DRUG-FREE HOUSING POLICIES UPHELD

High Court: Family Can Be Evicted, Too

Efforts to stamp out drug abuse in Houston's public housing projects will
be strengthened by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling Tuesday upholding
"zero-tolerance" drug policies, a local Housing Authority spokesman said.

Lawyers who represent public housing tenants, however, said the ruling will
make it more difficult to prevent evictions of tenants whose relatives or
guests have used drugs without the tenants' knowledge or consent.

The Supreme Court upheld housing agencies' authority to evict entire
families from public housing or other federally assisted low-income housing
when a family member is caught with illegal drugs.

The court ruled 8-0 that a zero-tolerance law passed by Congress in 1988
allows authorities to evict tenants even if they were unaware another
member of their household, or a guest, was using or selling drugs.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote that the law gives local public
housing authorities the power to tear up a tenant's lease, "regardless of
whether the tenant knew, or should have known, of the drug-related activity."

He wrote that Congress had an "obvious reason" to allow evictions of
unwitting residents: Tenants who cannot control drug use in their
households pose a threat to the entire housing project.

Robert Reyna, a spokesman for the Housing Authority of the City of Houston,
said 18 of the agency's 77 evictions last year were drug-related. Many
other tenants caught using drugs left voluntarily before eviction
proceedings were filed, he said.

"The Supreme Court's decision today really just reaffirms the Housing
Authority's concern that we provide decent, safe and sanitary housing, as
is our mandate, but also that our residents have a right to live in
drug-free environments," Reyna said.

Reyna said the agency might consider "extenuating circumstances," such as a
tenant's claim of having been unaware of a family member's drug use, before
making a decision to evict.

"We cannot just arbitrarily and capriciously say that everyone involved,
whether directly or indirectly, has got to go," he said.

Robert Sohns, the litigation director for the Gulf Coast Legal Foundation,
which provides legal services to the poor, said the Housing Authority's
approach in such cases has generally been reasonable.

"If there's a grandmother with a grandson who's been smoking dope, and we
can work out an arrangement to remove that child from the household and not
get grandma evicted, they've been reasonable in working with us," Sohns said.

In cases in which lawyers are unable to prevent the evictions before they
are filed, though, the Supreme Court decision will leave less to work with
in court, said Fred Fuchs, a lawyer with Austin-based Legal Aid of Central
Texas.

"Before, with the law being uncertain, you could argue that in the eviction
court they had to show the tenant participated or had knowledge. Now that
the Supreme Court has ruled that that's not necessary, it's going to be
very difficult" to persuade judges to overturn such evictions, Fuchs said.

The court's ruling Tuesday involved four elderly tenants of an Oakland,
Calif., housing project who were served with eviction notices in 1997 and 1998.

One of the tenants, 63-year-old Pearlie Rucker, was told she was being
evicted after her daughter was caught with cocaine three blocks from
Rucker's apartment.

John Gresley, the executive director of the Oakland Housing Authority, said
Tuesday the agency plans to drop Rucker's eviction and will review the
other three cases.

The tenants had been allowed to stay in their apartments because of an
injunction imposed by a federal district court judge and upheld by the 9th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In throwing out the injunction, Rehnquist wrote that the government's
policy is constitutional because it does not punish the tenants criminally,
but is instead "acting as a landlord of property that it owns, invoking a
clause in a lease to which respondents have agreed and which Congress has
expressly required."

The 1988 law, a response to fears that federal housing projects were
becoming overrun with drug use, mandated that a "one strike" provision be
included in housing project leases, allowing for evictions after the first
incident involving drugs.

Justice Steven Breyer recused himself from the ruling because his brother,
Charles Breyer, a district court judge in San Francisco, issued the initial
order stopping the evictions.

John Henneberger, co-director of the Texas Low-Income Housing Information
Service in Austin, said punishing people for the actions of others outside
their control is unfair and would never be tolerated in the broader society.

"Where is the fairness?" Henneberger asked. "We're clearly creating a new
category of citizenship for people in public housing, and that's something
we should all be concerned about."

Ruth Love, the president of the residents' council at the Clayton Homes
public housing project east of downtown Houston, said she was concerned the
Supreme Court decision went too far.

"If a child is in the home, we should be aware of what our children are
doing," Love said. "If my child is caught across town doing something they
shouldn't be doing, they should punish the child, but they shouldn't punish
me."