Case Name: Hosea SIMMONS and Andrea Williams, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. William Ryan DREW and the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, Defendants-Appellees
Court: United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
Jurisdiction: United States
Decision Date: 1983-09-12
Citations: 716 F.2d 1160
Docket Number: No. 82-2773
Parties: Hosea SIMMONS and Andrea Williams, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. William Ryan DREW and the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, Defendants-Appellees.
Judges: Before CUMMINGS, Chief Judge, NICHOLS and PELL, Circuit Judges.
Reporter: Federal Reporter 2d Series
Volume: 716
Pages: 1160–1167

Head Matter:
Hosea SIMMONS and Andrea Williams, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. William Ryan DREW and the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, Defendants-Appellees.
No. 82-2773.
United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.
Argued April 19, 1983.
Decided Sept. 12, 1983.
James A. Gramling, Jr., Louis J. Mestre, Legal Action of Wisconsin, Inc., Milwaukee, Wis., for plaintiffs-appellants.
Michael A.I. Whitcomb, Asst. City Atty., Milwaukee, Wis., for defendants-appellees.
Before CUMMINGS, Chief Judge, NICHOLS and PELL, Circuit Judges.
The Honorable Philip Nichols, Jr., Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, is sitting by designation.

Opinion:
CUMMINGS, Chief Judge.
Plaintiffs are two participants in a public rent assistance program who claim that the Fourteenth Amendment entitles them to a hearing before the administering state agency may expel them from it. They commenced this civil rights suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 as a class action and seek money damages, declaratory and injunctive relief. Because summary judgment was granted against them before the class was certified, the only issues before us are those germane to the claims each asserts on her own behalf. Roberts v. American Airlines, Inc., 526 F.2d 757 (7th Cir.1975), certiorari denied, 425 U.S. 951, 96 S.Ct. 1726, 48 L.Ed.2d 195.
Section 8 of the United States Housing Act of 1937, 42 U.S.C. § 1437f, authorizes the Secretary of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development ("HUD") to establish various programs to "aid[ ] lower-income families in obtaining a decent place to live and [to] promot[e] economically mixed housing." These programs are financed by the federal government, regulated by HUD, and administered by state public housing agencies ("PHA's"). One such program — the rent assistance program — helps low-income families to obtain rental housing in the open market. Briefly, the program works as follows: HUD contracts with a local PHA to make available each year a sum of money for the payment of rent on behalf of a specified number of families with incomes below a certain amount. The PHA then distributes this money by contracting to pay each person who agrees to rent housing to one of these families a fixed percentage of the family's rent.
Before a PHA will begin to make rental payments on behalf of a family eligible to receive them, four things must happen. First, the family must be admitted into the rent program. Families apply to their PHA for admission; those admitted receive a certificate authorizing them to participate in the program. When the program is full, eligible applicants are placed on a waiting list. Second, once a family is admitted, it must within a stated period of time find someone willing to rent to it and submit a proposed lease to the PHA for its approval. Third, the PHA must approve the proposed lease if it finds, after an inspection, that the dwelling to be leased is in decent, safe, and sanitary condition and that the terms of the proposed lease conform with the requirements set forth in regulations issued by HUD. Fourth, and last, the necessary papers must be signed: the lessor and family must sign the lease and the lessor and the PHA must sign a contract containing the terms and conditions of the PHA's promise to pay the lessor a fixed percentage of the family's rent.
Plaintiff Andrea Williams had completed the first of these steps when the defendant Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee ("Milwaukee PHA") sent her written notice that it had expelled her from the program; plaintiff Hosea Simmons was sent a similar notice after having completed three of the four steps. The notices informed plaintiffs why they had been expelled — each was alleged to have violated a lease she had previously received through the program, Williams by permitting a person not named in the lease to reside with her and Simmons by moving into her new residence two weeks before her lease on her old residence expired. The notices also advised each plaintiff that she had a right to an informal hearing conducted by the Milwaukee PHA. Although the notices did not say so, the purpose of those hearings would not be, as it probably seemed to plaintiffs, to determine whether they had in fact committed the alleged lease violations but rather to determine whether the Milwaukee PHA should forgive the violations and readmit plaintiffs into the program. Simmons and Williams both requested and were granted hearings and both were readmitted into the program some two months after having been expelled.
