Hard Line in Public Housing

For the more than 10 years that Herman Walker has lived in federally subsidized housing in Oakland he has been, to all accounts, a model tenant. When a stroke left him partially paralyzed, the 78-year-old hired Eleanor Randle, a health care aide, to help him with cooking and bathing. Big mistake. Although he didn’t know it at first, Randle was a cocaine user, and she hid the drug in Walker’s apartment and a crack pipe in a bag of her hair rollers. She was caught during a security check of the building, and because of her drug use Walker may be evicted. Walker may deserve to stay where he is, but that does not make the law allowing his eviction wrong.

In a unanimous decision Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law giving public housing administrators the unfettered right to get rid of tenants if any family member or visitor is caught with illegal drugs on or off the premises. It doesn’t matter whether the tenant knew of the drug use, or could know. In three of the four cases on which the Supreme Court ruled, the tenants claimed that the drug activity took place without their knowledge, either in the parking lot of the apartment complex or blocks away. Nor will it necessarily matter to housing officials that a tenant tried to prevent such activity. The reasoning is that tenants unable to control drug activity, even if they don’t condone it, still harm their neighbors.

This one-strike policy is at least as draconian as the zero tolerance policies many school districts have adopted, requiring the expulsion of any student who brings drugs onto campus. Federal housing officials believed it had to be that way to quell the drug trafficking and gang violence that can destroy public housing complexes. Chicago’s Cabrini-Green project and Robert Taylor Homes are among the most notorious. Although conceived as decent housing for tens of thousands of hard-working, low-income residents, the drug trade helped make them miserable, treacherous places where even police officers feared to tread.

With its decision upholding the no-drug-use lease terms, the Supreme Court has given housing administrators a potent club they can wield to reclaim public housing projects. Officials should now take care to use this power wisely.

Under the court ruling allowing eviction, in many cases that harsh action will be justified but it is not required. For tenants like Herman Walker, eviction seems cruelly unjust. In some cases, housing officials can and should set conditions short of eviction--for example, barring certain visitors or family members from the premises. Other cases may more easily justify eviction, as when the leaseholder turns a blind eye to where the easy money or the new big-screen television came from.

Public housing was never intended to be luxurious, but it shouldn’t be a drug-filled purgatory. The Supreme Court’s stern ruling could help revive those housing projects where dealers and gangbangers have put residents under siege.