtain. The church must also obtain new state permits to run the convalescent home.

At the home this week, residents expressed fear over the coming move. They also worried the new home might not be completed before their facility is demolished.

“We’re not happy with it,” said Betty Olney, 87, whose husband, Stephen, lived there with her until he died two years ago. “None of us want to move into a high-rise. I’m not going to stand at an elevator to get to my room. Not with my bad knees.”

Residents were not pleased that their spread-out, condominium-like residences, each including a flower garden, are expected to be replaced by new two-story buildings.

“I walk out of my room now and I look out at beautiful landscaping,” said Marguerite Haas, 93. “I don’t want to step out of my room and look at a hallway.”

Moreover, residents fear being separated from their longtime friends, who have become like extended family members. Soliday, who lost her sight three years ago, relies heavily on Haas, who lives a few doors away, to help her through day-to-day activities.

The pair have a sisterly relationship.

“We help each other out, don’t we, Bernice?” Haas asked Soliday. “And Bernice has all of her marbles. You remember everything, don’t you?”

As well as helping her vote in absentee ballots, Haas reads letters and novels to Soliday, a schoolteacher for 40 years before she retired.

“We’re very close,” said Haas, a former social worker.

In preparing for the move, Soliday has already given away some of her belongings, though she is holding out hope her home will not be razed. Beyond her front door, where a nameplate read, “Miss B. Soliday,” some of her shelves were empty.

Her intricate needlepoint work adorned the walls and throw pillows graced her bed. Pine cones the size of cantaloupes collected from long-ago hikes in the foothills of Malibu were neatly lined on a shelf.

But she let go of her prized rock collection and many other pictures and pillows depicting her needlepoint work.

“I gave away as much as I could,” she said, adding, “I still hope it doesn’t happen.”

Gerald Hardy, the home’s chief administrator, said staff members will move the seniors’ belongings when the time comes. They also will be on hand to give moral support, he said.

“Change is difficult for anybody,” Hardy said. “It’s especially harder as you get older.”

No one knows that more than Soliday.

“This is my home, it’s all I have for a home,” she said.

Soliday, though blind, can find her way to any place in the house without anyone’s help.

“That’s what 27 years has taught me,” she said.

“I like it all right here,” she added. “But I guess I’ll go where they put me. I have nowhere else to go.”