DRUG RULING WORRIES SOME IN PUBLIC HOUSING

OAKLAND, Calif., March 27 -- Herman Walker is getting too old for all this
worry. 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 is getting kicked out of his apartment and ending up on the street.

"I didn't do anything wrong," Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. Walker became a marked man. When the United States 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
Mr. Walker and three other elderly residents for drug use they did not know
about.

The 8-to-0 decision on Tuesday overturned a ruling by the United States
Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that innocent tenants could not be
evicted. Justice Stephen G. 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 authority on behalf of the four elderly tenants.

Mr. 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 Mr. 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 teenage
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, Mr. Somvichian said, the zero-tolerance law could punish a
public housing tenant for something a relative does far from the tenant's
residence.

"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," Ms. Tony said, adding that the Housing Authority
would announce its decision on the four residents in a day or two.

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

Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat who represents Oakland, today 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.