Housing Authority

The Annapolis housing authority added two more neighborhoods to its redevelopment list this week in a plan that calls for setting aside homes for ownership - a move that has some residents fearing permanent displacement. Annapolis Gardens and Bowman Court, off Admiral Drive, will see major renovations, increased security and improved landscaping by mid-2009. The agency plans to redo two Clay Street public housing communities by 2014. It expects to rehabilitate College Creek Terrace and raze and rebuild Obery Court.

Housing Dept. retreat was a genuine effort to improve serviceAs the person responsible for ensuring that the Housing Authority of Baltimore Citys (HABC) operations do not violate either ethical or legal parameters, I take exception to The Suns editorial Big spender (Nov. 11).The editorial refers to the management retreat held at St. Michaels as misuse of the publics dollar. . . This characterization is unfair. It implies that public money was not used for a proper public purpose, or to improve HABC operations.

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

More than two dozen people were arrested at the Pall Mall apartments in Park Heights yesterday afternoon when their search for "blue-and-white" heroin was abruptly ended by a Housing Authority of Baltimore City reverse sting.The housing authority police targeted the apartments, known as "The Ranch," in the 4200 block of Pimlico Road for 2 1/2 hours, luring would-be drug buyers into the complex's basement where they were arrested.Thirty-three people -- from a frail 32-year-old man with a 15-year, $100 a day heroin addiction to middle-class suburbanites -- were arrested.

The federal government has ended its 1994 review of the Baltimore Housing Authority's scandal-ridden, $25.6 million, no-bid repair program for low-income housing.The housing authority returned $343,400 to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to resolve accusations that the authority paid twice the going rate to fix apartments for the poor, paid contractors for work that was not done and paid millions to companies run by friends and relatives of authority directors.The HUD audit led to an FBI investigation.

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.

Surrounded by empty, trash-filled rowhouses in East Baltimore's Brentwood Village, Charlene Stafford has dealt with rats overtaking her basement, strange odors seeping into her house and the threat of a fire spreading to her home.Since moving to the 1100 block of Forrest St. six years ago, Stafford has watched the houses around hers empty and become trash sites and targets of arsonists.But she and a handful of neighbors got some relief yesterday when 100 Baltimore firefighters, housing authority workers and community volunteers pitched in to board up four vacant properties on the block and clean several nearby lots and alleys.

In a major setback for Maryland authorities trying to control drugs flowing through public housing projects, a federal judge ruled yesterday that Frederick officials may no longer arbitrarily ban nonresidents from its properties.Though the order is temporary, it has broad implications for how crime is fought in housing projects in Maryland and perhaps beyond. The issue boils down to the right of tenants to choose their friends and associates vs. the need to control the violence and destruction that comes with the drug trade.

ON SOUTH EDEN Street, which is not the same as North Eden Street, there is now a muddy hole in the ground where there used to be a grubby little stop for the poor and the homeless. In such an hour, we can curse the idiocy that brought us to such a condition, or we can do what we normally do, which is to wish the poor would go away.Or we can say thank you to the Lancers Boys Club, for prodding our collective conscience on such matters.The boys are putting together a Nov. 7 Walk for the Homeless, a heartfelt project they commenced even before this week's news of the latest fumble by the city's Housing Authority.

ST. MICHAEL'S -- They gathered at the secluded Harbourtowne Gulf Resort and Conference Center in this Eastern Shore community.It was a 2 1/2-day retreat for 54 supervisors from the Housing Authority of Baltimore City, the quasi-public housing agency funded largely with federal funds.Housing officials said the $13,446 trip -- paid for by the agency -- was designed to lay out a strategy for implementing recommendations for the city's public housing communities.But Mayor-elect Martin O'Malley questioned the prudence of a lame-duck administrator taking his staff on such a getaway a month before he leaves the job."

About 270 dilapidated public housing units will be renovated and equipped with energy-efficient fixtures with $66 million in federal stimulus funds, city officials announced Friday. The money will be used to renovate about 240 individual vacant public housing homes scattered throughout the city and 30 traditional public housing units, officials said. "People are not only committed to making a difference in their communities and transforming their communities, they also want to make sure we are accountable and responsive to them so they can live their lives with their families in a safe environment, in a clean environment, in a stable environment," said Mayor Sheila Dixon in a news conference at a newly renovated home in the Harwood community.

