A NOT-SO-WELCOME MAT

Antelope Valley Neighbors Are Behind A Crackdown On Subsidized Housing

THE anonymous tip came in over a special hotline: Someone was smoking
marijuana on the balcony of Rachel Baker's government-subsidized apartment.

On a recent morning, Lee D'Errico, a Los Angeles County Housing
Authority investigator, bounded up the stairs of the sprawling
two-story complex in Lancaster, half a dozen armed sheriff's deputies
on his heels.

D'Errico rapped on the door of Baker, a 28-year-old single mother of
three. She took one look at the group on her stairs, ordered her
children into a bedroom and moved aside.

Then the officers, who had no warrant, searched the home. Within
minutes, they discovered a half-smoked marijuana cigarette under a
couch cushion -- enough, D'Errico told Baker, to terminate her subsidy
under the federal Section 8 program.

"What?" Baker said, sobbing. "I didn't know it was there. Otherwise, I
wouldn't have let you in."

It was another fruitful investigation for the housing authority in the
Antelope Valley, where officials have launched one of the most
aggressive campaigns in the nation to stamp out unauthorized or
illegal behavior in federally subsidized housing.

Baker's boyfriend, who said he was there to watch the children while
she went to work, admitted that the marijuana was his. But the Section
8 program has zero tolerance for drug use.

The crackdown, initiated by local political leaders with the support
of county Supervisor Mike Antonovich in mid-2004, has been fueled by
the anger and fear of homeowners in the Antelope Valley. Many
associate rising crime, gang violence and declining property values
with an influx of poor and mostly black Section 8 tenants from South
Los Angeles.

"We work hard for what we've earned," said John Alvarez, who said his
house was burglarized by teenagers on Section 8. "And we don't want
that mentality in our neighborhood."

More than 350 families have lost their subsidies in the last two
years, which is more than 10% of the rolls in the Antelope Valley.
Some have been left homeless.

Section 8 recipients and their attorneys say that civil rights are
being violated as housing authority investigators team with law
enforcement to conduct unannounced searches without warrants. People
who see deputies massed at their door are effectively coerced into
letting them in, the lawyers argue. Adding to the show of force,
sometimes, are masked officers with guns drawn, looking for felons in
violation of their parole. The various agencies work together.

Critics say the campaign is unfair because it is selective: The
Antelope Valley is home to only about 15% of Section 8 recipients
managed by the housing authority, but 60% of the agency's subsidy
terminations occur there, according to a Times analysis.

The crackdown has set off a sometimes dramatic social conflict,
pitting neighbor against neighbor, tenant against homeowner, and,
often, blacks against whites. Charges of lawlessness have been met
with countercharges of racism and vigilantism.

Antonovich says race has nothing to do with it: It is aimed only at
criminals and rule breakers and will make room for honest people who
have waited years for a subsidy. His office, which has allocated
$284,000 to match local government contributions, contends that
officials are taking a judicious approach: Only half of the families
investigated this year have actually lost their subsidies.

Other civic leaders acknowledge that innocent people might be harmed
in the effort but see it as an unfortunate consequence of a crucial
undertaking.

"Our community is dying," said R. Rex Parris, a local lawyer and civic
leader who organized an anti-crime meeting this spring. "The reality
is we're going to have to suffer a certain amount of injustice to fix
this."

To Sylvia Franklin, a black single mother of three who says she lost
her subsidy unfairly, the message is simple. "They don't want us
here," she said.

Lots Of Housing, Cheap

Compared with the Los Angeles Basin, housing in the Antelope Valley is
plentiful and cheap. Walled-off new developments of stucco houses and
spindly trees rise out of the desert scrub and stretch to the horizon.

The dusty desert towns are among the few places in Los Angeles County
where people without great means can buy a new house. The trade-off
for many is a brutal commute of 140 miles round trip to jobs in Los
Angeles -- one measure of their desire for a piece of suburbia.

The housing deals also attracted other customers: Section 8
landlords.

In much of L.A. County, landlords complain that payments under Section
8 fall below market rates, but in Lancaster and Palmdale, they are a
boon. The government allows landlords to charge up to $1,874 for a
three-bedroom house. Some have two-car garages, vaulted ceilings,
modern kitchens and swimming pools. Under Section 8, poor tenants pay
about a third of their income in rent; the federal government pays the
rest directly to the landlord.

Section 8 tenants flooded in. About 1,500 families were on Section 8
in the Antelope Valley in 2000, according to government statistics. By
early 2006, the number had more than doubled.

The influx contributed to a demographic transformation. The number of
African Americans in Lancaster and Palmdale has soared, nearly
quadrupling to 45,000 in 15 years.

Nicola Jackson, 36, was part of the influx. The only Section 8
apartment she could find in Los Angeles was in a neighborhood where
her five kids had to worry about stray bullets.

In Lancaster, her Section 8 subsidy got her a four-bedroom,
three-bathroom home on a cul-de-sac. She spent hours decorating each
room, matching her curtains to the fresh paint.

In some ways, this is how Section 8 backers hoped the program would
work: Created during the Nixon administration, it was hailed as a way
to break up bleak public housing projects considered incubators for
poverty and crime. The idea was to move poor people into neighborhoods
with access to better jobs and schools.

Around the country, however, Section 8 tenants have not necessarily
been welcomed into middle-class enclaves, according to a federally
commissioned report issued in 2001.

"In many cases," the report concluded, Section 8 "becomes a scapegoat
for larger problems or changes in the community," such as declining
quality of life and property values.