Because plaintiffs were expelled from the program, it is quite likely — although not certain — that they did not begin to receive rent assistance until some two months later than they would have had they not been expelled. The Milwaukee PHA refused to compensate plaintiffs for that loss, not because it found that it had just cause to expel them or because it found that the payments had not in fact been withheld for two months, but because it claims it has no power to make any retroactive payments of rent assistance benefits. It is this fact that is the heart of plaintiffs' claim that the Milwaukee PHA was constitutionally required to afford them a hearing before it expelled them.
Plaintiffs can complain about lack of process only if the Milwaukee PHA deprived them of property protected by the Fourteenth Amendment when it expelled them from the rent assistance program for two months. Issuing a family a certificate admitting it into the rent assistance program is much the same as conferring job tenure upon a public school teacher. Tenure restricts the power of a state to terminate the employment of one of its teachers; it gives the teacher the right to continue teaching so long as the state lacks just cause to fire him. See Smith v. Board of Education, 708 F.2d 258 (7th Cir.1983). A certificate limits the power of a PHA to deny rent assistance to the family that holds it; until the certificate expires, it gives the family the right to continue participating in the program so long as the PHA lacks just cause to expel it. Both the Milwaukee PHA's own internal operating rules and a regulatory handbook put out by HUD list the grounds sufficient to constitute just cause for expelling a family from the program. It is unclear whether the provisions in HUD's handbook are binding upon PHA's, see Nichols v. Landrieu, No. 79-3094 (D.D.C. Sept. 12, 1980), and that raises the question whether the right of participating in the program that vests when a certificate is issued is federally or state created. But whichever is the case, it is plain that just as job tenure is a species of property protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, Perry v. Sinderman, 408 U.S. 593, 92 S.Ct. 2694, 33 L.Ed.2d 570, so too is "program tenure," the right of certificate holders to participate in a rent assistance program by seeking out persons willing and able to rent them housing pursuant to the rules of the program. Ferguson v. Metropolitan Development & Housing Agency, 485 F.Supp. 517 (M.D.Tenn.1980); Brezina v. Dowdall, 472 F.Supp. 82 (N.D.Ill.1979); Watkins v. Mobile Housing Board, No. 79-0067-p (S.D.Ala. May 14, 1979). Cf. Holbrook v. Pitt, 643 F.2d 1261, 1278 and n. 35 (7th Cir.1981).
It might be argued, and there are traces of this argument in the district court's memorandum opinion awarding defendants summary judgment, that because plaintiffs were readmitted into the program two months after having been expelled, they were not deprived of this property. It is conceivable, though extremely unlikely, that the signing of Simmons' lease and rent assistance contract effective May 8, 1980, and the processing of Williams' alternative requests for approvals of proposed leases of two units might have been held up for two months evén had they not been expelled from the program. Thus, goes the argument, it is possible that neither plaintiff suffered any loss of rent assistance benefits.
The PHA's argument assumes that there can be no constitutional deprivation if there is no demonstrable loss of benefits. However logical that assumption may seem, the Supreme Court squarely rejected it in Carey v. Piphus, 435 U.S. 247, 98 S.Ct. 1042, 55 L.Ed.2d 252, when it held that persons deprived of property without due process could sue under Section 1983 for nominal damages. The rationale is that it is more important that procedural rights guaranteed by the Constitution be protected than that the public be spared the cost, and state agents the inconvenience, of litigating claims worth little or no money. Thus regardless of whether plaintiffs lost any benefits or whether the Milwaukee PHA had a legitimate ground for expelling them, expelling plaintiffs from the program for two months deprived them of property protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Shortly before Williams was expelled, a Wisconsin court evicted her from the rented dwelling she then occupied because it found that she had permitted more people to live there than the lease allowed. The court made its finding after a bench trial at which Williams appeared and had ample opportunity to present her version of the facts. Sharing living quarters with more people than a lease permits is a proper ground for expulsion from the rent assistance program, so that when the Milwaukee PHA learned of the eviction, it expelled Williams. Since there is no reason to suppose that the Milwaukee PHA is in a better position than a court to determine how many people are living together under one roof or that Williams was prevented from presenting fully to the court her version of the facts, the Milwaukee PHA was not constitutionally required to afford her a second hearing before or after it decided to expel her.
