Baltimore Housing

A story in Friday's Maryland section misrepresented the conditions of a settlement between the Baltimore Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development over a 1994 audit of the authority. Instead of requiring the Housing Authority to return disputed excess spending to HUD, the federal agency forced the authority to transfer $343,400 in earnings into an authority account to improve city public housing.The Sun regrets the errors.Pub Date: 1/12/99

ONE OF THE TALLEST buildings in East Baltimore, the 22-story Broadway tower that once was housing for the elderly at Fayette Street and Broadway, might be converted to Baltimore's newest hotel, if a private group can persuade the city's housing authority to support the project.The vacant tower also might be reopened as housing for the elderly or it might be demolished, depending on what proposals the city receives in the next two months.The 7-acre parcel occupies a key site along Broadway between the Fells Point waterfront and the Johns Hopkins medical campus.

FOR A NUMBER of years, the Baltimore Housing Partnership was held up as a model of what a nonprofit developer can achieve in cooperation with governments and the private sector. It kept expanding and taking gambles. In the end, it overextended itself so badly it is now going out of business.The partnership's collapse is a wake-up call to the nonprofit-development sector -- just like the demise of the City Life Museums last year was a red flag to the museum community. Being classified as nonprofit for tax purposes does not mean that an organization can live in defiance of fundamental economic laws.

So it comes to this for Kurt Schmoke, mayor of all Baltimore: Backed into a corner, the feds finally asking where all their housing money has been spent, he invokes the language of race and hopes that everyone suffers from amnesia."

U.S. housing officials have banned a Baltimore contractor from federally financed jobs because the firm flouted a similar ban on a key employee when it was working for Baltimore's housing agency.The action, made public yesterday, was taken against Botech Inc., which has been awarded nearly $4 million in housing agency work in the past three years.HUD also imposed a ban on Timothy Lanocha, the key employee who worked for Botech while he was under an earlier ban on federal work after acknowledging that he paid off Baltimore housing aides.

A federal appeals court has upheld the bribery conviction of Baltimore housing contractor Larry E. Jennings Sr., saying his boasting about influence with a city manager was "a classic sign of bribery."In his 27-page opinion, filed last week, 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge M. Blane Michael also rejected Jennings' claim that the trial judge gave erroneous instructions to jurors. Michael said the instructions were sufficient.Jennings was convicted in 1995 of making payments totaling $6,500 in 1993 to Charles Morris, who supervised a Baltimore Housing Authority no-bid program to repair rundown homes.

Baltimore housing officials will work with a Yale University think tank to come up with long-term solutions to the city's vacant housing problem, Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III said yesterday.U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew M. Cuomo, in town yesterday, endorsed the idea.He said Baltimore can serve as a national model for other large cities from which many residents have fled to the suburbs, leaving behind scores of aging buildings.The Yale professors "would use Baltimore as a laboratory to come up with innovative ways to solve this problem," Henson said.

A Baltimore housing group that polices the federal Fair Housing Act has reached a $75,000 settlement with a Baltimore County developer accused in a lawsuit of failing to make its new condominiums accessible to disabled people.Martin A. Dyer, associate director of Baltimore Neighborhoods Inc., said the federal suit was filed last year on behalf of two disabled condo owners at Falls Gable Condominiums, inside the Baltimore Beltway near Old Pimlico Road and the Jones Falls Expressway.Dyer said one condo owner had no accessible pathway for wheelchairs to her apartment, as required by federal law. In another unit, he said, an owner who uses a walker could not fully use the bathroom because the door and shower stall are too small.

HAVRE DE GRACE -- Know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em, says the song. Know when to walk away, and know when to run. That's a pretty good rule, not just for poker but for business and for life. In plain unmusical prose, it means being prepared to cut your losses when necessary.Sometimes this means obeying your brain when your heart is screeching at you to stop. Not everyone can do this. In farming there are plenty of examples of those who can't -- third-generation dairymen who just can't imagine life without cows, say, or people with thin-soiled farms who stick with corn year after year as the yields steadily shrink.

Lonnie Robert Perry Sr., 69, Baltimore housing officialLonnie Robert Perry Sr., a retired Baltimore housing official, died of a massive stroke Saturday at St. Joseph Medical Center. He was 69 and a longtime resident of Lake Avenue.Mr. Perry joined the Department of Housing and Community Development as an inspector in 1963 and was promoted to general superintendent in 1979. He retired in 1993.Earlier, Mr. Perry, who also worked a second job as a house painter, worked for a local brewery and bakery and drove a tractor-trailer.

