Safe House : Homelessness: A unique facility offers a roof and comfort to women who never expected to be out on the street.

Judith Holtz grew up in the middle class. Three months ago, Judith Holtz was living in a van.

Lyn Keath used to sing jazz at nightclubs. She had a future. Now she just wants a present.

Debbie Zimnock has shuttled from one nowhere to another. She’s tired of the trip.

Each story is different and the same--single women who, because of misfortune or misjudgment, find themselves homeless. Security, a given, is taken away. Life on the streets is the new reality.

But all three women discovered a two-month reprieve from running.

It’s called the Women’s Care Cottage in North Hollywood. It is more sorority than shelter, more living room than boardinghouse. It gives women a few months to regroup in a comfortable environment while helping them find jobs and start new lives.

“It’s basically like your own house,” said Zimnock, 31. “Everyone knows what they’re doing. I’ve been in a couple of shelters up north--you just sign in, and it’s very cold. But this place brings out the best in women and helps them take care of themselves.”

The two-story, five-bedroom Tudor-style house is run by the San Fernando Valley Friends of Homeless Women and Children, a nonprofit volunteer organization founded in 1983 by two social workers who were doing academic research on the homeless crisis. Six workers, paid by government and private sources, operate the house.

“To a large degree, we neglect women,” County Supervisor Ed Edelman said, “because we think of the homeless as men. We see them more frequently than women and children, but the problem is more acute for women.”

Adds author Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, a volunteer at the cottage: “Women are more vulnerable physically and emotionally.”

Edelman said he supports the Women’s Care Cottage, saying it offers the personal approach required to deal with women who pass through the “anonymous bureaucratic system.”

In 1985, the Valley organization started a center in North Hollywood that provides assistance during the day for women and children. That wasn’t enough. The women and children needed more than showers and sympathy. They needed shelter.

So two years ago, the group purchased the North Hollywood home. Using state and city grant money, it paid $450,000 to buy and restore it. Last November, the first occupants moved in.

The house can hold as many as 15 women and children. Typically, these are not the chronic homeless--the mentally ill or drug-plagued who roam the streets for years. Life on the run is new to cottage residents. Most have been homeless for less than six months. And it’s certainly not what they expected.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen to me,” said Holtz, 36. “I was a person who gave a quarter to the ones at Ralphs.”

But it did happen, and the workers don’t spend too much time dissecting the causes--they concentrate on changes. They promise no miracles.

“The reality is pretty limited on what we can do,” said Lori Shaw, a social worker at the cottage. Until the government assigns a higher priority to housing for low-income people, “we can only be a Band-Aid solution.”

Under city guidelines, residents are allowed to stay at the shelter for 60 days. During that time, workers help the women search for jobs and apartments, and for their forgotten self-worth.

“I feel more confident now,” said Zimnock, who recently moved to an apartment with the money she earned cleaning rooms. “I know I can do it now. I know I can make it.”

Recently, the San Fernando group implemented a new program to keep track of the residents after they leave the house. Also, in-house therapy will soon be provided to help them with their problems.

It is not a hotel. There are chores and rules as the women become equal members in a communal setting. The place is spotless. It is filled with books for adults and has a back yard for children. Meals are served regularly and the rooms are comfortable.

To make sure women have enough money to put down a security deposit on an apartment when their two-month stay is up, workers require them to put aside 80% of whatever they earn while staying there. The goal is to help them earn enough money to be self-sufficient so they can return to mainstream society.

“These women haven’t had anyone to care about them,” Hailey said, “and without that, how can they care about themselves?”

The women, in some cases, could have opted for bigger shelters in Los Angeles or the San Fernando Valley, which also accept men. But they prefer the less crowded, more secluded Women’s Care house.

“There was no other place for me to go,” Holtz said. “If it weren’t here, I’d still be in my van. A lot of people are comfortable jumping from shelter to shelter. Not me. I’ve heard other shelters are drug-infested, and I’d be scared to stay there. I’m not scared here.”

Holtz is trying to put her life back together. Up until last year, she worked as a product manager for a personal growth company. She lost her job because of cutbacks. Soon she began to lose everything else: her phone, her apartment, her dignity.

When she couldn’t afford to pay rent, she made the van her home, lighting candles for heat. She moved from street to street to avoid suspicion and took showers at friends’ homes. She parked near outdoor bathrooms so she could run out in the middle of the night.

“It was degrading,” Holtz said. “I was brought up in an upper middle-class family.” She said she wanted a “Brady Bunch” existence, “but it didn’t work.”

Instead, she said, she was sexually and physically abused as a child. Only when her false, outward toughness was exposed did the horrible truths of her past come back.

Now she is getting therapy at a clinic, and getting better.

Several weeks ago, Holtz got her hair cut at the house. The work, done for free by a local beauty salon, touched her. She started to cry, realizing the fortune and the despair of her last few months.

“You don’t get people treating you this way when you’re dealing with the system,” Holtz said. “You get treated here like you’re normal.”

Holtz said that once she returns to mainstream society, she won’t forget what she learned on the streets.

“When I make it,” she said, “I’m going to help the homeless.”

Keath isn’t planning that far ahead. She just entered the cottage a few weeks ago and understands she won’t straighten things out immediately.

She, too, can’t quite comprehend how she wound up homeless. Five years ago, she was a jazz singer and had a ranch in Thousand Oaks. Keath, according to 1974 review in The Times, was “a no-nonsense jazz artist and that in itself is some kind of innovation nowadays.”

But she also had lung and heart problems that slowly ruined her singing career. Financially, the domino effect soon hit her. She moved into an apartment, and then lost that too. Her family wasn’t faring much better, and couldn’t afford to help her.

“I couldn’t believe I was going through an eviction,” said Keath, 50. “I’ve always been in control of my life, and this was the first time in my life I ever felt helpless.”

A few weeks at the Valley shelter and her attitude is changed. She works a few hours each day as a telemarketing saleswoman, starting shortly before 6 a.m. She believes the future will be better.

“My life’s not over,” Keath said. “This is just a transition period. I’m not going downhill. I’m going uphill.”

Zimnock is equally optimistic. For $4.25 an hour, she’s been cleaning apartments at a building in Van Nuys.

“If it weren’t for this place,” she said, referring to the cottage, “I’d be sleeping outside and panhandling.”

Zimnock, unable to support her three children, gave temporary custody to her mother in Pennsylvania. After getting more firmly settled, she plans to bring her kids here.

The Women’s Care Cottage, Zimnock said, saved her.

“I was able to get clean, take a shower, and be in a bed,” she said. “That’s what gave me the confidence to look for a job.”

She thinks she’ll keep in contact with her housemates.

“We’re all going to be staying around the same area,” Zimnock said, “We all feel pretty fortunate.”