By Anat Rubin
Daily Journal Staff Writer
This article appears on Page 1


LOS ANGELES - A loud, clanking noise awakened Elvira Evers. The 55-year-old was still half asleep when she opened her front door to find five men, four in police uniform, standing behind her security gate on 146th Street in Gardena.
"The police officers were hitting the gate with their batons," she said. "It was still dark, and when I opened the door, they shined their flashlights in my face."
One of the men, a Los Angeles County Housing Authority investigator, said he was there to conduct an unannounced compliance check, to see that Evers was living in accordance with a federal housing subsidy program.
Evers had been receiving the subsidies, commonly called Section 8 vouchers, since 1992. She had never heard of unannounced compliance checks, and she was surprised to see a Housing Authority official surrounded by armed police officers. But she invited the men inside.
"I don't have anything to hide,'" she said. "Ever since I got on Section 8 I had no kind of problem."
The investigator, Evers said, stood by the door while the police officers searched the apartment and interrogated Evers and her children. They told her they were looking for firearms and drugs.
The officers had no warrant, but housing investigators do not need one to enter a subsidized unit. Increasingly, police officers and sheriff's deputies have been using the county Housing Authority to gain access into homes, even when they have no evidence that residents are involved in criminal activity.
County and local law enforcement officials say the searches are useful in fighting crime and rooting out people who are defrauding the system. They say they always get consent to enter a unit. Civil rights attorneys say the practice is in violation of the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on warrantless searches. They say tenants feel they must consent to Housing Authority investigators because they depend on the county for their monthly rent and are not aware that they are also consenting to a criminal investigation.
The Housing Authority searched the homes and apartments of all Section 8 recipients on Evers' block after a Gardena police officer called in January to request assistance in dealing with what he called a "troublesome" area.
The officer, Octavio Saldana, told a Housing Authority investigator there was a "sudden increase in the number of East Coast Crips gang members moving into Gardena," according to Housing Authority documents.
Saldana did not suggest a connection between any specific Section 8 recipients and the alleged gang activity.
But at Saldana's request, Housing Authority investigator Tom Scott turned over information on the 34 families on the block receiving Section 8 vouchers. He also told Saldana that he and other Housing Authority investigators could come to Gardena to conduct unannounced compliance checks with Gardena police officers on all 34 locations.
"The assumption is because somebody's poor and they need Section 8, they must be the gang people," said civil rights attorney Carol Sobel. "That is a pernicious and an erroneous assumption.
"Section 8 is an economic benefit. It's not a penalty," Sobel said. "Getting Section 8 is not a trade for your Fourth Amendment rights."
When the Gardena police officers found no evidence of criminal activity, Evers said, they began to focus on the possibility of a Section 8 lease violation.
She said they asked her about a TV she has in her otherwise bare living room. They went through her closet and asked her 16-year-old daughter why her mom had so many clothes.
"The officer said 'You're not reporting everything to Section 8,'" Evers said. "I told him 'Sir, I report everything.'"
Evers' older children, who were not on her Section 8 lease, were sleeping in the apartment. Evers told police they were there to take care of her because she was sick. According to Housing Authority documents, Evers admitted during the search that her older sons had for the last year spent two days a week in her apartment.
A few weeks later, Evers was terminated from the Section 8 program for having unauthorized guests.
"Everybody got terminated," she said. "Everybody I know on block 1600 was terminated."
Saldana did not return calls, and Housing Authority supervising investigator Robert Nishimura, who signed off on the searches in Evers' neighborhood, declined to comment.
But Bobbette Glover, a Housing Authority assistant director, said the agency partners with law enforcement "all over the county."
"Where there's law enforcement who can help us out or who we can help out, we partner with them," she said. "It's a more effective means of enforcement, whether that's law enforcement or enforcement of the Section 8 program."
Glover said the Housing Authority contacts the sheriff's department if it suspects criminal activity.
"If we have reports about gang activity or drug activity, we call them up," she said.
But often, it's the police or sheriff's department that calls the Housing Authority, as in the Gardena case, to ask for information.
"Sometimes they'll say, 'We're looking at this apartment complex. Can you tell us if there are any tenants on Section 8?'" Glover said.
