Housing Officials

Arecent report from the Abell Foundation finds that housing for low-income families in Baltimore is being torn down by the city's housing authority a lot faster than any replacements are being put up. City housing officials challenge the report's conclusions and insist that reduced funding, particularly from the federal government, has limited their options. The federal government's disinvestment in public housing is clear - and should be reversed. But the city should do more - and do it faster - to create more livable spaces for the city's poor and working poor.

The ticklish issue of affordable housing in Howard County is spawning lots of high-level discussion but isn't likely to produce a law or substantial policy change until next year at the earliest, county officials say.That's when the new 10-year county General Plan should be completed, and housing officials hope to have their goals included in that guide to the future -- paving the way for more new housing in the $80,000 to $130,000 range for families earning...

WITHOUT FANFARE, city officials have veered away from the long-standing policy of patching up vacant houses in hopes that someone will eventually move in. Instead, they're bulldozing more houses -- 1,000 a year. Given Baltimore's shrinking population, more unsafe older housing should be demolished. But not if it simply means replacing "the eyesore of a vacant house with the eyesore of a vacant lot."Those aren't our words, but those of Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, who says he intends to alter city demolitions after reading a three-part series in The Sun by John B. O'Donnell and Jim Haner on the blight and residential flight fostered by Baltimore's housing policies.

Fourteen people were forced to move yesterday when city housing officials condemned an apartment building shortly after a car ran into a rear wall of the structure.Police said the 1994 Cadillac was traveling in reverse on Riggs Avenue just before noon when it backed into the wall of the three-story rowhouse in the 1000 block of N. Stricker St. One unidentified occupant of the building was injured and taken to Bon Secours Hospital, authorities said.Despite the crash, many occupants of the building's four apartments remained inside until ordered out by housing officials.

Submitting to a rare self-inspection, Baltimore officials formally initiated a review yesterday of their technique for toppling middle-of-the-block rowhouses.As the city hired a consultant to examine its demolition procedures, experts interviewed by The Sun raised fundamental questions about the city's razings of aged rowhouses between other aged rowhouses -- all locked together by bricks, mortar and lumber that often date to the last century."Before you tear down a midblock house, you ought to be doing some very serious engineering to make sure the walls are going to stand," said Randy Johnson, a home improvement contractor who began renovating Baltimore rowhouses 20 years ago.Added Tim Sibol, a structural engineer in Baltimore: "The first thing you need to do is go in and make sure you know what you've got before you start."

Federal housing officials are expressing concern over Baltimore's new plan to exclude middle-income residents in the rowhouse communities that will replace the Lafayette Courts and Lexington Terrace housing projects."

In yet another stinging criticism of the city housing authority, federal housing officials have charged that the agency violated several federal regulations by, among other things, awarding work to a suspended contractor and ignoring formal bidding procedures.Baltimore City Housing Authority officials attempted to refute the allegations, which were made public yesterday by U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski. At a hastily called news conference, the city officials said the charges are either untrue or misrepresent the facts.

After concern was expressed this week about Baltimore's plans not to include middle-income people in replacement housing for the Lexington Terrace high-rise housing project, a federal housing official now says those plans are fine.Alex Sachs, a spokesman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said yesterday that the plans represent no change from the city's original application for a $22.9 million federal grant, so there's no need for a federal review."We were reassured [by city housing officials]

THE REAPPOINTMENT of Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III should not be confirmed until the mayor investigates incidents in which certain housing officials have ignored the very laws the public entrusts them to uphold.Conflicts of interest are bound to arise when city policy allows these officials to own slum dwellings that their own department is supposed to inspect. But when they also ignore or quash citations to repair these properties, this is an abuse of power that demands an outside investigation by Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke.

Pledging a thorough investigation into the troubled $25.6 million program to fix up homes for the poor, Baltimore City Council Vice President Vera P. Hall is calling local and federal housing officials, as well as lawyers and tenants, to a hearing next week.Mrs. Hall, who chairs the council's housing committee, said she is "trying to cover the waterfront" in soliciting testimony from people involved in the no-bid repair program that has come under fire for shoddy work and inflated costs. The hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. Tuesday.

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.

