Hospitalized For Over A Year, Legally Blind, Elderly Quadriplegic Faces The Boot From Rented Apartment After 15 Years Because Sleazy Landlord Claims Tenant Is Not Using Premises As Primary Residence

In Berkeley, California, the Contra Costa Times reports:

• A quadriplegic who has been hospitalized for over a year with life-threatening sores faces eviction from his apartment because his landlord's agent contends he is not using it as his primary residence.
  
  "If you do not move back into or vacate your apartment on or before November 10, 2015, the John Stewart Company will have no choice but to have its legal counsel initiate legal action against you," property manager Patrice Gunther-Hill informed tenant Michael Pachovas in an Oct. 27 "Written Notice to Cease" addressed to him at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek.
  
  "Please note that by not giving up possession of your apartment, you are preventing other low-income people from being able to live at William Byron Rumford Sr. Plaza."
  
  Pachovas said he pays $761 a month rent for his apartment. The government-subsidized Rumford Plaza complex has 43 units, many of them affordable (rent determined by a set formula) under conditions of a series of loans from the city.
  
  Pachovas, who is 67 and legally blind, as well as diabetic, has rented a unit at the Rumford Plaza complex in South Berkeley since 2000. He has been hospitalized at John Muir since around October 2014 for what initially appeared to be a cyst but turned out to be a subcutaneous pressure wound that reached all the way to the right thighbone, requiring extensive removal of necrotic tissue, he said. Doctors eventually discovered a similar wound on the left side, requiring a second surgery.
  
  All told, Pachovas has had eight or more surgeries to remove necrotic tissue since he was hospitalized in 2014, he recalled.
  
  "I have no choice but to be in the hospital. Believe me, I'd rather be at home," he said last week during a bedside interview.
  
  Pachovas additionally failed to fill out annual recertification forms, according to a Dec. 9 "Notice to Cure" from the Stewart company. He said last week that he never received the current forms.
  
  He is being represented by the East Bay Community Law Center.(1) EBCLC attorney Meghan Gordon declined to comment on Pachovas' case other than to confirm her office is representing him.
  
  "It just infuriates me that they would do something like this, with someone with as many disability issues," said Pachovas, who broke his neck in 1969 when he dove into a lake in Ethiopia while he was a Peace Corps volunteer. He has total paralysis of his lower limbs and limited motion in both arms.
  
  In the 1970s, Pachovas moved from his native Indiana to the Bay Area, enrolling at UC Berkeley and becoming an advocate for disability rights, the environment and social justice.
  
  "Have we gone that far, not only in our rent control practices but our humanity, that we throw somebody out who's blind, who's quadriplegic and diabetic, not to mention being a senior?" he said last week. "A landlord shouldn't be allowed to do this."

For the story, see Disabled Berkeley tenant faces apartment eviction over prolonged hospital stay.

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(1) East Bay Community Law Center is a community-based teaching clinic of University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, providing training and supervision to law students and legal services to low-income clients in Alameda County. Seventeen lawyers and more than 100 law students under their supervision provide free legal services to over 5,000 clients annually.