"They're not going out looking for people who have committed Section 8 fraud, they're looking for people who have committed a crime," she said. "Usually the Section 8 component is secondary. Almost always it's secondary. But if they find something that is a program violation, our investigator is there."
The Housing Authority distributes federal rental subsidies in all of the unincorporated areas and many smaller cities throughout Los Angeles County.
In the Antelope Valley, more than 80 miles from Gardena, the agency has been open about its sweeps of Section 8 residences with the sheriff's department.
Attorneys from Neighborhood Legal Services began hearing complaints a few years ago about searches in that area.
"These are people who as a general rule did not have problems with their Section 8 subsidies," said Neighborhood Legal Services Executive Director Neal Dudovitz.
Neighborhood Legal Services lawyers have represented individual tenants from the Antelope Valley whose Section 8 vouchers were terminated.
In almost every case, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has reversed the Housing Authority's decision to terminate the tenant from the program. But the legal aid group hasn't yet been able to challenge the constitutionality of the searches.
"The 'investigations' are sold by officials in the Antelope Valley as a crime-fighting measure," Dudovitz said. "If that's true, it means searches must comply with Fourth Amendment's constitutional limitations on searches of homes. People have a right to expect to be treated in a way consistent with the Constitution, especially when it comes to the privacy of your home."
The Section 8 program, in which qualified recipients pay one-third of their income in rent and the federal government pays the rest, was designed to give poor families a way out of housing projects and into communities with better schools and job opportunities.
The federal program caps what Section 8 landlords can charge in monthly rent, and these limits have made outlying areas of Los Angeles County much more appealing to landlords in recent years, as rental prices in the city of Los Angeles have soared.
As a result, the once predominantly white Antelope Valley has seen an influx of poor families on Section 8, many of them black.
"There was a hysteria around Section 8 in the Antelope Valley," said Neighborhood Legal Services housing attorney Stephanie Haffner. "Section 8 participants were being blamed for all the ills of the valley, and the language in the local press was racially coded."
Supervisor Michael Antonovich, whose district includes the Antelope Valley, joined forces with local politicians four years ago to fund a special investigations unit within the Housing Authority. The investigators, all of them retired sheriff's deputies, work directly with the sheriff's department, sharing information and coordinating enforcement efforts.
Neighborhood Legal Services attorneys said some investigators have desks at local sheriff's department offices.
"It was a very new approach," said Antonovich deputy Norm Hickling. "There were no other communities working in such a cooperative manner with the county and with law enforcement."
Hickling said the cities of Lancaster and Palmdale, which make up the Antelope Valley, were experiencing a rise in crime.
"You can't attribute all of it to the Section 8 program," he said. "But a lot of the complaints involved people on Section 8."
The Housing Authority set up a Section 8 fraud hotline in the Antelope Valley, where anonymous callers could report what they deemed suspicious activity in Section 8 households.
"It could be an inordinate amount of people coming in and out of a house, or it could be a code violation on a house or suspected criminal activity," Hickling said. "There was really no other community that was taking such an aggressive stance, going after the people who were defrauding the system."
Hickling said the waiting list for Section 8 vouchers is long, and the crackdown is making room for those who really need the subsidies.
But the effort has resulted in a significant decrease of Section 8 residents in the Antelope Valley. And Dudovitz said the program is having a disproportionate effect on black families.
"Our experience is that the Section 8 families subject to these 'investigations' are overwhelmingly African-American, and we should all be concerned about that," Dudovitz said. "I hope we have moved beyond the '60s when some people tried to equate African-Americans on welfare with crime."
Hickling said race is not a factor in the investigations.
"The complaints that have come in from the community that our agents have responded to have strictly been based on behavior," he said. "Race has no bearing whatsoever on the investigations or the Housing Authority's decisions, which are based on rules the participant agreed to adhere to."
Hickling said the Antelope Valley's approach to Section 8 enforcement initially concerned officials at the federal Office of Housing and Urban Development.
"They were watching the program very carefully," he said.
But federal housing officials in Southern California were already familiar with the methodology. Four years ago, the federal HUD inspector general's office monitoring Southern California's housing authorities was itself conducting unannounced compliance checks with armed law enforcement.
Jim Todak, special agent in charge at the inspector general's office, said his office no longer conducts unannounced inspections.
"I know we don't do that anymore," he said. "I know there were different things that we've done, and I can't comment on that."
