Public Housing

On Tuesday, the morning after Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke announced he would clean out the wreckage of his demoralized housing department, I went to Abbott Court in the Latrobe Projects to wonder why everything's gone to hell.The mayor's big announcement came with remarkable speed, as these things go at City Hall. All it took was the threat of a rent strike at Lexington Terrace over revolting living conditions, and the news that $42 million in federal grants had somehow been overlooked by his housing people, and the sudden realization of an 18 percent vacancy rate in the city's high-rise public housing buildings at a time when there are somehow more than 15,000 families on waiting lists.

Washington -- April and May have been -- literally -- the most explosive months in the history of public housing in America.At 9 a.m. on April 30, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros and Philadelphia city officials pushed a ceremonial plunger igniting 660 pounds of dynamite to implode five towers of the 41-year-old Raymond Rosen Homes in North Philadelphia.Good riddance, wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer's Acel Moore, of a project which for 30 years has ''been an island -- a black township -- where crime, violence and drugs flourished.

A federal judge has ruled that a Baltimore public housing discrimination lawsuit should go forward, rejecting arguments from government lawyers that residents can freely choose whether to live in subsidized, often racially segregated, housing. The distinction is important because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that government agencies have a greater obligation to desegregate institutions where participation is not voluntary, such as attendance at public schools. "Of course there is no law that compels people to abide in public housing," U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis said in a ruling Thursday.

Public housing tenants, officials and a developer will resume meetings next week in an effort to salvage a March agreement to build a new 52-unit housing community along Annapolis waterfront property. In a letter sent yesterday to city and state officials and tenants, Gov. Parris N. Glendening expressed confidence that changes can be worked out. He reiterated his commitment to see a development "that will serve as a national model for public housing" replace the 61-year-old Bloomsbury Square, one of the country's oldest public housing projects.

Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley said last night that the city would try to meet its court-ordered obligation to provide opportunities for public housing residents to move to mostly white, middle-class neighborhoods by negotiating long-term leases of rental properties, and not by buying scattered-site houses. O'Malley told a low-key meeting at Hamilton Middle School that the city would try to spread the leased units across the city. "What we want to do is explore ways where we can enter long-term leases where the Housing Authority doesn't manage the properties," O'Malley said.

Annapolis housing officials have compiled a $19.3 million wish list to spruce up the city's 10 public housing complexes.The Annapolis Housing Authority is completing a five-year plan to replace roofs and old utilities, correct flooding problems, landscape the apartment complexes and blitz dim hallways with fresh paint.Although the agency is requesting $19.3 million, housing officials said they expect to receive only about $1.8 million in each of the next five years. The agency already has been given a $3 million grant by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to renovate Harbour House, the city's largest public housing development, built in the 1950s.

THE ANNAPOLIS Housing Authority is getting a bad rap. Critics are firing away at Executive Director Patricia Holden Croslan, although federal reports demonstrate clearly that she has improved the city's 10 public-housing complexes. One tirade came during a forum last month sponsored by the Anne Arundel County NAACP. The accusers blamed Ms. Croslan for trash and maintenance woes. Too bad Ms. Croslan wasn't invited to defend her record. She might have pointed out the solid fiscal and physical progress the housing authority has made since she took over that poorly run operation 3 1/2 years ago. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development credits her with saving the authority from bankruptcy.

Federal housing officials are examining more than $22.8 million in no-bid contracts that Baltimore's Housing Authority awarded to renovate 1,136 public housing units.The contracts also are being scrutinized by the regional inspector general for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as part of a Housing Authority audit.Bill Tamburrino, chief of the public housing division of HUD's Baltimore field office, said he has tried for months -- at times unsuccessfully -- to monitor the renovation program.

The federal government yesterday rejected Baltimore's grand plan to level five high-rises at Lafayette Courts and replace them with garden apartments in an attempt to make life in public housing more hospitable.But city officials remain hopeful of getting money next year to transform five of the six buildings at the East Baltimore housing ,, complex.The authority applied this year for a $49.6 million urban revitalization grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help finance the project, but the agency failed to make the cut in competition with 41 other cities for the $300 million in HUD Hope VI grants.

A Baltimore councilman wants members of the Nation of Islam to patrol the city's public housing high-rises. Kenneth Hall, a resident of George B. Murphy Homes, likes the idea, but he has one reservation."