Affordable Housing

Baltimore's Department of Housing and Community Development has waived the affordable-housing requirement for the Lexington Square "Superblock" project, a development discussed Thursday at a meeting of the City Council's Taxation, Finance and Economic Development Committee. The housing department does not have the $9.5 million needed to subsidize the construction of 59 affordable apartments in the mixed-use development slated for the intersection of Lexington and Howard streets, according to a memo from Baltimore Housing Commissioner Paul Graziano.

The number of homeless children in public schools is up 57 percent since the start of the last recession. That gloomy figure -- from the U.S. Department of Education -- was highlighted by the First Focus Campaign for Children, a Washington-based nonprofit. Across America, classrooms are filled with more than 1 million homeless students, the highest number in the country's history, First Focus says. In Maryland, the number of homeless students has more than doubled since 2007 , colleague Jessica Anderson reported in January.

More than 100,000 Maryland children whose families got mortgages in the middle part of the last decade have lost their family home to foreclosure or were dangerously close to it as of last year, according to a new report . That's one out of every 11 children in the state, which ties Maryland for the sixth-highest share nationwide. The study, from the child-centered group First Focus in Washington, looked at the swath foreclosure has cut through families across the country.

Mike Posko was building a house with Habitat for Humanity International — in Nepal — when the Baltimore-area affiliate emailed him late last year to ask him to come in for an interview. He got the job. Posko, who took over as Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake's chief executive in February, said he's passionate about the group's affordable-housing mission. The nonprofit builds new homes and rebuilds vacant ones in the Baltimore region with the help of volunteers, then sells them at no profit and with no-interest mortgages to workers with modest incomes.

Patricia T. "Patty" Rouse, who with her late husband, Columbia developer James W. Rouse, co-founded Enterprise Community Partners Inc. and who devoted her life to making sure that decent and affordable housing was accessible to all Americans, died Monday afternoon from complications of Alzheimer's disease and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at Vantage House in Columbia. The Wilde Lake resident was 85. "Patty Rouse was a visionary, who, along with her husband, saw a time when all Americans would have a home they could call their own," Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, a Baltimore Democrat, said in a statement released Tuesday.

Baltimore's Housing Authority filed a motion Friday to prevent its property from being sold in order to satisfy a $2.6 million judgment in a lead paint exposure case, according to the agency. Last week, representatives from the Baltimore's sheriff's office tagged vehicles used by the Housing Authority in anticipation of seizing them to pay off a jury award. Siblings Antonio Fulgham and Brittany McCutcheon were provided the judgment in 2010, but the agency has resisted making payments while it appeals.

What accounts for the unfairly sensational tone of your recent article on Baltimore City's legitimate - and sensible - use of affordable housing funds to demolish vacant eyesores ("City 'affordable housing' fund destroys more houses than it builds," Dec. 26)? Didn't The Sun take Housing Commissioner Paul Graziano to task just six months ago for overspending on affordable housing units in Johnston Square? Johnston Square should have taught us that government bureaucracies are not well-suited to meeting the complicated economic and logistical challenges of developing new housing, affordable or otherwise.

The city is misguided if it believes that demolishing vacant homes is the solution to providing affordable housing in Baltimore ("City 'affordable housing' fund destroys more houses than it builds," Dec. 21). Demolishing vacant homes is myopic, since the number of vacant homes will increase as long as the city's population continues to decline. That alone will undermine any alleged improvements to public safety. A 1996 demolition project targeting vacant housing stock in Camden, N.J., initially decreased the vacant housing stock of the city.

A cluster of vacant rowhouses in the 1600 block of North Gay Street succumbed to the metal claw of an excavator this month, as yet another batch of unwanted city homes turned to rubble. Once the East Baltimore tract is cleared, nothing will be built there. It will be turned into a community-managed open space, providing a patch of green for residents of nearby senior housing units and tenants at the restored American Brewery building. The $215,000 demolition is among the most recent projects funded by the city's Affordable Housing Program.

When the second plane slammed into the south tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Stacy Spann had a bird's-eye view of the firestorm from his employer's office a mere block away. Anxious that the skyscraper where his wife was working could be targeted next, he called Shannon and told her to get out of her high-rise and go to a friend's house, even as he watched workers jumping from the burning buildings. As the last train leaving Manhattan pulled away with him on it, he looked over his shoulder and watched the twin towers fall.