Todak's office conducts inspections in areas where housing authorities do not have their own investigators.
In 2004, the mayor pro tem of Hawaiian Gardens, a community just north of Long Beach, wrote a letter to the Long Beach Housing Authority warning officials there that the unannounced inspections instigated by the inspector general's office could lead to civil rights lawsuits.
"I am deeply concerned with the methodology utilized by the office of the federal Inspector general for Section 8 housing inspections," wrote then-mayor Leonard Chaidez in a letter dated Oct. 24.
Chaidez described the process, which he said became known to him only after the first round of inspections occurred and voucher-holders began to complain.
"The inspector general's office communicates with your law enforcement agency, usually by phone or verbally to suppress any written documentation, protecting the inspector general's office from liability," he wrote. "A list of Section 8 participants is compiled with the assistance of your Housing Authority staff ... a date for these surprise inspections is made by all parties."
Chaidez said the Section 8 recipient, "surprised and half asleep in many cases," fears being cut off from the program if he or she does not consent.
"Furthermore, no agents disclose that the recipient has a right to refuse and not give consent to the inspection," he wrote.
Chaidez said he feared the inspections violated federal HUD policy, which mandates that housing authorities conduct inspections at reasonable times and after giving reasonable notice.
He told Long Beach city officials that the Hawaiian Gardens Housing Authority would no longer cooperate with the HUD inspector general's office on the unannounced inspections.
Chaidez no longer works for the city of Hawaiian Gardens and could not be reached for comment.
Todak, who joined the Southern California office two years ago, wouldn't comment on Chaidez's complaint. But he said his agency has since "taken steps to go a little bit further."
"We're getting search warrants," Todak said. "I'm not commenting on whether it was wrong. I'm just saying this is what we're doing now. We don't do an unannounced knock. We don't support it, and we don't do things that way."
But his office hasn't stopped housing authorities from utilizing the practice.
Todak is familiar with the policy at the Los Angeles County Housing Authority, but said he "can't tell people what to do unless they were violating the law.
"You can always talk about what you think is best, but I don't have control over everything the local housing authorities do," he said. "I'm sure they're doing what they think is right."
Whether the checks are unconstitutional, he said, is an issue "that can be debated in the courts."
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently held that eligibility inspections of welfare applicants' homes did not amount to Fourth Amendment violations. The 2006 opinion said the searches were allowed because they were purely administrative, were made during the brief time period after the initial application for benefits and involved advanced notice. Sanchez v. County of San Diego, 464 F.3d 916, 921 (9th Cir. 2006).
Civil rights attorneys said that opinion could be used against the county in court.
"They went to great lengths [in the Sanchez case] to emphasize that this was part of the administrative process and not a part of a criminal investigation," said Western Center on Law and Poverty attorney Robert Newman, co-counsel on the case.
But the Housing Authority searches, he said, "are obviously a criminal investigation in the guise of a search. There's no question that's what's going on here."
The situation in the Antelope Valley is similar to one in the city of Antioch, east of San Francisco. The predominantly white area saw an influx of black families on Section 8 in recent years.
City officials publicly attributed problems in the area to the increase of Section 8 residents, and Antioch police and politicians demanded that the Housing Authority of Contra Costa County turn over a list of all Section 8 residents in the area.
But the Housing Authority refused.
And last year, the Contra Costa County counsel's office wrote a letter to local politicians explaining that the Housing Authority could not legally turn over such information.
"Release of information regarding participants in the Housing Authority Section 8 Program to the city of Antioch for the purpose of assisting the city in tracking these individuals or targeting code enforcement activities is not sanctioned by state or federal law," the letter states.
The release of such information, according to the letter, would amount to a violation of state and federal privacy laws and could be grounds for legal action against the Housing Authority.
"The fact that a person is receiving public assistance is not sufficient legal grounds to subject that person and his or her family to routine, extensive police surveillance," the letter says.
In Gardena, Evers has managed to stay in her apartment with help from her older children.
"We had to come up with another $900 for rent, and everybody put in a little," she said. "My kids are helping me right now, but I can't depend on them forever."
Evers, who for the last eight years has been in charge of Christmas decorating outside her building, breaks down when she talks about the future.
"This year I don't feel like doing nothing," she said. "I'm barely making it."

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