She could rock the house -- if she had one

Victoria walks me into the elevator and hits the button for the second floor. She says she can play the piano, and she’s taking me upstairs at the Downtown Women’s Center in Los Angeles to prove it.

“Can you sing, too?” I ask.

“Yes!” she says indignantly.

Victoria, 52, has been waiting, waiting, waiting and waiting for a place to live, but the seasons come and go with nothing new on the horizon. Monday night, she slept in an alley near 4th and Los Angeles, and where she’d lay her head Tuesday was still an open question.

But she was spending the day, as she often does, at the Women’s Center, gathering herself, taking her meals and staying abreast of job and housing information.

As Victoria tells it, she was a victim of incest for 10 years as a child, was raped at 15 and then beaten by her husband. Doctors say she has dissociative disorder, which can be caused by trauma, and she used to self-medicate to excess, grabbing whatever she could find on the street. But for two years, she says, she’s been clean.

In other words, Victoria is like thousands of others in Southern California. She’s trying to pick herself up and get a place of her own, but she could use a little boost.

Incompetence, indifference and red tape stand in her way, and the latest problem is a screw-up in which the city of Los Angeles lost federal funding that could have been converted into hundreds of housing units. I’ll get to that -- as well as Victoria’s piano concerto -- in a minute. But first a little history.

Remember the L.A. County Board of Supervisors’ big announcement exactly one year ago that it would establish five regional homeless centers? Not even one site has been chosen yet.

Remember the Hope Gardens project in the far northeastern San Fernando Valley? It could be home to 147 children and 57 moms now living on skid row, but the Union Rescue Mission -- which bought the land in 2005 -- is still fighting neighbors and county officials for the right to do business.

In North Hills, New Directions has tried unsuccessfully to provide housing and services for disabled veterans on VA property! Rep. Brad Sherman says neighbors question whether New Directions would be able to limit housing to vets and prohibit alcohol. But New Directions chief Toni Reinis is livid at bureaucracy and naysayers, insisting that her only desire is to help thousands of vets now living on the street, with many more expected to join them after the wars play out in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And now comes the latest snafu, in which several proposed housing projects were threatened when Los Angeles missed out on $12.5 million in federal money because of a history of foul-ups at the Housing Authority.

I’ve never made more phone calls to get to the bottom of a story, but the upshot is that local and federal officials say the local Housing Authority was notoriously inept and poorly managed. As a result, several funding requests were denied earlier this year, including money for two projects by the Skid Row Housing Trust that would have created nearly 200 new units.

“Over the lifetime of these contracts, we would have served thousands of people,” said Mike Alvidrez, chief of the agency that got stiffed, explaining that tenants in the units would have turned over several times, moving on to more permanent housing. Though he lost just several million dollars, Alvidrez said that made it impossible to secure additional financial backing that was key to making the projects pencil out.

“At first we were led to believe this could be reversed,” Alvidrez said, but his agency wasn’t as lucky as he would have hoped.

Local officials hustled together a meeting with federal housing chiefs and local congressional representatives, and they managed to replace some funding for three other agencies. But Alvidrez may have to wait until the next round of HUD funding to get his projects financed.

William Vasquez, a local HUD executive, told me Los Angeles could fare much better in the future because of improvements made over the last two years at the local Housing Authority.

Victoria, no stranger to red tape, isn’t surprised by all these hang-ups. Before she led me to the piano at the Downtown Women’s Center, she described the process of filling out forms at several agencies to wait for housing each month.

“If you don’t get it, you have to keep repeating the process every 30 days,” she said.

She’s got family in Monrovia she stays with on occasion, Victoria said, but it doesn’t work as a steady thing. She has some training in nursing and will start school next month to become a drug and alcohol rehab counselor. Her dream is to get a job and finally land an affordable housing unit, but with a shortage in the thousands, she knows there will be more nights in shelters and in alleys before that happens.

Victoria wasted no time when she plopped down at the piano. It was hard to say what was better, her playing or her singing. But she rocked the Downtown Women’s Center, showing what she could do with Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All.”

If I fail, if I succeed

At least I’ll live as I believe

No matter what they take from me

They can’t take away my dignity

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steve.lopez@latimes.com