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The Tina Hendrix lawsuit, part 2
Tenants charge housing authority denied rights, stole money
Robert Jones, president of the Resident Action Council, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Seattle Housing Authority over due process rights. Photo by Harold Shand
Khadija Bin is one of a large community of Somali immigrants who call Seattle’s Yesler Terrace housing project home. But, since last year, it’s a home that Bin has been locked in a major battle with the Seattle Housing Authority to keep.
Last year, SHA, which owns and operates Yesler Terrace’s 30 acres of public housing on First Hill, tried to evict Bin based on a claim that she hadn’t correctly reported how many people were living in her unit and, as a result, owed $5,800 in back rent.
Bin exercised her rights under the federal housing code and requested a grievance hearing, but the housing authority held it when her lawyer could not come, forcing Bin, a non-English speaker, to represent herself with untranslated documents. The hearing went against her and SHA filed to evict her family, but a judge threw out the case for lack of due process, says Northwest Justice Project attorney Eric Dunn.
SHA continued to demand the money from Bin and she requested a new grievance hearing – this time with a different hearing examiner, who ruled that she owed nothing. Despite the ruling, the housing authority has sent Bin a bill for $13,000, Dunn says, and continues to issue her pay-or-vacate notices, along with denying her the translation services she’s entitled to.
The battle is now part of a far-reaching lawsuit that the Northwest Justice Project filed last week against SHA on behalf of Bin, three other tenants and the agency’s Resident Action Council, which represents 7,500 low-income households in Seattle. They allege that SHA and its public-housing hearings not only disregard any and all applicable law, but that the agency has been charging some tenants too much rent and improperly managing specially designated tenant savings accounts – in most cases, the lawsuit says, illegally keeping the money.
The issues with the grievance hearings are similar to a lawsuit that Dunn filed in 2007 on behalf of Tina Hendrix, the niece of rock legend Jimi Hendrix and a Section 8 rental voucher recipient who SHA tried to cut off. Like that case, the new lawsuit focuses largely on what Dunn calls the incompetent practices of a single hearing examiner, Lawrence Weldon, who SHA uses in the vast majority of its public-housing grievances.
Weldon follows SHA’s orders, Dunn says, ruling in the agency’s favor some 90 percent of the time, regardless of whatever facts, regulations or law tenants might cite in their hearings. “Legal authorities that Weldon has deemed ‘outside the scope’ of SHA grievance hearings,” Dunn says in the lawsuit, “include (but are not limited to): the United States Constitution, the Washington State Constitution, Washington’s Residential Landlord-Tenant Act, the Seattle Municipal Code, the U.S. Housing Act of 1937, the Fair Housing Act, the Federal Disabilities Act [and] federal immigration law.”
In the Hendrix case, the Northwest Justice Project reached a settlement with SHA in 2008 in which the agency agreed to remove Weldon from hearing any more cases in the Section 8 voucher program, which subsidizes tenant rent at private properties. In its place, SHA agreed to allow a panel chosen by Seattle’s Tenants Union to select a rotating team of hearing examiners with law degrees and at least three years of legal experience, which Weldon does not have.
Since the reforms, Dunn says, problems like the ones that Bin faced in her hearing with Weldon have all but disappeared. But SHA, he says, has refused to get rid of Weldon or adopt the same hearing reforms for residents of public housing. That’s a different program than Section 8, says housing authority spokesperson Virginia Felton, and its hearings don’t require the legal standards that the Northwest Justice Project is demanding.
“In Washington state, you can’t evict somebody without a court hearing,” Felton says, “so our basic position is that the grievance hearing helps us to determine the facts of the case so that we can figure out whether we should go forward to eviction.” The tenant’s due-process rights, she says, are in the court process.
Dunn disagrees, saying there’s really no difference in the hearing regulations for the Section 8 and public-housing programs. In most situations, he adds, it’s impractical to think that low-income people are going to take the housing authority to court in smaller matters such as rent calculations or whether a tenant is entitled to a larger apartment.
That’s what grievance hearings are for, says Robert Jones, president of the Resident Action Council – to protect the rights of public housing tenants. “When lawful procedures don’t get followed and all the rulings are one-sided, it’s a pretty clear indication that people’s Constitutional rights are being violated and that needs to be fixed,” Jones says.
“If you don’t have a viable grievance procedure,” Dunn says, “a lot of the rights you’re supposed to possess are meaningless because you have no means of enforcing them.”
He cites the case of Patricia Ann, another public-housing tenant named in the suit. Two years ago, Ann got a part-time job working for Solid Ground, a nonprofit housing services provider in Seattle. Based on her new income, SHA was entitled to raise her rent, but, under a federal public-housing law called the Earned Income Disallowance, it was required to phase in the increases over 12 months.
Instead, SHA raised her rent all at once, from $182 a month to $582. Ann requested a hearing and argued she was entitled to a slower rent increase, but Dunn says Weldon ruled the federal law didn’t apply to public housing. “It begs the question of what it does apply to,” he says. “You can’t be doing this job and not know what the Earned Income Disallowance is.”
Instead of giving tenants the earned-income rent break, Dunn says, SHA has been offering another option created by the same law. They can have the housing authority deposit the amount of their rent increase – that is, the difference between their old and new rent – into what’s called a Tenant Trust Account.
The resulting savings can be used for specific purposes, such as moving out of public housing. But when Komba Ngauja, another plaintiff, tried to get the $732 in his account, the lawsuit says, he was told that he had “forfeited” it to SHA because he hadn’t used it within two years – something that isn’t authorized under the law, Dunn says. The lawsuit also claims that SHA only deposits a small fraction of what it’s supposed to in the accounts and charges a management fee that Dunn says also isn’t legal.
SHA is currently facing a separate federal class-action lawsuit from Columbus Legal Services on behalf of previous housing voucher tenants who were cut off prior to the Hendrix settlement that removed Larry Weldon from Section 8 grievance hearings. That case, Dunn says, could run into millions of dollars in claims for SHA. But Felton says Weldon will stay on and that the Northwest Justice Project simply doesn’t like him.
Dunn says he doesn’t understand why SHA doesn’t see the larger issues of inequity and discrimination that it’s fostering or the peril it’s putting itself in. “They’re creating these grave financial risks to the integrity of the program by these antics,” he says. “It’s just aggravating because they just don’t have a leg to stand on legally.”
Comments
she still violates the visa issuances that allowed her into the country and some who were staying with her were deadbeats conspiring to hide thier illegality and hustle uncle sam…. she never worked a day in her life but she gets housing becuz she has rights u.s. citizens dont have the luxury of receiving….brutal reality of why u.s. is second rate ........
Why doesn’t the authority just eliminate the program? No more sec 8 - no more tax money spent on defending these lawsuits - let legal aid rent to these criminals.
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