Housing Rule to Put 1,000 on Street, Panel Told

The Reagan Administration’s plan to evict illegal aliens from federally subsidized housing will force 1,000 tenants from a Pacoima housing project onto the street, a Los Angeles City Council committee was told Tuesday.

“About 1,000 people are going to be displaced from my project,” Fred Nobles, manager of the 430-unit Van Nuys Pierce Park Apartments, told the council’s Public Health, Human Resources and Senior Citizens Committee.

The committee was holding a hearing on a regulation announced last week by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The rule will require tenants receiving federal housing subsidies to show proof that they are in the country legally.

HUD said the rules are “intended to reserve scarce housing assistance resources for persons with the most legitimate claim--namely citizens and other persons lawfully present in the United States.”

More Homeless Foreseen

Committee Chairman Ernani Bernardi of the central San Fernando Valley said the regulations will worsen the city’s growing problem of homeless residents. “These people are just going to be put out on the streets,” he said, explaining that most tenants receiving federal rent subsidies cannot afford to pay market rents.

“The Administration is hoping they will all go back to the border,” said Deputy Mayor Grace Davis.

Nobles said his estimate of the number of undocumented immigrants in his apartment project was his “best guess” because he cannot legally ask tenants whether they are legal U.S. residents.

City housing officials likewise said they cannot determine how many illegal aliens are among the 120,000 residents of the city’s 31,000 federally subsidized housing units. HUD subsidizes rents in about 2,000 to 2,500 units in the San Fernando Valley, said Dushyant Rajan, acting assistant executive director of the city housing authority.

Although Nobles predicted during the hearing that the regulation would force many of his tenants into the street, he later said in an interview that it probably would force most of them to live in illegal, substandard housing, such as garages, or doubling up with other families in non-subsidized housing.