TOUGH PUBLIC-HOUSING LAW IS OK

The Supreme Court has upheld a controversial federal policy that allows
public-housing officials to evict entire families when a family member,
even a teen-age child, is caught with illegal drugs in or near the housing
complex.

And you know what? I'm glad.

No, I'm not happy that Pearlie Rucker, a 63-year-old great- grandmother,
was threatened with eviction by the Oakland, Calif., Housing Authority
because her adult son and her mentally disabled daughter were caught with
cocaine in separate incidents several blocks from their home. That was too
rough a decision, and I've been told that, following Tuesday's ruling, the
authority is reconsidering. But I'm glad the housing authorities still have
that weapon in their arsenal.

You might be, too, if you can get past the awfulness of having poor
helpless grandmothers tossed out of their homes and remember why the rule
was introduced in the first place. It was at a time when drug dealers and
gangbangers were turning public-housing complexes into virtual crime
bazaars. The noncriminal majority of residents found their lives turned
upside down by neighbors and neighbors' children who were using and selling
drugs, either from individual apartments or on the grounds.

What to do about it? As the law then stood, unless the person in whose name
the apartment was leased was caught red-handed, he or she only had to plead
ignorance to the illegal activity: I had no idea my son was using drugs, no
idea my boyfriend and his cousin were dealing out of the building, no idea
. . . of anything.

But soon, leaders in the public-housing tenant-management movement got sick
of it, and people like the late Kimi Gray of Washington and Bertha Gilkey
of St. Louis started pressing federal officials to give them the leeway to
pressure tenants to shape up or face eviction.

One result was sterner screening standards for new tenants; another was the
right to award (with choicer units) residents who kept their places up and
their children under, control. A third was the so-called one-strike policy
that Pearlie Rucker and others fought all the way to the Supreme Court,
where they lost last week.

Under one-strike, tenants have to sign a lease that includes an agreement
to keep their public-housing premises free of drug-related and other
criminal activity. The implication is that they know or should know what is
going on in their homes. And if they don't, the threat of being homeless
should be enough to pique their curiosity.

Nor would it be enough under the policy simply to move the criminal
activity outside the apartment or even just outside the grounds. Drug
dealing by a member of a resident's household near the complex still could
result in eviction. Could.

The eviction is permitted but not required, which is why the handling of
the particular case of Pearlie Rucker seemed unnecessarily ham- handed. A
rule requiring proof of knowledge would do nothing to stop the descent into
chaos that marks so many public-housing complexes. A rule requiring
eviction under any and every circumstance of family- member involvement
with criminality would be just another example of zero tolerance gone mad.

The inflexibility of crack-cocaine enforcement has prisons bursting at the
seams, with very little positive to show for it. People have to be free to
make judgments based on a totality of circumstances, even with a
presumption of knowledge. Based on what I've read of the Rucker case and
some others in the suit, a stern warning would have made a lot more sense
than summary eviction.

But I understand, too, the fragility of poor communities and their
vulnerability to the predations of a relative handful of miscreants. There
are public-housing and other low-income communities where residents dare
not enjoy the spring breeze or allow their children to play on the grounds,
because the criminal element has taken over.

It really comes down to a choice between a liberal interpretation of the
civil liberties of those affected by one strike and enforcing at least the
possibility of a safe community for those willing to live by the rules.

Having seen both the devastation wreaked by the gangbangers and the hopeful
patience of poor families on the long waiting lists for public housing, I
choose one strike -- sensibly enforced, of course. Grandma Pearlie doesn't
need to be on the street.