What if the government told you that your family couldn't live together? That your father or your son or your child's father couldn't even come over to your house to visit? That if he did visit you, he would be arrested, prosecuted for trespassing, possibly incarcerated - and you could be evicted? That's exactly what the city of Annapolis is telling its public housing residents. Fathers and mothers are prevented from living with and raising their children. Children and grandchildren are prevented from visiting and caring for their aging parents and grandparents.

Suing on behalf of residents who say their invited guests and relatives are barred from coming to their homes, the American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the Annapolis Housing Authority's practice of banning people from the public housing agency's property. The lawsuit against the authority, the city and others was filed Wednesday in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court by 11 people. It comes as the housing authority is in the midst of reworking its banning policy, which was enacted in 1994 and which allows the agency to ban from its 10 complexes "non-residents who are detrimental to the overall quality of life for public housing residents."

The nine candidates vying to be Annapolis' next mayor discussed public housing issues ranging from funding to revitalization and social services at a recent forum hosted by the Housing Authority of Annapolis. The seven Democrats, one Republican and one independent spoke mostly in broad terms of improving communication and collaboration between public housing residents and city government and creating opportunity for residents. Housing Commissioner Michael Jackson posed perhaps the most controversial question of the forum, asking candidates if there should be a time limit on families living in the city's public housing, which is often home to generations of families.

Despite opposition from some public housing residents, the Annapolis City Council passed a resolution Monday that gives the city's housing authority approval to proceed with a plan to redevelop the Obery Court public housing complex. The project, which would use more than $12 million in state, county and private funding, has drawn criticism from many public housing tenants, several of whom spoke out against the resolution at the City Council meeting before the vote. The residents feared that after demolition and reconstruction of the rental units, some would not be able to move back, attributing their concerns in part to mistrust of housing authority officials, whom they say did not give them sufficient input in planning the project.

The city of Annapolis should devote more resources to policing its troubled public housing communities, including creating a dedicated team of officers, stepping up traffic enforcement and broadening the Police Department's authority to allow officers to ban trespassers, according to a report presented last night to city officials. The $60,000 study prepared by the consulting group ICMA calls for a sustained - and drastically different - approach to fighting crime in the 10 federally controlled public housing complexes.

Samantha Johnson hasn't had an easy time of it. A year ago today, she was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward after attempting suicide, according to court documents, and was later fired from her job at Wal-Mart for missing too much work. One of her two sons, Timothy, 11, has severe asthma. Now Johnson and her boys face eviction from their apartment in a Cherry Hill public housing project because she's behind on the rent. Had it not been for a lawsuit filed Thursday by the Legal Aid Bureau on her behalf and that of three other families, Johnson, 31, might have been on the street as soon as next week.

Zelda DuBose and her family are about to lose their home. The single mother is being kicked out of a rent assistance program run by the Housing Authority of Baltimore City, and she says it is all because of a series of bureaucratic glitches. Without the subsidy, she says, she can't afford the $1,187 rent for her West Baltimore rowhouse, and she and her children could be forced out on the street. City housing officials say they did everything they could to help DuBose. But she contends that the agency failed to work with her to requalify for the federally funded Section 8 housing program, and that when she requested a hearing, the agency made it difficult for her to get information about the hearing date, even denying her information over the telephone.

The smell of filth filled the small apartment. The couches were overturned, along with a washing machine, and the floors were streaked with grime. A bra lay on the floor in front of Shirley Gilbert's refrigerator. The underwear wasn't hers. Neither, she says, was the mess that drug dealers and junkies left for her to clean up in her one-bedroom apartment in the Latrobe public housing community in East Baltimore. "It's not safe here," Gilbert said. "They come in and do what they want to do. They bust the window.

The federal agency overseeing the Housing Authority of the City of Annapolis will not provide money to help repair two large sinkholes outside an apartment building for the elderly and disabled, saying that the authority is making "reasonable" progress on its own. Instead, the Baltimore office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development offered in a Jan. 7 letter to help the authority secure money from the city and Anne Arundel County. The city has refused to help amid concerns that the Housing Authority isn't spending its own money and the Glenwood high-rise is not in the county's jurisdiction.