Site Presented By
Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Elderly residents of public housing must police their children and grandchildren or lose their apartments. But the Supreme Court ruling apparently doesn't apply to the Bush family.
Apr 10, 2002 | At 10 a.m. on a recent Friday, the housing projects at 531 Bay Street are mostly deserted. The stairs reek of urine, there's a broken shopping cart hanging upside down over the edge of the concrete balcony. Two sullen boys hang around a denuded courtyard.
Alma Lark squints down from the third-floor balcony. Behind her, 8-year-old Nefertiti watches from behind an iron grille on their apartment door. She and her sister came to live with Lark, their grandmother, when their mother, addicted to drugs for almost 20 years, couldn't care for them anymore.
"Are the boys there?" Alma asks nervously. "They here every morning, selling the drugs."
Lark doesn't know the boys. They don't even live in the housing project. But today, in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling earlier this month, Lark's future -- along with the future of her grandchildren -- is tied to the teenage strangers. Their behavior, long an annoyance to Lark, is now a threat to her well-being.
Under the terms of a 1996 law upheld by the court, any public housing resident can be evicted from his or her apartment if anyone living in or visiting their home is discovered using drugs, or participating in other criminal activity. The rule means that Lark, already overwhelmed with the business of mothering, has to take on the role of cop. If she wants to stay in her apartment, she has to make sure that no one in it -- friends, visitors, her addicted daughter -- takes drugs, sells drugs, hangs out with drug dealers or commits any crime. If she fails, she could be evicted.
"When you live in public housing it's a challenge all the time," Lark says. "You have drug activity around the building and young people trying to get other children involved in the activity."
And increasingly, there are few activities to offer as alternatives to drug activity. Even as the Supreme Court upheld the One Strike rule, as the eviction law is called, the Bush administration is eliminating programs that have been successful in reducing drug use and crime in public housing. The Public Housing Drug Elimination Program -- started in 1989 to direct $345 million annually to special police enforcement, youth initiatives and drug addiction programs within housing projects -- was credited with helping reduce drug use in public housing by up to 44 percent in some communities. Bush ended the program last year. Public housing advocates, devastated by the loss, predict that crime rates will begin to rise again as a result.
The One Strike rule was created by the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration to curb drugs and crime in public housing. It was to be a tool, says Jon Gresley, executive director of the Oakland Housing Authority, to give residents like Lark authority in their own families, and power in their housing projects. But enforcement of the rule demands relentless vigilance and enormous responsibility. It requires grandparents taking care of grandchildren, who constitute many of the projects' residents, to regard their own family members with panicked suspicion; to monitor their activities, even when they are not at home. And if the grandparents detect bad behavior, they have to stop it, or lose their apartments.
This was the dilemma of plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case. Willie Lee and Barbara Hill were threatened with eviction when their grandchildren -- first-time offenders -- were caught smoking marijuana in the parking lot of their Oakland, Calif., apartments. Grandmother Pearlie Rucker came to the brink of eviction because her developmentally disabled daughter was caught smoking crack three blocks from Rucker's apartment. Disabled senior Herman Walker is in trouble because his caretaker secretly brought crack into Walker's home. (As of this week, only Walker still faces eviction. The others have been given another chance.)
The fate of these elderly people is frightening to their peers, who aren't just afraid of eviction, but wary of the estrangement that the burden of household law enforcement may bring. The One Strike rule pits love against reason: If the surrogate parents of abandoned kids must now view the children as potential liabilities, they may not have the courage or ability to take them in at all.
Says Anne Omura, attorney with the Eviction Defense Fund in Oakland, and lawyer for some of the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, "Realistically, it's going to stymie alternative families, because you can be punished and held accountable for the acts of another person. It chills the freedom of association with their own family members.
"You may love your grandson and want to take him out of a bad lifestyle," she adds, "but if he screws up once you will lose your home. I just hope family members don't have to file restraining orders against their own families to save their homes."
According to data collected by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there are some 3 million people living in 1.2 million public housing units: 360,000 are elderly and 1 million are children. HUD's statistics say that roughly 25,000 minors are being raised by their grandparents within public housing, but these numbers are considered unreliable, thanks to the countless public housing residents who underreport the number of family members living with them. More data can be gleaned from the U.S. Census, which reports that 2,354,121 grandparents nationwide are raising their grandchildren; about 60 percent of those are single grandmothers, and of these families, almost two-thirds are living in poverty.
