'STRIKE ONE' AND HARDBALL

"One strike and you're out" has been the byword in the nation's public
housing enclaves' battle against drugs sales and usage and other crimes.

And its use as a policy - Toledo adopted it in 1994 - has made many public
housing communities as livable as envisaged when they were built. Crime has
dropped.

No one disputes the need for booting out a household where an adult is
using or dealing drugs right on the premises. But when a teenager is caught
smoking pot in a parking lot several blocks away, for example, should that
be grounds for eviction of the whole family? The U.S. Supreme Court will
decide, and hopefully it will come down on the side of common sense.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's position in oral
arguments before the Ninth District U.S. Court of Appeals was sadly lacking
in that life basic. It maintained that an entire family could be evicted if
a tenant's child, visiting friends on the other side of the country, were
caught smoking pot, even if the parents had no idea what was going on 3,000
miles away.

That offends all perceptions of fair play, and the appellate court thought
Congress never intended it to be that way.

Four cases from the Oakland (Calif.) Housing Authority are stirring the
fuss. One involves 63-year-old Pearlie Rucker, who lives with her "mentally
disabled" daughter, two grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter. Though
the mother had vainly and regularly searched her daughter's things for
drugs and alcohol, the younger woman was caught with cocaine three blocks
from home.

No one can sensibly argue against hanging tough on the use, storage, or
trading of illegal substances in public housing rental units. Illegal acts
beget illegal acts, and these have in the past forced many low-income
people for whom public housing was the only option to live in terror.

But residents should not have to sacrifice due process to this effort or
become guilty by association, as Pearlie Rucker did. HUD also acknowledged
in oral argument that the 63-year-old could have done nothing to protect
herself from eviction. That's patently unfair.

Letting public housing authorities oust innocent family members for deeds
by others of which they are unaware offends the basic American commitment
to fair play. Some might argue that low-income adults should know what
their children are up to at all times. But countless suburban young adults,
not far removed from teenage recklessness, know better from their own life
experience. Imagine the furor were their homes forfeited.

Moving against innocent tenants won't curb drug use, the court found, and
will allow for irrational evictions.

The value of the "one strike" law overall is readily acknowledged. What has
bugged experts writing in legal journals, housing courts around the nation,
and Toledo's Housing Court judge, C. Allen McConnell, is the part that lets
housing authorities evict tenants whose relatives' behavior is
inappropriate away from home. Common sense says that has to be
unconstitutional. Presumably the Supreme Court will find it so.