Havens of Wellness for Women

Wanda Davis was young, but she never forgot the worn-out gazes on the faces of the women who stood outside the Ding Dong Motel, a 16-room flophouse on a busy stretch of South Figueroa Street where the prostitution and drug trades have flourished for decades.

She was 11 when her family moved into a small wood-framed house next door and her bedroom window looked out on the nightly commotion.

“I could hear women crying,” she recalled. “If anything sticks out the most in my mind it’s that sound, a wailing sound.”

Davis left home for UCLA in 1979 and swore she would never look back. She returned last year--not to live, but to help. She transformed that childhood home into a sober living house for women recovering from drug and alcohol abuse.

The family house on Figueroa is the third group home that Davis’ nonprofit organization, the House of Wellness, established in South Los Angeles.

Davis, a field engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Public Works, came up with the idea of operating a group home in 1997. She had purchased a $125,000 fixer-upper on Normandie Avenue and 46th Street and thought of a way to make money and provide a much needed community resource--affordable housing for people in desperate need of a second chance. She picked up another property at 66th Street and Main within two years.

So far, she said, “The payoff is not as much financial as it is spiritual. Financially, it’s a struggle making ends meet on what I receive in rent from the women--and sometimes they’re not able to pay. But it’s also rewarding in that I can help them turn their lives around and reunite with their children.”

At UCLA, Davis majored in applied mathematics, leaving behind acting and basketball, her high school passions. After graduation, she worked as an adult school mathematics teacher and later picked up a real estate license.

The House of Wellness’ two dozen adult tenants pay $200 to $400 a month for a room. They also must agree to share expenses and chores, seek employment and continue their treatment for substance abuse. Run as a cooperative, the organization has a board of directors but no employees. Its executive director’s only compensation is free housing.

Program participants are selected from residential treatment programs.

“When they come from a treatment program they have tools to work with--a foundation,” said Barbara Wade, the program’s executive director. “It’s not enough to sit at the table and expect to eat. You have to learn to sit and feed yourself.”

“I always wanted to come back and do something for people who were less fortunate,” said Davis, a single mother, who lives in an apartment building she owns near West Adams.

Sober Living Houses Seek Prop. 36 Funds

Davis’ investment may also pay off financially if sober living houses can tap into public funds. Since the implementation this year of Proposition 36, which mandates probation and drug treatment for nonviolent narcotics offenders, the supply of housing for recovering addicts has become scarce.

But under Proposition 36, funding is earmarked for drug treatment programs, not sober living houses--an issue that group home operators, like Davis, would like to change. Proponents of the measure argue that such housing should be eligible for state funding if the homes can be monitored and licensed.

“We believe that many of these people need safe places to live,” said Whitney Taylor of the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation in Sacramento and who is helping the state implement Proposition 36. “But halfway houses and sober living environments should be licensed and regulated.”

The expansion of group homes has been advocated along the Figueroa corridor by such community activist organizations as the Community Coalition, which has waged a campaign against the low-rent motels that dot the street.

“We want to eliminate motels as a source of crime in the neighborhood,” said Karen Bass, the Community Coalition’s executive director. “If people are using the motel as office space to deal drugs and rent rooms out by the hour for prostitution, then that will negatively impact communities.”

In the shadows of the Coliseum, Figueroa shares a reputation for prostitution similar to Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, said Capt. James Bowers of the 77th Street Division.

Prostitution and other crime remain high along Figueroa, Bowers said, but have fallen since the peak of the crack epidemic a decade ago. “If you drive up and down Figueroa, you won’t see the graffiti there was a couple of years ago, which means that area is cleaning up, and prostitution is not as conspicuous.”

Some credit a city and community campaign to force dozens of operating conditions on motel operators. Fanny Liu, whose mother owned the Ding Dong, said police harassment forced her family to sell the motel last year.

“The police came and they parked outside,” she recalled. “They wanted to look into every room and disturb the customers. My mother sold it because it just wasn’t worth it.”

Before selling, the owners agreed to prohibit the renting of rooms for periods of less than 24 hours, to discourage prostitution, remove graffiti and prohibit the consumption of alcohol outside the rooms.

A worker at the Ding Dong, now under new management, said all guests must pay the full $35-a-night rate.

Coming of age next to the Ding Dong didn’t leave much to the imagination. Davis remembers a childhood in which she hid in the closet at the crackle of gunfire. She recalls being bundled up and rushed outdoors at the smell of fire next door. Members of her family fell to the crack epidemic.

Next door, in Davis’ old bedroom, a 36-year-old mother of two named Brenda said she doesn’t care what’s going on inside the motel.

“I’m just looking to put my life back together again,” she said.

Brenda experienced a double hardship recently beginning with the murder of her twin sister in April and the death of her mother in September.

“It just hit me hard and I didn’t think I would ever recover,” she said. “I started using drugs and I didn’t think I could stop, but I did.”

Mom, Sober for 3 Years, Reunited With Daughter

Sober for three years, Terri Smith, 39, has been able to reunite with her 15-year-old daughter, Telia Pruitt, who has lived in more foster homes than she can remember.

“I’m balancing my checkbook and paying off old bills,” Smith said, a sign of how much her life has changed since she was living on the streets. “I used to justify the fact that I didn’t walk the streets, but I did many things I was not proud of for drugs. I lost a lot in my life.”

Another roommate, Francesca Woods, 39, also has been sober for three years.

Her memories of the Ding Dong are firsthand. It was the last hotel she worked on the street before her arrest turned her to sobriety.

“I was tired, just tired of the streets,” she said. “The cops pulled me over, I had warrants for my arrest.” From jail, she made her way into a program and sobered up.

Woods said she had been on drugs for years, lost contact with family and friends, but somehow that night in 1998 she was ready to make a change and she hasn’t thought about going back.

“I can’t think about it,” she said. “I can run by any motel and think about the good old days, but in my mind and heart I know I’m different, different now. I think about the pain, despair and loneliness and it reminds me of me. It doesn’t tempt me, but it does hurt.”