Baltimore Neighborhoods

Malcolm "Mal" Sherman, a former Rouse Co. executive and real estate agent who battled blockbusting and worked tirelessly for integrated neighborhoods during the 1950s and 1960s, died Thursday of pneumonia at the Broadmead retirement community in Cockeysville. He was 87. Mr. Sherman was born in Philadelphia and spent his early years there. After the death of his father in 1927, he was sent abroad to a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he lived until returning to New York City in 1932.

Baltimore has a gem online that's worth exploring for a few minutes the next time you're info-snacking on the web. CityView is Baltimore's online database that lets you plug in your address, or any other address you're interested in, and search for crab houses that are nearby, local food trucks or libraries within walking distance. The site is a map-based portal that plots addresses by neighborhood. The city bills the site as being useful for residents, visitors, researchers and businessmen and women.

Baltimore has a gem online that's worth exploring for a few minutes the next time you're info-snacking on the web. CityView is Baltimore's online database that lets you plug in your address, or any other address you're interested in, and search for crab houses that are nearby, local food trucks or libraries within walking distance. The site is a map-based portal that plots addresses by neighborhood. The city bills the site as being useful for residents, visitors, researchers and businessmen and women.

A survey of 549 community-based organizations suggests that housing discrimination is on the rise, particularly targeting disabled individuals, immigrants, minorities and families with children, according to the nonprofit Consumer Action . Locally, Baltimore Neighborhoods Inc. has said it found similar problems. The organizations, which has sent “testers” out in the region to inquire about available housing, filed suit last year and in 2010 over alleged discrimination.

What can you do if the heater in the apartment you're renting conks out and your landlord won't fix it? Or if you're facing eviction? Or, for that matter, if you're a landlord with a nightmare tenant? A local group has answers. Baltimore Neighborhoods Inc., a nonprofit that works statewide, counsels renters and rental owners alike. "The majority of the calls we get on a regular basis, day to day, are rent court issues," said Stephanie D. Cornish, program manager for the tenant-landlord counseling department.

If vacant houses and "For Sale" signs are barometers of a city's underlying stability and health, then many Baltimore neighborhoods are in alarming shape. The next mayor will likely preside over a demolition of whole city blocks -- unless the trend can be reversed.The causes of this situation are both simple and complex. In the past four decades, Baltimore's population has plummeted by 250,000 to an estimated 700,000. Many middle-class families have moved to the surrounding counties in search of more space, less crime and better schools.

Baltimore Neighborhoods Inc., a fair housing advocacy group, has opened an office in Carroll County to monitor inequities in home rentals and sales."Our only agenda is to see that fair housing laws are followed," said Patricia Staples, outreach coordinator. "We cannot change negative attitudes, but if landlords or home sellers are breaking the law, we can do something."The private, nonprofit organization, which was started in Baltimore nearly 40 years ago, uses testers -- who assume the role of homebuyers or renters -- to help judge the local housing market.

GRAY FEBRUARY days aren't ideal for looking at Baltimore real estate, but then again, my father and I were not buyers. He had heard about, as had I, a row of houses being constructed on Race Street in South Baltimore. We were both curious. So, that afternoon, after a big family gathering at his boyhood home on Poultney Street, we took off in search of the $500,000 rowhouses being built along the CSX tracks. The price of rowhouses in what is called Federal Hill always amazes us. But that's nothing new now. We looked the group over and he observed the site at least was free of the natural gas tanks that once stood not so far away from the new kitchens in these pricey abodes.

THE WHOLESALE ABANDONMENT of marginal rowhouses in many Baltimore neighborhoods is easy to describe and decry. Coming up with solutions is far more difficult. The Citizens Planning and Housing Association is now trying to figure out novel answers. So is city Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson, who is enlisting a Yale University think-tank to help.There is much the city and the private sector can do. But none of that will be easy politically or racially. The unavoidable truth is that some neighborhoods are going to die. People just will not want to live in them because they are either too unsafe or their aging housing stock has outlived its usefulness.