In the Antelope Valley, homeowners are particularly rattled by rising
crime. Property crimes climbed at nearly twice the rate of the
population in Lancaster and Palmdale between 2000 and 2005. Though the
number of overall violent crimes has risen only slightly, the number
of murders has nearly tripled, and robberies are up 60%.

At least in part, many residents blame Section 8.

Launching A War

On a Monday in March, more than 3,000 people, many of them homeowners,
filled Lancaster Baptist Church. They came to vent about the latest
assaults on their suburban dreams.

Just weeks before, teenage boys -- presumed to be from Section 8
families -- had broken into the home of a pregnant woman, urinated on
her maternity clothes and put her barking Chihuahua in the freezer.

On this night, the attendees vowed to redouble their efforts against
such hooliganism, launching what they called the Antelope Valley War
on Gangs and Crime. One key objective: limiting the number of Section
8 tenants in the Antelope Valley.

The meeting came as a conflict was raging at the city's eastern edge,
in a decade-old tract with the sedate name of Traditions. Up and down
the tidy streets, neighbors could point to houses rented to Section 8
families that they felt were not being cared for properly, bringing
down everyone's property values.

They shook their heads at lawns turned brown for lack of water and at
garbage cans abandoned on the street. Some said they were afraid to
let their children play in the local park because of reports of a
mugging. After a rash of burglaries, neighbors concluded that Section
8 tenants or their families were responsible.

John Alvarez's house was looted last August. His two young children,
he said, were afraid to sleep alone for six months. "They lost their
innocence on that day," said Alvarez, 31, a middle school math and
history teacher.

Soon after the break-in, he and others got together for a Neighborhood
Watch meeting. They talked about how to take back their neighborhoods
from people on Section 8. Among their tactics: flooding a hotline set
up in 2004 to take complaints about neighbors on such subsidies.

Eventually, the complaints brought visits from housing authority
investigators, who found cause to cut off some subsidies. Among those
targeted was Nicola Jackson, the woman who had moved with such delight
into a four-bedroom home on a cul-de-sac.

Although Jackson wasn't implicated in the burglaries, her neighbors
didn't like her. They claimed she had wild parties, that teenage
visitors shot out a streetlight and that Jackson's boyfriend stood
with menacing-looking pit bulls at the entrance to the cul-de-sac.

No one would speak on the record, citing fear of retaliation.

In revoking her subsidy, officials alleged that her boyfriend was
living with her without authorization -- an allegation she denies.
Jackson said her neighbors' real problem was that she was black and on
Section 8.

Then came the Chihuahua incident -- allegedly perpetrated by the same
teenagers who hit Alvarez's place a few blocks away. The Chihuahua's
owner, Kim Holzer, was at work and her husband was serving in the Air
Force in Afghanistan when the burglars ransacked their place and put
3-pound Roxy in the freezer, where she was found near death by a
sheriff's deputy.

The plight of Roxy, who recovered, made the news in Australia.
Meanwhile, less egregious acts were rankling homeowners all over the
Antelope Valley.

'I Had Him Out'

Lancaster Mayor Henry Hearns, who is the first black elected official
in the valley, says the homeowners' anger is not based in racism. It's
about a failure to maintain standards.

"If they don't care how they live, we don't want them," Hearns said.
"But if they want to be good citizens, keeping their yards up like
everybody else, they are welcome here."

Hearns said he had a run-in with neighbors that he suspected were on
Section 8. Perturbed that they were not bringing in their trash cans,
he went over to their house to offer assistance.

The 74-year-old pastor of a 3,000-member church said he was not warmly
received. He wound up in an altercation with the teenage boy who lived
there, then was ordered off the property by the boy's father.

Within weeks, the mayor said, "I had him out."

"It was quick, but it was fair," said Hearns, declining to say how the
ouster was accomplished.

In the area's haste to cleanse its suburbs, critics say, officials
have swept up people who desperately need help and have played by the
rules.

One tenant attorney pointed to the case of Cecily Williams, a single
mother who suffers from mental illness. She lost her subsidy earlier
this year when her adult son was arrested for robbery. Tenants are not
entitled to aid if they or children living with them commit crimes.

But Williams said her son was not living with her. At a hearing to
contest her termination, she produced mail, bank statements and a
California driver's license to show that her son lived in South Los
Angeles.

"My neighbors are little white old ladies," she said. "I couldn't hide
a 6-foot-6 black man."

But a hearing officer refused to grant her a reprieve. Tenants can
contest the termination of their subsidies at informal hearings, but
lawyers complain that their clients often are denied a chance to tell
their side of the story or see the evidence against them.

"They are biased," Stephanie Haffner, a lawyer with Neighborhood Legal
Services, said of the hearing officers. Her group has challenged the
enforcement program in a series of lawsuits, including one on behalf
of Williams.

In four instances since 2005, Superior Court judges have reviewed
hearing officers' decisions from the Antelope Valley, records show.
They have ruled against the housing authority in three of them, saying
there was not enough evidence of wrongdoing for people to lose their
subsidies. More cases, including Williams', are pending.

One of the strongest objections is to the warrantless searches. But
law enforcement officials say they are on solid legal ground; tenants
can always say no.

Unless a court tells them otherwise, they said, the searches and other
enforcement actions will continue.

And tenants will continue to face the consequences. For four months,
Williams and her teenage daughter were without a permanent home,
moving from one friend's house to another to avoid becoming a burden
on anyone. Last month, they moved into a smaller unsubsidized
apartment, to which Williams devotes most of her disability income.

Talking about how hard it was to tell her daughter that they had to
move, Williams dissolved into sobs, hiding her face behind her hand
and rocking back and forth.

"It's tough. I had a nice life once upon a time," she said. "It's not
necessary to interrupt somebody's life like that."