Simmons, however, was not given a hearing before she was expelled from the program. The Milwaukee PHA expelled her after determining on its own that two weeks before her lease was due to expire, she had moved out of the dwelling in which she had been living. The Milwaukee PHA had been paying rent assistance on the dwelling, and both its operating rules and HUD's regulatory handbook provide that a tenant who vacates a subsidized unit before the lease expires may be expelled from the program. The Milwaukee PHA had good reason for thinking that Simmons had moved out. It had recently approved her request to move to a new place and an inspection of the old place revealed that except for a few odds and ends — some clothing hanging in a closet, a disconnected telephone, possibly a sewing machine, a typewriter, and some food in the refrigerator — it was empty. As things turned out, the Milwaukee PHA was probably right. But things might have turned out otherwise. There was a chance when the Milwaukee PHA decided to expel Simmons that although her dwelling was almost empty, she was still living there. It might have turned out that she had been robbed or wrongfully evicted or that she had moved virtually all of her belongings to her new place but continued to reside in her old place for fear of being expelled from the program. In fact, there is evidence in the record to support the last of these.
Simmons was not given a chance to offer the Milwaukee PHA these or any other explanations until after she had already been expelled. That might not be constitutionally objectionable — we reserve judgment on the matter — were it not for the fact that the Milwaukee PHA claims it has no authority to pay any rent that accrues during the time someone is wrongfully excluded from the program. The public has an interest in seeing that its tax dollars are not spent paying rent on unoccupied dwelling units, and expelling from the rent assistance program those persons who vacate their units early is an effective means of protecting that interest. Simmons, of course, has an interest in living someplace reasonably safe and sanitary, and requiring that she be afforded a hearing before being expelled from the program protects that interest. But affording her a hearing after she is expelled also protects that interest, assuming that any benefits she loses while she is expelled can be returned to her, and maybe, given the likelihood that an empty apartment is unoccupied and given that the loss suffered by someone expelled from the program is offset somewhat by the benefit gained by his replacement, a hearing after expulsion is all that is constitutionally required. See Sutton v. City of Milwaukee, 672 F.2d 644 (7th Cir.1982).
Be that as it may, assuming without deciding that the Milwaukee PHA is correct in claiming that it lacks the power to award retroactive rent assistance payments, it was constitutionally required to grant Simmons a hearing before it expelled her. The hearing need not have been modeled after a court trial. Notice of the reason the Milwaukee PHA wanted to expel her followed by an informal hearing like the one she received after being expelled is all that the Constitution required. The notice need not even have spelled out the facts that led the Milwaukee PHA to charge Simmons with vacating her dwelling unit; in this case, the charge itself was specific enough to have conveyed sufficient information for Simmons to have defended against it.
Summary judgment against Williams is affirmed; that against Simmons is reversed; and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. We express no view on whether the class Simmons seeks to represent should be certified and we leave it to the district court to calculate the amount of damages Simmons may have suffered during the two months she was excluded from the program, as well as any declaratory or injunctive relief that may be appropriate.
. The other defendant is William Ryan Drew, the executive director of Milwaukee PHA.
. Williams' March 31, 1980, request for a lease approval for a unit on 27th Street in Milwaukee was turned down because it needed repairs. Her April 14, 1980, request for lease approval for a unit on Medford Avenue was approved on May 8, 1980.