Salary: $84,000 Age: 55 Time on the job: 15 months How he got started: After moving from Detroit to Baltimore to take a teaching position, Doran found that his job had been given to a recently laid-off teacher. So instead he went to work for a nonprofit organization as its director of camping and recreation. He then worked part time for another nonprofit, the Maryland Center for Independent Living, while attending the University of Baltimore to earn his master's degree in public administration.

Hey, everybody -- give a warm welcome to Yvonne Wenger , a new Baltimore Sun reporter who will be joining me here to blog about (appropriately enough) newcomer issues. She'll take us along as she looks for a place to settle, gets to know the city and navigates the system (MVA registration, anyone?). We hope her experiences will help other newbies and give natives a new way to look at things we've seen a thousand times before. (If you're a new buyer, check out this collection of information and resources while you're at it.)

As much as any 5-year-old could be, Jake Owen was a fixture in South Baltimore. He hung out at the pool, played on the soccer team and ran through Riverside Park, an expanse of green across the street from his rowhouse. The kindergartner, who was killed on Wednesday in an accident on the Baltimore Beltway, was recognized as much for his spirit as for his family ties — nephew of a former gubernatorial aide, classmate of children of a school board member, the chief mayoral spokesman and a city councilman.

Earl Johnson's boots crunch broken glass from liquor bottles as he walks down an alley in East Baltimore's Oliver neighborhood. He is just blocks from the site of the firebombing of a family who called the police on area drug dealers and were killed for it and just yards from some of the most memorable scenes of urban decay in "The Wire. " At his side are Rich Blake, 32, a Marine Corps veteran, and Jeremy Johnson, 34 , a Navy veteran, who like Earl — who is no relation — are on a different kind of mission.

Today's story on the theft of copper gutters and downspouts brought several postings from residents in North Baltimore, particularly in Homeland. Two people wrote in to describe their problems, and one describes a suspicious man who appeared to be scouting out homes with copper gutters. And Sharon Caplan called me this morning from Pikesville to say that over the weekend someone took a heavy bronze statue that had been cemented into the ground in front of their house. They had named it Alexandria, after the city in Virginia where they triplets were born, and it was worth about $5,000.

Lucretia Billings Fisher, the leader of an early effort to save Fells Point and Federal Hill from a 1960s interstate highway, died of renal failure Friday at her Ruxton home. She was 98. "Lu Fisher was way ahead of her time," said former Judge Thomas Ward, a fellow preservationist and former City Council member. "There weren't too many people who saw the possibilities of those neighborhoods when she did. " Born Lucretia Billings in Pittsburgh, she attended the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. Her father was a prominent physician and her mother was a Mayflower descendant.

Dickens W. Warfield, a psychologist who as associate director of Baltimore Neighborhoods Inc. became an outspoken advocate for fair housing, died Oct. 21 of liver cancer at the Broadmead retirement community in Cockeysville. The former longtime Towson resident was 86. The daughter of a lawyer and a homemaker, Dickens Waddell was born in Detroit, and later moved with her family to Pittsburgh, where she attended what is now Carnegie Mellon University for two years. After the death in 1944 of her father, she and her mother moved to Roland Park, where she enrolled at Goucher College and was a 1946 Phi Beta Kappa graduate, earning a bachelor's degree in psychology.

A variety of Baltimore neighborhoods ended the roller-coaster ride of the past decade with significantly higher home values than at the start, but some communities saw all the gains of the housing bubble erased by the bust. That's the conclusion of a group of Johns Hopkins University graduate students who analyzed how the turbulent 2000s affected a mix of low-, moderate- and high-income areas in the city. Two recessions, a financial crisis and a housing run-up followed by collapse did not hit every neighborhood equally.

Tracy Gosson was everywhere yesterday, electronic megaphone in hand as she called out departures for the vans hired to carry prospective homeowners on tours of Baltimore neighborhoods. "I don't care what the census says. People want to move [into] Baltimore," said Gosson, director of the Live Baltimore Marketing Center. "This is not three years ago. There are very positive attitudes about the city." Yesterday's "Buying Into Baltimore Fair" gave the nonprofit agency another chance to showcase the city's neighborhoods.