BERKELEY — 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. 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.”

Rumford Plaza is owned by Berkeley-based Resources for Community Development. An official at RCD said Monday that the organization does not handle property management and landlord-tenant matters itself and referred inquiries to the Stewart company.

Ryan Lau, aide to City Councilman Darryl Moore, whose district includes Rumford Plaza, said Monday that Moore will look into the Pachovas matter.

San Francisco-based John Stewart Company’s corporate office last week ﻿referred inquiries to the local Rumford Plaza office, which referred calls to a representative of legal firm Zanghi Torres Arshawsky LLP of San Francisco, who was not available.

Contact Tom Lochner at 510-262-2760. Follow him at Twitter.com/tomlochner.