Protecting public housing.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold the federal government's "one strike and you're out" policy for public housing projects means a tenant can now be evicted if any guest or member of their household is caught using illegal drugs, even if the tenant is unaware of the drug use.

It's a hardnosed, even draconian, policy that's similar to the zero-tolerance policies many school districts have adopted, requiring the expulsion of any student caught with drugs at school. But the high court unanimously - and correctly - ruled that federal housing officials need such a powerful tool to keep drug trafficking and gang violence from devouring public housing projects in cities across the nation.

The case involved a federal lawsuit filed by four evicted public housing tenants from Oakland, Calif. They included Pearlie Rucker, a 63-year-old great-grandmother whose mentally disabled daughter was arrested for crack cocaine possession, and Herman Walker, a 78-year-old stroke victim whose health care aide hid cocaine in a bag of hair curlers she kept in his apartment.

Rucker, Walker and their fellow plaintiffs appealed their eviction notices, arguing that the "one-strike" law signed into law by President Reagan in 1988 was never intended to punish innocent tenants for the drug activities of relatives or guests.

By an 8-0 vote, the high court found that Congress had spoken "unambiguously" when it passed the one-strike law, which was intended to address a drug-dealer-imposed "reign of terror" in public housing. Lawmakers fully intended for public housing officials to have the ability to get rid of tenants when family members or guests were caught with illegal drugs, even when tenants were unaware of the drug activity or tried unsuccessfully to prevent it.

In some ways, the case before the high court boiled down to a straightforward landlord-tenant matter in which tenants had signed a lease promising that no one in their apartments would use drugs - period. Such evictions for lease violations are common under normal landlord-tenant law.

The court also noted that tenants who are unable to prevent drug activity can pose every bit as much a threat to their neighbors as those who condone it or even engage in it themselves. Without such a policy, officials would be helpless to protect the many hard-working, low-income residents of public housing complexes from the drug trade and the violence that invariably accompanies it.

Housing officials should exercise this authority with discretion and compassion. The court's decision permits public housing authorities to enforce the "one strike" law but does not require them to do so in every case. Leniency should be shown in cases such as Rucker's and Walker's, where tenants are not to blame and had no reason to suspect drug activity was occurring in their homes.

Federal housing officials have a solemn responsibility to protect law-abiding tenants of public housing from drug activity. The court was right to give them the necessary tools to do the job.