Kendall Ridge

Crime in the area surrounding Columbia's Kendall Ridge neighborhood is perhaps not as rampant as some residents believe. Police report that for the first six months of 1994, there were no reports of drug violations, two reports of theft and four assaults (none involving children). Those statistics say something about the potential for danger should elementary school students from that neighborhood have to walk a wooded pathway less than a mile to Waterloo Elementary School.Now that the path has been installed, school officials are considering whether to discontinue bus service for about 70 Waterloo students from Kendall Ridge.

A plan to discontinue school bus service to some 70 students at Waterloo Elementary School has raised safety concerns among the parents of those children.Parents in Columbia's Kendall Ridge neighborhood fear for the safety of students who will have to walk the less than one-mile route across a secluded, wooded area to get to school, saying there is little visibility and many animals that roam the area. Some parents say even if they were to accompany their children to school, they would be afraid to walk home alone.

It was an unlikely comparison -- and one that illustrated the depth of community suspicion -- about a proposed affordable housing development in Long Reach.At a public meeting on the proposed 64-townhouse Kendall Ridge project Monday night, an audience member warned that the Enterprise Foundation's plan would produce a culturally and economically segregated enclave in the neighborhood."And aren't you just creating another Sandtown?" said the man, referring to an Enterprise Foundation venture to transform the deteriorated community in West Baltimore.

Invariably, when the discussion turns to low- and moderately-priced housing, there is an undercurrent of unspoken and sometimes spoken) emotion. Debates about scattered-site housing and what represents a community's fair share of the burden are sometimes used to mask people's true concerns. Even though the term "affordable housing" should speak for itself, some people mistake it to mean low-income housing, and see it as a breeder of crime and deterioration.In Howard County these issues are playing out in the opposition in the Kendall Ridge neighborhood of Columbia's Long Reach village, where the Enterprise Foundation and the Rouse Co. want to build 64 town houses for buyers and renters whose household income is $25,000 a year or less.

As the melted ice began to re-freeze in the evening chill last night, it was time to talk about swimming pools.Preferably solar-heated ones.Columbia Council members wrestled with what has become a perennial philosophical question: Are 21 neighborhood pools enough?For member Mike Rethman, whose Hickory Ridge village has the city's newest and best-attended pools, the answer is a resounding "yes!"Roy T. Lyons, whose Long Reach village has been battling for a fourth pool for five years, has a different view.

Kendall Ridge neighborhood residents finally are feeling more a part of Columbia, says community activist Beverly Riling, now that the Columbia Council included $965,000 in next year's proposed budget for a long-awaited community swimming pool."

Every city has its equivalent of a town square. In Columbia, during summer at least, there are 21 town squares -- the swimming pools that dot nearly every neighborhood.Teen-agers hit the volleyball courts, complete with imported sand, while younger kids line up for swim team practice and mothers congregate on lawn chairs to shoot the breeze. Columbia Mall may be the gathering place during winter months, but in summer the town pools have no equal.Why is it, then, that Columbia's outdoor pools lose money on the order of $1.4 million a year?

A county law aimed at preventing school crowding is holding up 900 homes planned by the Rouse Co."It was bound to happen sooner or later," said Alton J. Scavo, Rouse Co. vice president and associate director of community development. "It would have been nice if it had happened a lot later."The development of up to 483 apartments, 192 townhouses and 214 detached houses in the Kendall Ridge neighborhood of Long Reach Village was to have been built in 1996.But the county's limit on the number of units in the region had already been allocated.

They marched into a Columbia Council budget hearing seven weeks ago with signs asking rhetorical questions such as "Is Kendall Ridge a Columbia neighborhood?" and "How can you ignore 3,000 residents?"Last week, the Kendall Ridge residents got what they had been seeking for about eight years when the council, reversing its earlier position, included in the Columbia Association's 1994 budget $75,000 in planning money for a Kendall Ridge pool. The council had voted against the capital budget item in November.