Neighborhood Housing

Open house features more than 30 homesNeighborhood Housing Services of Irvington and Crestar Bank are holding an open house from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. today with more than 30 homes in seven neighborhoods available for inspection.Prospective homebuyers can stop by the NHS office at 4107 Frederick Ave. for a list of addresses, gifts and door prizes, refreshments and a chance to meet with professional housing counselors.Community representatives from Allendale, Carroll, Irvington, St. Joseph's, Tremont, Uplands and Yale Heights will be on hand to welcome those who come to tour their neighborhoods.

From her kitchen window in East Baltimore, Darlene Glover watched the junkies line up in the alley from dawn until well past dark to buy crack cocaine.Her son watched, too. He was 9 years old.Desperate to buy a home in a safer neighborhood but lacking good credit, the 42-year-old advertising assistant became a victim of real estate flipping -- an increasingly common practice in which speculators buy shoddy homes and then rapidly sell them to naive purchasers for inflated prices.Glover paid $60,000 -- twice the amount she thought she was paying -- for a problem-ridden house at 819 N. Kenwood Ave. that a speculator had purchased six months earlier for $8,000, according to city records.

Vacant and rundown rowhouses in the neighborhood around Bon Secours Hospital will be renovated and transformed into affordable rental housing under a plan unveiled yesterday by the hospital's parent company.Four vacant rowhouses on the 1800 block of W. Baltimore St. will be the first targets of Operation ReachOut, a revitalization project organized by Bon Secours Baltimore Health Corp.But the company's vision for improving the neighborhood extends well beyond those houses. The company has acquired about 22 rowhouses in the blocks around the hospital and is looking to purchase more, company officials said.

Pulte Home realigns Maryland operationsPulte Home Corp., the nation's largest homebuilder, has expanded its Baltimore Division as part of a realignment of the company's Maryland operations.Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Harford, Howard, Prince George's, Calvert, Charles and St. Mary's counties are now members of the Baltimore Division, which will be headed by Jeb Bittner, formerly executive vice president for this area.Cora Wiltshire, the previous Baltimore president, now heads the Potomac Division that covers the suburban Washington market with a focus on Montgomery and Frederick counties.

The Garwyn Oaks community in Northwest Baltimore is hoping that a housing resource center opening today will increase homeownership by 30 percent and protect the historic area from encroaching blight.The Garwyn Oaks Housing Resource Center will hold its grand opening from noon to 2 p.m. today.Now predominantly African-American, the neighborhood was built in the early 1900s and its large, wood-framed homes with front porches and half-acre yards gave the area a small-town look."All you [have]

Surrounded by water on three sides, accessible from most of the city by a single road, Locust Point for years was a close-knit, working-class community where families toiled and lived in happy isolation from the rest of Baltimore. As the site of Fort McHenry, a disembarkation point for thousands of immigrants, the home of two marine terminals and several storied industrial plants, the community boasted a rich history but was often overlooked or ignored by those who lived outside its mostly narrow streets of brick-and-Formstone rowhomes.

Neighborhood: Brewers Hill Location: Southeast Baltimore Average sales price: $223,000 (January-June) Notable features: Ask people in the region to name a funky Baltimore neighborhood near the water, and they'll probably come up with Canton. Brewers Hill, its small next-door-neighbor to the east, gets a lot less attention. But it has neatly kept rowhouses, cool beer-brewing history and easy access to Canton hot spots without the bustling activity.

Kenneth A. Savage has been preaching for nearly a decade inside a double-wide rowhouse on East Lombard Street in Highlandtown. The pastor of Holy Truth Temple of Deliverance House of Praise says he's reached out to the corner boys who set up their drug shop on nearby narrow Mount Pleasant Avenue and welcomed the homeless to help them find housing. Kevin L. Bernhard has been working for years to improve his neighborhood, too. The president of the Highlandtown Community Association has canvassed door-to-door with police to inform residents about crime problems and helped to clean up litter.

In a sign that Reservoir Hill's comeback is gaining momentum, a developer plans to transform two long-vacant lots into about 170 market-rate condominiums with views of Druid Hill Park and estimated prices of up to $320,000. Baltimore developer CIMG LLC is planning an estimated $40 million project called Vistas on the Lake, two eight-story buildings in the 700 and 800 blocks of Druid Park Lake Drive across from the park. CIMG, selected Feb. 18 by the city's Department of Housing and Community Development in competitive bidding, will buy the land from the city for $1.2 million and expects to complete the project in about two years.

There was a time when Michael Buccheri considered purchasing the white rowhouse four doors down from the one he was renting, but he dismissed the thought after learning that it had been sold. In the long run, he got the house anyway: He married the buyer. Catherine Buccheri, a 35-year-old product manager for a software development company, moved into the Butchers Hill house in January 1999. She and her future husband met the following November, started dating a month later, were engaged seven months after that and married a year ago. The three-story, 1870s rowhouse half a block from Patterson Park sits on Lombard Street, but the front door opens onto the adjacent alley, Madeira Street, as a result of a previous owner's renovations, said Michael Buccheri, 29, a computer network engineer.