Arecent report from the Abell Foundation finds that housing for low-income families in Baltimore is being torn down by the city's housing authority a lot faster than any replacements are being put up. City housing officials challenge the report's conclusions and insist that reduced funding, particularly from the federal government, has limited their options. The federal government's disinvestment in public housing is clear - and should be reversed. But the city should do more - and do it faster - to create more livable spaces for the city's poor and working poor.

Mayor Martin O'Malley yesterday helped topple the roof of the lone building approved to come down in a vacant Southwest Baltimore apartment complex, a large redevelopment project that has been held up for two years by a legal dispute. Attorneys from the Legal Aid Bureau waged a successful fight this week to ensure the demolished unit at Swann Avenue and Old Frederick Road in the Uplands Apartments is the only one razed until a final agreement is reached in a long-running federal court suit on behalf of former tenants seeking assurances that the new project will include low-income housing.

Baltimore police on Tuesday stumbled upon five young children left unattended in a rundown apartment in a dilapidated, crime-ridden building with no heat or hot water. Fortunately, the children, who did not live in the building but had spent the night there, were unharmed and showed no signs of abuse. Child protective service workers will likely monitor them for some time, as they should. But why are people paying rent to live in such appalling conditions? The sad truth the lack of housing that is affordable for poor people in the city gives many of them very little choice.

The Internal Revenue Service has slapped the Housing Authority of Baltimore City with a federal tax lien, alleging the agency owes more than $626,000 in payroll taxes. Officials at the housing authority, however, say the IRS is mistaken and that no back taxes are owed. Housing officials have been trying without success to reach the IRS for an explanation for a week since learning about the lien from a reporter. The document was filed in Baltimore Circuit Court on Oct. 9. Rainbow Lin, chief financial officer for HABC, has reviewed the authority's financial records and believes they are in order, said Melvin Edwards, housing spokesman.

Traveling aboard a trolley bus, city Housing Commissioner Paul T. Graziano and other housing officials will talk with residents at four community events tomorrow, beginning at 9 a.m. at the New Shiloh Baptist Church parking lot, 2100 N. Monroe St., for a "Christmas in April" volunteer day in the Mondawmin area. The tour will move at 10:15 a.m. to a "chat and chew" at the Bay-Brook Housing Festival in Bayview-Brooklyn, continue with an 11:30 a.m. "meet and greet" at the Herring Run Spring Festival in Belair-Edison, and end with a 1 p.m. stop at the rededication of the Patterson Park pagoda.

It seemed like the perfect project. Launched in the heady days of the city's renaissance and financed with $4.1 million in public money, six vacant school buildings were converted by a private partnership into subsidized rental units - recycling historic properties, bolstering marginal neighborhoods and providing decent housing for poor people. Twenty-one years after the first tenants moved into the Baltimore Schoolhouse Apartments, however, this once-heralded venture in preservation, community development and affordable housing has become not a model for renovation but yet another addition to the city's roster of problem properties.

Howard County housing officials won some breathing room in their bumpy quest to buy a parcel in Elkridge for affordable homes - a deal threatened by a mix-up over grant money. Officials, who have a contract on the land but have not settled, hoped to win more time. Now it appears that the closing date, set for tomorrow, will be postponed because the owner must resolve a title problem, housing administrator Leonard S. Vaughan said yesterday. Operating under the assumption that the county might be able to buy the land after all, he has asked for an environmental assessment of the parcel to make sure nothing toxic is mixed in the soil.

Instead of tearing down dilapidated houses willy-nilly, city officials may remove whole blocks of vacant buildings, under a proposed demolition policy that could mean the razing of as many as 300 houses annually. The policy, one of Housing Commissioner Patricia J. Payne's first major initiatives, represents her attempt to restructure the demolition policy, which has come under attack in recent years by city residents who say the toppled houses become dumping grounds and magnets for drug addicts, vagrants and rodents.

Baltimore officials continued their search yesterday for the owner of a rowhouse in which four people died in a fire over the weekend, and they said they could demolish his Amity Street house if they don't hear from him by tomorrow. Housing inspectors condemned the three-story dwelling in West Baltimore hours after a fire early Saturday that killed a woman and her three grandchildren. The owner has 72 hours from Monday to meet with city housing officials and present a plan for the property, which could include tearing it down or making repairs.