Plan for homeless center draws heavy opposition

Ana Petrova cleans up human feces every morning in the alley behind Peter's Marina Motors, the business she and her husband have operated on Lincoln Boulevard for 40 years.

Allison and Petrova say they feel compassion for the homeless, but they are among many neighborhood business owners and residents vigorously battling a walk-in services facility that St. Joseph Center plans to open in its former thrift shop at Lincoln and Flower Avenue.

"We're a neighborhood that is literally under a state of siege," said Allison, a freelance photographer who works out of his home just east of Lincoln. "We can't absorb this center."

As the Los Angeles region seeks solutions for its homeless population, and as police try to disperse the many denizens of downtown's skid row, residents of communities such as Venice and Hollywood are finding that the homeless problem is increasingly coming to their back door.

Allison's and Petrova's neighborhood, near Penmar Park in north Venice, has already seen a proliferation of operations -- several medical marijuana stores, two methadone clinics and at least three liquor stores that, according to residents, sell single shots out their back doors -- that would be unwelcome in Brentwood or Pacific Palisades. A guerrilla needle exchange has been a continuing problem in alleys throughout the area.

So residents mobilized when they learned late last year that St. Joseph Center, a reputable nonprofit provider of homeless services, was on the verge of relocating its homeless access center to the thrift-shop site from a nearby location west of Lincoln.

They organized Venice SONIC (Save Our Neighborhood's Integrity Committee) and hired an attorney, Robert P. Silverstein, who says Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl "has pushed the project through under stealth of night." Rosendahl countered that "this has been public through all of 2006."

Residents are sensitive to how others may view their opposition. "We know we're going to be tarred and feathered as NIMBY and anti-homeless," said Chris Williams of the Penmar Neighborhood Assn. "But that's just not true.

"The problem with this particular program