THE PROBLEM : The roadway behind the Power Plant lacks barriers along the Inner Harbor. THE BACKSTORY: Downtown workers got a telling demonstration of how important it is to take care when driving near the Inner Harbor. On Oct. 30, eyewitnesses say the driver of a Lincoln Navigator drove at high speed down Market Place, across Pratt Street behind the Power Plant and right off the pier. The driver got himself out of the SUV, and firefighters spent the morning removing the vehicle from the water.

The housing rescue act signed by President Bush yesterday won't bring an end to the national foreclosure crisis, but it does take crucial steps to help lessen its impact in Baltimore and across the nation. Most important, the legislation protects the liquidity of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lending giants that hold or insure nearly half of America's mortgages. Nobody likes bailing out these federally chartered lenders. But Federal Reserve oversight will ensure that mortgage money will continue to flow, nationally and around the world, a vital condition for a housing recovery.

The National Association of Realtors' chief economist told local real estate agents yesterday that he believes the Baltimore housing market has hit bottom and 2008 should be a better year - assuming buyers don't sit on the sidelines, anticipating major price drops. "This area will be very interesting to watch because there's very solid economic growth, but people aren't buying homes," said Lawrence Yun, the economist. He added: "Ten years from now, people will look back at 2008 and say, `Wow, that was a great time to become a homeowner.

The city agency that oversees Baltimore development has received a subpoena from the Maryland state prosecutor's office, which has been conducting an investigation into spending practices at City Hall. The Baltimore Development Corp., an arm of city government that brokers land deals on behalf of Mayor Sheila Dixon's administration, has been ordered to hand over documents by the end of next month, a top city lawyer told The Sun yesterday. City officials would not disclose the contents of the subpoena, but it was issued days before prosecutors raided the offices of a prominent development firm, Doracon Contracting Inc., in what appears to be a widening investigation into city government spending.

Advocates for the disabled announced yesterday that 756 people are in line to share $1 million from the settlement of a Baltimore housing discrimination lawsuit. A victims' compensation fund was established as part of a landmark 2004 settlement in a lawsuit alleging that thousands of people with disabilities were intentionally or illegally excluded from public housing. Other terms of the settlement, worth more than $100 million, include development of more than 1,000 units of public housing accessible to people with disabilities and a program to help them obtain housing.

The rowhouse fire in East Baltimore that claimed the lives of six people and left seven injured highlighted a hidden problem of Baltimore housing: poor families who are unable to find or afford decent shelter banding together under one roof. Advocates said yesterday that the problem is the result of an acute shortage of adequate housing for the city's neediest residents. They pointed out that the Housing Authority of Baltimore City's inventory has declined by more than 5,000 units in the past 15 years, and that as many as 3,000 other federally subsidized units have been lost during that time.

Baltimore housing officials plan to begin demolition of an abandoned West Baltimore apartment complex today despite protests from Legal Aid Bureau lawyers who have filed a lawsuit on behalf of former tenants. Yesterday, the mayor's office issued a news release on the demolition of the Uplands Apartment complex in Southwest Baltimore. Today's ceremony calls for a news conference for elected officials, including Mayor Martin O'Malley, the Democratic candidate in the gubernatorial race. City housing officials said yesterday that they had the power to move forward with the demolition, but their position was disputed by a spokesman for Legal Aid. The spokesman said the city did not notify Legal Aid about the demolition, and once it found out about the city's plans, it asked a mediation judge to restrict the demolition to one building until the lawsuit is settled.

New housing data released this week by the U.S. Census Bureau confirm what Maryland residents and other Americans already know: People are feeling the pinch of rising housing costs in the rental and sales markets. It's really starting to hurt, and those hurting most are moderate- and low-income families. According to a nationwide community survey conducted by the Census Bureau, 45.3 percent of the state's renters spent at least 30 percent of their income on rent last year and thus bypassed the affordability threshold.

Baltimore's public housing authority never should have been permitted to join a program to ease controls on its spending because officials failed to hold a required public hearing, a federal oversight agency has ruled in a scathing audit. Since July, the Housing Authority of Baltimore City has been part of a federal pilot program called Moving to Work, which allows 27 city and state housing agencies to waive restrictions that dictate how millions in federal housing money must be spent.

A group aiming to turn Washingtonians into Baltimoreans hopes a little inside-the-Beltway humor will do the trick. "NSA records indicate you're making a lot of calls to Baltimore," reads a new ad from the Live Baltimore Home Center. "Why don't you just move here?" A photo of President Bush talking on the phone also appears in the ad, which was placed in Express, a free newspaper geared to Metro riders and put out by The Washington Post. "If we don't get audited by the IRS, it will be pretty good," said Tracy Gosson, executive director of the center, who dreamed up the pitch to promote an event the organization is putting on in Greenbelt on Wednesday.