Community

Community leaders near the old Eastern High School were thrilled yesterday to hear that the Johns Hopkins University wants to redevelop the long abandoned and vandalized school building across from Memorial Stadium for a satellite campus."

Berkeley, California. -- In recent years the molders of public thought have been waxing enthusiastic about the movement called communitarianism, whose message is that Americans ought to be less individualistic and more deeply connected to society. The idea has a kind of Sunday-sermon goodness flavored with a light touch of social criticism -- a perfect mixture for the magazine essay or the political speech.Unfortunately, it completely misses the real problem that people have to deal with in today's world -- which is not an absence of community, but a surfeit of communities.

YESTERDAY MORNING AS I WAS reading the Sunday papers at the neighborhood coffee shop, a woman sitting alone at the next table burst into tears. Three people immediately stopped eating breakfast, got up and rushed over to her table to comfort her.We had all heard what she had just heard on the television news: the grandmother of a Navy pilot trying to describe her grandson, who was reported dead in the Persian Gulf war. She struggled for a moment but finally...

By now, you have probably heard of Web logs, those online diaries where people post memos to the world on just about any topic - politics, fly-fishing, a trip around the world, their daughter's wedding. So when 52-year-old Alan Weinkrantz decided to sell his $349,000, three-bedroom bungalow, the public-relations professional figured, what better way to get the word out and give prospective buyers a taste of the town than to create a blog? Weinkrantz's blog is called "826 Cambridge Oval, San Antonio, TX" - essentially a digital scrapbook of his turn-of-the-century home and life as he knows it in the 2-square mile city of Alamo Heights, population 7,319.

When architect Charles W. Moore received the Gold Medal last week from the American Institute of Architects -- an award considered by many to be architecture's highest honor -- the developers of a new residential community in Maryland had good reason to be glad.The 3,000-unit Russett community will go on the market starting this spring as the latest of three large developments in western Anne Arundel County, and one of the features that sets it apart from its competitors is that the community center has been designed by Mr. Moore, a longtime friend of co-developer Curtis F. Peterson.

Strong communities can battle crime; weak ones often succumb to the predations of the underworld. When residents band together to fight drug dealers in the face of threats and physical intimidation, they deserve praise and support.Such an example is Battery Village in Havre de Grace, where residents formed a neighborhood council last month and prodded law enforcement agencies to step up foot patrols of the modest townhouse development to crack down on drug dealers.In the process of uniting to combat drug activity, the neighbors found a broader sense of community that has turned to sprucing up unkempt yards, organizing bake sales and improving the recreation activities and facilities for children.

Two sermons by the Rev. Walter Thomas, pastor for one of Baltimore's largest black congregations, rather neatly define the black community's dilemma about crime.On April 23, Mr. Thomas, of New Psalmist Baptist Church, preached on the theme "Justice for All?"He questioned whether the three black men charged with beating Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, during the Los Angeles riots would receive the meticulous legal treatment and compassion given the four white police officers charged with beating Rodney King, who is black.

Sacramento -- Could we ''go back to the future'' to build an America we like better than the sterile single-class suburbs, auto-dependent and far from town centers, that commercial builders have been pushing on us for the last generation?Yes, says Grantland Johnson, supervisor of Sacramento County, California. The model is right in front of us, he observes, in those pre-World War II communities where housing types and costs vary block by block, upper- and lower-income people live in closer proximity, much less space was wasted, and housing densities make mass transit practicable.

Ten years ago, a woman who wanted her children to live in a drug-free environment, and who called police on those who would have it otherwise, was killed when a man tied to the local drug trade kicked in the front door of her home in Oliver and set it ablaze. At an event Tuesday night marking the deaths of Angela Dawson, her husband and five children in the fire, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said the message being sent that night in 2002 was clear: that community members "should keep your mouth shut, that you shouldn't speak out, that you can't win. " Rawlings-Blake's message to the more than 100 community members gathered at the event outside the Dawson Family Safe Haven Center, which was built in the ashes of the Dawson's destroyed home, was just the opposite, she said.

Maryland now has a hard-fought "Dream Act" that offers undocumented-immigrant young people in-state tuition for post-high school education — but with many limitations, including that these "dreamers" must enroll first in Maryland community colleges. Why would a number of staunch opponents approve the act once the last-minute community college mandate was added? Because this concession is very significant in legitimating the class- and race-biased structures of U.S. higher education — especially in blessing the community colleges, said to be the "democratizing" open door to higher education.