AIDS agency sues L.A. over action on former hospice

Los Angeles’ largest nonprofit AIDS services agency is suing to stop the city from foreclosing on a onetime AIDS hospice that was built with a city housing loan and is now being used as offices for HIV case managers.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation opened Linn House, its third hospice, on donated land near West Hollywood in 1995. Within two years, lifesaving antiretroviral drugs changed the course of the epidemic, and in 1999 the foundation turned Linn House into offices for social workers and administrators and meeting rooms for support groups.

“When we conceived this facility and built it, people were dying within 30 months of being diagnosed with AIDS,” said foundation President Michael Weinstein. “We should be celebrating that this change took place, not punishing the organization that came to the rescue.”

But city officials say that the $1.1-million, 40-year loan to build Linn House can’t be used for offices or administration.

“The law very clearly requires that the money that was lent to the foundation be used for housing,” said Mercedes Marquez, general manager of the city Housing Department.

In the Superior Court lawsuit filed this month, the foundation argued that the city waived its right to enforce the loan contract because it had known about the new use since 2000. Both sides agreed that negotiations that have taken place for at least the last year failed to yield a compromise.

The dispute marks the second time that the foundation has wrangled with government officials over an AIDS hospice. In 2006, it closed the Carl Bean House in the West Adams district of L.A. after protesting funding reductions for patient care imposed by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. The county said the foundation charged too much to care for indigent patients.

At the time, the foundation had argued that such a facility was still needed, not so much for hospice as for skilled nursing services.

Many longtime AIDS survivors agree.

“The population is aging,” said Jim Chud, who was diagnosed in 1985. “There are a whole slew of things that happen after 20 years of infection that seriously debilitate your life. In reality, the population that is going to need skilled nursing facilities is growing.”

Chud was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for five months beginning in April 2007 after a wound on his back wouldn’t heal. He believes that his stay would have been shortened to six weeks had Carl Bean or another AIDS nursing home been open.

A study released in December found that 46% of the Los Angeles County nursing homes surveyed would not accept a patient with HIV. Under the direction of UCLA law professor Brad Sears, the director of a think tank on sexual orientation law, two third-year law students posing as hospital discharge planners called 131 Los Angeles County nursing homes. Just 36% responded with an unqualified yes to the question about accepting HIV-positive patients.

“The reality is there just aren’t beds for people with HIV, and the beds that are available . . . the services are awful,” Chud said.

According to Marquez, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation could use the Linn House as a nursing facility or as transitional housing and still qualify for the housing loan.

Weinstein said that without a county subsidy, Medi-Cal, the state’s healthcare program for the poor, pays too little to sustain such a facility.

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mary.engel@latimes.com