HIGH COURT EVICTION DECISION WORRIES TENANTS, ADVOCATES

OAKLAND, Calif. - Herman Walker said he is getting too old for all this worry.

He said his feet ache from 79 years of wear and tear; lingering
complications from a stroke five years ago have him in and out of his
doctor's office; and he is bone-tired. The last thing he needs to fret
about, he said, is getting kicked out of his apartment and ending up on the
street.

"I didn't do anything wrong,'' Walker said in a wavering voice after he was
reached by phone at the one-bedroom apartment he has called home for more
than 10 years.

Indeed, no one at the Oakland Housing Authority has said Walker has done
anything but behave like an upstanding citizen. But minding his own
business, keeping his apartment in order and doing right by the neighbors
may not be enough to keep him in public housing.

On Tuesday, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal law that permits
the eviction of public housing tenants if a family member who lived in
their unit, or a guest, was arrested on drug charges, the justices, in
effect, said Oakland could evict Walker and three other elderly residents
for drug use they did not know about.

The 8-0 decision on Tuesday overturned a ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals that innocent tenants could not be evicted. Justice
Stephen Breyer did not take part in the decision because of a conflict of
interest.

Public housing residents and tenant rights advocates here and throughout
the country say the decision is a harsh punishment for poor and elderly
residents.

"What the decision said is if you have a guest and they leave and walk
across the street and commit a crime, you can be evicted,'' said Anne
Omura, executive director of the Oakland Eviction Defense Center, which had
sued the housing authority on behalf of the four elderly tenants.

Walker, who received an eviction notice because housing authority officials
found that his full-time caretaker had hidden crack pipes in his apartment,
has other options before he can be evicted from his apartment in a building
in downtown Oakland. He is partly paralyzed, and the Eviction Defense
Center has filed a lawsuit on his behalf under the federal Americans with
Disabilities Act, as well as a state lawsuit that also challenges the
housing authority's decision to evict him.

But Walker, who spent part of Tuesday in the hospital and was fielding
requests for comment from reporters most of the day, is not resting easy.

"I don't want to leave,'' he said.

Residents of public housing and their advocates say they are worried
because the elderly residents affected by the ruling are stark examples of
how the rules adopted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in
1991 can have the unintended consequence of punishing the innocent.

Pearlie Rucker, 63, who challenged the housing authority in 1996, faced
eviction because her mentally disabled daughter was arrested on charges of
possessing cocaine three blocks from their home. Her case was dropped when
her daughter moved away and completed drug rehabilitation.

The other two tenants, Willie Lee, 74, and Barbara Hill, 67, had teen-age
grandsons who lived in their apartments and were arrested on charges of
smoking marijuana in the parking lot of the public housing. Both say they
did not know about the drug use outside their quiet public housing in a
middle-class neighborhood.

Whitty Somvichian, a San Francisco lawyer who helped the Eviction Defense
Center prepare its challenge, said that while the four elderly residents in
the lawsuit were not facing imminent eviction, public housing residents
across the country have reason to worry. As written and as upheld by the
Supreme Court, Somvichian said, the zero-tolerance law could punish a
public housing tenant for something a relative does far from the tenant's
res-idence.

"Our argument has always been that if you read the statute literally, you
can evict a grandmother who lives in Oakland if their granddaughter is
smoking pot in New York,'' he said.

Lily Tony, a spokeswoman for the housing authority, said that the ruling
would benefit more people than it would punish, though she conceded that it
penalized people for something they did not do. "While it may not be fair,
it's what we have to do,'' Tony said, adding that the housing authority
would announce its decision on the four residents in a day or two.

Omura said she and other housing advocates hoped Congress would change the
law to correct its obvious flaws.

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif, who represents Oakland, Wednesday issued a
statement expressing concern about the law's broad reach and said it was
especially troubling given President Bush's elimination of a policing
program for public housing that provided programs for substance abusers.

But she stopped short of proposing to change the law.