Public Housing

AS REAL-ESTATE deals go, The Townes at the Terraces is hard to beat: A mere $43,000 buys a brand-new 1,900-square-foot townhouse near the University of Maryland at Baltimore campus, off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Construction will not start for another few weeks but 45 of the 100 townhouses are spoken for.The Terraces will rise at the site of Lexington Terrace, a complex of five public-housing high-rises that was dynamited 11 months ago. Public-housing tenants will live next to homeowners in 303 townhouses that are indistinguishable from one another.

THE ACLU and others who support helping some of Baltimore's public-housing families move to the suburbs are asking people who live in the counties to swallow their fears and do the right thing.To which suburbanites respond: Why should we?Most are not -- at this point, anyway -- kicking and screaming over this plan, part of a $400 million settlement of a racial-discrimination suit filed by the ACLU against the city housing authority. The ACLU and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development realized last fall, when the settlement was preliminarily announced, that they were going to have to make it more palatable to the counties if they were to win the cooperation of their elected leaders.

CALLING IT ''one of the last bastions of socialism in the world,'' Sen. Robert Dole, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, in late April suggested ending public housing in America.He was embarrassed when Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros quickly noted that the substitute Mr. Dole suggested -- housing vouchers for the poor -- had been proposed by the Clinton administration but rejected out of hand by the senator's own Republican Congress.Housing vouchers have existed for years.

Baltimore has corralled $300 million in federal funds to replace dilapidated public housing high-rises with rowhouse communities and to house 3,200 poor black families, many in the suburbs, under an agreement reached in a desegregation lawsuit.The partial settlement, to be unveiled today in Washington, would give two-thirds of the 3,200 families federal subsidies to rent or buy housing in mostly white, middle-class neighborhoods between this year and 2001, say sources close to the deal.The accord makes profound changes in the way Baltimore houses the poor, and it obligates the federal government to pay for giving families a wider choice of where to live.

No one can deny that our public housing developments are deeply troubled places. Isolated in the poorest sections of RTC Baltimore with few decent employment opportunities, residents of public housing find it hard to travel up the ladder of success. The provision of services in these communities has taken precedence over providing opportunity. It is a disempowering policy that turns public-housing residents into consumers, not producers.This policy perpetuates dependency and creates the expectation that generation after generation of public-housing residents will live in abject poverty in subsidized housing that has served to contain the poor, particularly the African-American poor.

WHEN DANIEL Henson, Baltimore's public-housing chief, visited The Sun's editorial board last month, he remarked that he hoped Baltimore could look to other cities that had dealt positively with the relocation of public-housing tenants. He mentioned, among other places, Yonkers, New York.Having grown up there, I know that Baltimore, now grappling with a housing controversy of its own, would not want to follow in Yonkers' footsteps.Like Baltimore, Yonkers prides itself on a blue-collar, ethnic quirkiness.

Seeking a court-ordered escape for black families from segregated pockets of poverty, six black Baltimore public housing residents filed suit in U.S. District Court yesterday against city and federal officials.The tenants, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, asked the court to remedy what they called a 60-year history of segregation in Baltimore public housing by ordering that they -- and 12,500 other black families in public housing -- be given the chance to live outside highly segregated areas.

''The poorest man in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; but the King of England cannot enter -- all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!'' -- William PittWhat the king dares not, the Chicago Housing Authority does, with the backing of the Clinton administration. They want families to agree in advance to give up privacy as a condition of obtaining a public-housing lease.

WASHINGTON -- Henry G. Cisneros, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, yesterday laid out plans that would dramatically alter the face of public housing by giving poor people vouchers that would allow them to live anywhere they choose.The restructuring of HUD is intended to help President Clinton pay for his proposed middle-class tax break, but it's also part of a larger effort at "reinventing government" begun 20 months ago by Vice President Al Gore. The effort took on urgency after the Nov. 8 elections, when President Clinton told Cabinet officers to examine their agencies as part of a budget- and tax-cutting initiative.

Should we help distressed inner-city neighborhoods? Or just encourage poor people to escape them?Franklin D. Raines, vice chairman of Fannie Mae and a lead economic adviser on the Clinton transition team, warns that the ''people or places'' question, which bothered and sometimes confounded advocates for the urban poor through the '60s and '70s, is about to resurface.There are signs that he is right. Virtually all President-elect Clinton's urban-initiative ideas, starting with community-development banks and proceeding to enterprise zones and targeted infrastructure projects, seem oriented to people in the neighborhoods where they live.

The Annapolis Housing Authority wants a civil rights lawsuit brought against it thrown out on the grounds that it functions as a private property owner and may ban anyone it chooses from public housing grounds. The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland filed suit this year to challenge a policy it claims unconstitutionally prevents friends and family of residents from visiting them. The Housing Authority and the Annapolis Police Department, another defendant in the case, have asked an Anne Arundel County Circuit Court judge to dismiss the case.

WILLIAM WAYNE JUSTICE, 89 Influential Texas judge U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, whose rulings shattered old Texas by changing the way the state educated children, treated prisoners and housed its poorest and most vulnerable citizens, has died. He was 89. His law clerk, Kelly Davis, said the judge died Tuesday in Austin. The soft-spoken jurist spent three often tumultuous decades on the bench following his appointment by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. To some, Justice was a judicial renegade who disregarded the public's will by imposing his own concepts on a conservative state.

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.

Residents of an aging Annapolis public housing community that is in the midst of a controversial redevelopment project said Wednesday that they have been without utilities repeatedly for the last two weeks. About two dozen residents of College Creek Terrace, a 70-year-old development in downtown Annapolis that is being redeveloped - along with nearby Obery Court - into a publicly funded and privately managed complex, aired their complaints to housing officials during a tense meeting in an outdoor courtyard.

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.

Chris Fox landed his first job before he turned 7. He took up a paper route, mowed lawns, shoveled snow and then served hot dogs on a street corner in Washington from the age of 12 to 19. In all those years, the 35-year-old Annapolis resident said he never wanted to get into politics. That was before he left his stand, bounced around the hospitality industry and opened an Irish pub on Church Circle in 2002. Since then, repeatedly trekking up to city hall to fight business policies made him grow tired of the current administration.

Work could start early next year on the $18 million first phase of redevelopment of 268 city-owned properties in a blighted North Baltimore neighborhood south of Charles Village. Developer Telesis Baltimore Corp., selected by city housing officials more than three years ago, has secured public financing to move forward with 72 affordable rental apartments and townhouses and hopes to start construction next year as well on for-sale housing, Catherine Simmons, a Telesis project manager, said Thursday.

When Brett Rogers bought his house on Fawn Street in Little Italy in 1999 for $115,500, the budding attorney was 24, living with roommates and happy to rehab the property. His home was surrounded by two public housing complexes, the water and a parking lot. Living in the city with its crime and grime was a challenge but also an adventure. He kept his Baltimore house when he moved to New York's Upper East Side a few years later, took a job as a corporate attorney for an international bank on Wall Street and married.

T. Rowe Price opens exhibit at Walt Disney World Baltimore money manager T. Rowe Price Group's new financial education and interactive exhibit opens Tuesday at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. The Great Piggy Bank Adventure at Epcot's Innoventions will feature personal finance lessons for families on saving, spending wisely and diversifying investments, among others. This exhibit is the first of its kind for Price, which was approached by Disney three years ago. The exhibit also features a companion online game and a related Web site at www.greatpiggybankadventure.