Median

Maryland's housing market spiraled further downward this past summer, registering the fourth-biggest drop among all the states as home sales fell nearly 30 percent from a year earlier. Despite the tumbling sales, the median sale price of existing homes in the Baltimore area managed to rise 1.7 percent in the July-September quarter compared with the same period last year, according to a National Association of Realtors report released yesterday. But Maryland's home-sales dive of 28.6 percent was more than double the 13.7 percent drop for the nation.

State police at the Golden Ring barracks were trying to determine the identity of a man who was killed when his car struck a tree in the median of Route 702 near the Baltimore Beltway in Essex early yesterday and burst into flames. Shortly after 5 a.m., a passing motorist saw a blue 2008 Toyota engulfed in flames on the northbound ramp of Route 702 leading to the Beltway and called police. Police said a preliminary investigation at the scene indicated that the driver had lost control of the vehicle on the ramp, entered the median shoulder and crashed into a large tree.

In his 18 years on the federal bench, Judge Michael B. Mukasey has issued more than 1,500 decisions concerning matters as cataclysmic as the Holocaust and as mundane as milk, beer and cigarettes. In his opinions, Mukasey comes across as intelligent, prickly, impatient, practical and suspicious of abstractions. He was quick to chastise and impose sanctions on lawyers who tested his patience or, worse, lied to him. He did not hesitate to rule against the powerful, including President Bush's uncle, or people with sympathetic cases but no claim to legal relief.

There are signs along a forlorn stretch of U.S. 40 on the west side that Mayor Sheila Dixon is trying to make Baltimore better, and I don't mean all the new trees, shrubs and stamped concrete planters in the median strips. I mean the 4-by-8-foot, city-sponsored placards with Dixon's name on them. "A cleaner, greener, safer and healthier Baltimore," they read on top. On the bottom, the signs give kudos to "Mayor Sheila Dixon and the Citizens of Baltimore." That's right: a great, big thank-you to the mayor seeking re-election and the taxpayers who paid for the signs promoting her. When the median work began months ago, the city posted large placards at either end of the project, so passing motorists would be aware of the beautification project.

THE PROBLEM -- A crossing signal at a downtown intersection doesn't give pedestrians enough time to cross the street. THE BACKSTORY -- Emily Hiller lives in Little Italy and walks along Fayette Street when visiting downtown. She keeps a brisk pace, unless one of her children tags along, but even when solo she complains that crossing President Street is a torturous task. The pedestrian signal, Hiller says, does not leave enough time to traverse seven lanes of traffic and a wide median strip.

A driver whose car crossed a median and struck a police cruiser in front of police headquarters has been released from Maryland Shock Trauma Center. The driver of the crossing car, LeeAnna Lynn Siegmund, 23, of Augusta Avenue in Baltimore was traveling north on Courthouse Drive shortly after 2 a.m. Wednesday, police said. Her Pontiac Sunfire jumped the concrete median at Rogers Avenue, police said, and headed north in the southbound lanes of Rogers Avenue. Police said that the Sunfire hit Pfc. Ronald Mabe III's cruiser.

Does anybody remember the old days when homebuyers actually made sizable down payments - often 20 percent or more - when they bought their first house? New national survey research reveals just how dated and quaint that concept has become in today's market, thanks to rocketing home prices that have far eclipsed buyers' incomes and savings. From mid-2005 to mid-2006, according to a statistical sampling of a representative group of 7,548 purchasers, nearly half of all first-time buyers financed the entire transaction, obtaining mortgages in the full amount of the home price.

A sylvan sliver in the unlikeliest of places, an urban luxury once criticized as a former mayor's extravagance and then neglected for much of its nearly 100-year existence, Baltimore's Preston Gardens is finally getting its due. The garden in the middle of St. Paul Street - which would more accurately be described as the city's fanciest median - is slated for a nearly $900,000 overhaul. The effort would not only restore the park to its former glory, but improve on it with a flourishing landscape, working fountains and better lighting - all in the hope that the hard-luck plot can become a real downtown park.

You might have seen the scary news reports just before Thanksgiving: Housing prices fell nationwide last quarter - the first such decline since 1993. Even grimmer, total sales of houses and condominiums plunged 12.7 percent across the country, compared with the third quarter last year. And you might have wondered, is this the long-predicted popping of the housing-boom bubble or the beginning of an extended period of eroding values in American home real estate? How bad could it get in the months ahead?

The scarcity of housing in Howard County for moderate- and low-income families will worsen without aggressive action, an interim report from a community task force warns. The report is a draft and has not been adopted by the full 23-member task force, but it leaves no ambiguity that the problem is of crisis proportions. A companion analysis commissioned by the panel says more than one-quarter of the county's households exceed the threshold of affordability by paying more than 30 percent of their incomes for housing, in some cases far more.