ELDERLY CAUGHT IN DRUG EVICTIONS

The Clinton administration vowed to drive drug dealers from public housing,
but lawyers say innocent senior citizens are being evicted along with the
criminals.
Elderly tenants nationwide are getting eviction notices because household
members or visitors have gotten arrested, usually on drug charges.

Under an executive order issued by President Clinton in 1996, that is all
the justification a public housing agency needs to evict.

"It's not fair at all," says Herman Walker, 75, a stroke victim who is
fighting to stay in his one-bedroom, $165-a-month apartment in Harrison
Tower, a 108-unit project housing the elderly in Oakland, Calif.

Three months ago, he was ordered to leave after his home health-care
attendant and a friend of hers were arrested for possessing crack cocaine in
Walker's apartment.

An Oakland Housing Authority lawyer says police reports show that Walker had
to have known that drugs were being used in his apartment. He flatly denies
that. He says police didn't think so or they would have arrested him.

Walker, who says he welcomed the police search that led to the arrest and
then fired the attendant, is suing the Oakland Housing Authority in federal
court.

Joining him are three elderly women facing eviction based on street-corner
drug possession arrests of their children or grandchildren.

The lawsuit says that all four evictions violate federal housing law and the
First Amendment right to freedom of association.

The 1996 executive order, dubbed "one strike and you're out," created rules
that speed up evictions, bypassing the usual requirement of a pre-eviction
hearing.
Congress laid the groundwork for the new system by making non-criminal but
offensive conduct grounds for eviction even if it occurs away from housing
projects. The White House then ordered local housing authorities nationwide
to apply the expulsion standards or face a reduction in federal funding or
even a federal takeover.

The policy took effect in most cities in mid-1996. In the first six months,
evictions rose 84% over the previous six months to 3,847 people nationwide,
according to a Housing and Urban Development Department survey. The
department does not know how many of those evicted were elderly. It hasn't
collected more recent statistics.

No one disputes that the policy responded to a real problem. In many public
housing projects, drug dealers terrorize their neighbors by toting weapons
or keeping pit bulls as pets. Such tenants tend not to fight eviction.

Instead, challenges have been mounted mostly by the elderly, including a New
Orleans woman who was ordered evicted after her visiting grandson got into a
dispute with security guards; a Washington, D.C., woman whose brother
allegedly sold drugs; and a Boston man whose son allegedly interfered with
an arrest near a housing project.

The Boston man won a court decision overturning the eviction, but the Boston
Housing Authority is appealing. Lawyers for the Washington woman are
negotiating a settlement that would allow her to remain. And, in New
Orleans, the woman was allowed to stay on the condition that no new problems
with her relatives crop up.

Enforcement varies from city to city. "The one-strike policy gives public
housing authorities a great deal of flexibility to take decisions on
case-by-case basis," HUD spokesman Alex Sachs says.

Eviction defense attorneys agree, up to a point. "They'll steamroll people
without lawyers," says Andrew Thompson of the Legal Aid Society of
Washington, D.C.

But Oakland Assistant City Attorney Randolph Hall says housing officials
order only evictions they can defend in court, because any tenant can get a
free lawyer. "We don't just bring these cases on the basis of the policy,"
he says. "We bring them because we believe there are facts sufficient for us
to establish that there has been an evictable offense."

The most far-reaching legal challenge to "one strike" evictions came in
Chicago. A class-action lawsuit, filed two years ago by the Legal Assistance
Foundation, led to a settlement limiting evictions to tenants who "knew or
reasonably should have known" about the behavior of a household member or a
visitor.

That is the standard that the Oakland anti-eviction lawsuit argues for.
Making a tenant automatically responsible for the acts of a relative or
visitor goes further than Congress intended, attorney William Simpich says.
"Guilt by association is rejected in our society."

(c) USA TODAY