Department Of Housing

The date for a trial to determine remedies for a finding of discrimination by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development against black public housing residents in Baltimore has been pushed back to at least March. The second, or remedy, phase of the trial in the 10-year-old civil rights case had been scheduled to begin Dec. 5 but was delayed by disputes between lawyers for HUD and public housing residents over the taking of expert witness depositions, according to court records.

Court-supervised settlement talks have broken down over ways to remedy the federal government's discrimination against black public housing residents in Baltimore, a judge said yesterday. The breakdown sets the stage for a second trial in the 10-year-old case to decide on court-ordered remedies that could involve providing more opportunities for black public housing residents to move to the suburbs. U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis ruled in early January that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development violated fair housing laws by failing to take a regional approach to public housing and instead concentrated the poorest residents within the city limits.

Mayor Martin O'Malley said yesterday that any remedy in a public housing discrimination case that involved the movement of city residents to the suburbs would be "antithetical" to his administration's goal of reversing Baltimore's decades-long decline in population. The comments were the mayor's first public statements on the decision this month by a federal judge that absolved the city of wrongdoing but found that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development violated fair-housing laws by not taking a regional approach to the desegregation of public housing.

All apologies Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps' Nov. 4 arrest on drunken-driving charges and his subsequent apologies inspired us to look back at how other Baltimore-area sports figures have handled themselves in such situations. One response that stood out came from former Orioles manager Earl Weaver after his arrest in Baltimore County in 1981. He told The Sun then: "What can I say? It happened again. My wife usually drives, but she was too smart to get behind the wheel and I wasn't.

Carroll County's housing counseling program will be discontinued for apparent lack of interest, an official told the county commissioners yesterday. A first-time homebuyers education program in June drew only one person - a news reporter, said Michael G. Ritter, deputy director of the county's Department of Citizen Services, and only one person has signed up for a fall class. So, the Housing Counseling Program of Carroll County has been closed after 12 years. "We're just not seeing that many people who might be interested in it," he said.

Some home appraisers object to a new city law, intended to combat flipping, that requires them to tell Baltimore officials which properties they've appraised and for how much. Most residential appraisals performed in Baltimore during the past year - including how much the property was appraised for - are listed in a databank kept by city officials. A law that was passed in 2003 now requires appraisals done on residential city properties - including refinancings - to be reported by appraisers quarterly to the Baltimore Department of Housing and Community Development.

In another step toward creation of a major new housing development in Southwest Baltimore, the city has taken title to a mostly vacant 970-unit low-income apartment complex and given the 19 families who still live there until Friday to move out. The city bought the approximately 50-acre Uplands Apartments site off Edmondson Avenue near the Baltimore County line from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Dec. 31 for $20. Preliminary plans...

RECENT STORIES in the Real Estate section of this newspaper profiled couples buying their "dream houses" in Northwest Baltimore neighborhoods that were once all white and have been predominantly black for a few decades. One couple bought a 6,600-square-foot grand five-bedroom, four-bath Dutch colonial in Forest Park for $160,000 and invested $30,000 in renovations. The house has a wraparound porch. In Hanlon, near Lake Ashburton, there are Roland Park-style homes going for ridiculously low prices.

The "dominant factor" in where to put single-family public housing units in Baltimore in the 1970s and 1980s was race, a Cornell University researcher told a federal judge here yesterday. Rolf Pendall, an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Regional and City Planning, said that census tracts with predominantly black populations were up to 12 times more likely to be selected as locations for individual, scattered-site housing than tracts that were mostly white. Pendall said his analysis eliminated the impact of such factors as population loss and vacancy rates.

The developers behind the long-awaited Bloomsbury Square public housing community in downtown Annapolis sued the state Department of General Services and two other agencies yesterday, claiming they have not been paid more than $1 million promised for their work. In the lawsuit, filed yesterday in Baltimore Circuit Court, A&R Development Corp. of Baltimore says the state has withheld payment because of a dispute over performance bonds involved in the project, as well as other concerns. Also named in the suit are the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development and the Housing Authority of the City of Annapolis.