Rise

Poor families with children should not be housed in high-rises. It's a cry that has echoed across the country for years.The towers are notorious for violence and vandalism. Filth -- including discarded scraps of food and dirty diapers -- makes life almost unbearable. And drug dealers use the secluded hallways as safe havens from police.Public housing officials complain that the security and maintenance costs make high-rise buildings the most costly to manage. In the 1980s in cities such as Chicago, Newark, N.J., and St. Louis, those complaints turned into action with officials calling the buildings "inhumane reservations" that were dilapidated beyond repair and ordering them demolished.

Some Lexington Terrace residents reacted angrily yesterday to a plan to move them from one blighted high-rise to another in the crime-plagued West Baltimore public housing complex.The tenants learned this week that the Housing Authority of Baltimore City plans to close a vandalized high-rise at 734 W. Fayette St. because it is 24 percent vacant and spend $500,000 to renovate an adjacent high-rise at 770 W. Saratoga St.Under the plan, the residents' moving expenses would be paid by the Housing Authority and the relocations from the 110-unit building would begin in early spring.

Sea levels in the Chesapeake Bay have risen a foot during the 1900s and may rise another 3 feet during the next century because of global warming, a University of Maryland scientist said yesterday.Dr. Michael S. Kearney, a coastal geographer at the College Park campus, reported that some bay islands have disappeared within recent decades and vulnerable waterfront on the Eastern Shore is losing as much as 10 feet of shoreline a year."You don't have to look very far for evidence of shoreline retreat -- it's all over the place," said Dr. Kearney, who also decried "out-of-control" coastal development with "people putting themselves in harm's way."

NEW YORK -- The Dow Jones industrial average has been the star of the stock market firmament in 1992. And that in itself might be a bad sign.Only twice in the last decade has the Dow's performance, on a relative basis, been so much better than the broadly based Standard & Poor's 500. And those times, said Byron R. Wien, the chief U.S. equity strategist for Morgan Stanley, were not great times to buy stocks.The first time was in the early fall of 1987, shortly before the 1987 stock market crash, which drove the entire market down sharply and hurt the Dow even more sharply than other indexes.

It would be silly and simplistic to suggest that the recent $208,000 cleanup blitz at East Baltimore's Flag House Courts has ended long-standing problems there. Only one of the three troubled high-rises was cleaned and fixed up, after all. Yet the symbolic importance of this remarkable operation should not be discounted.A new standard of order and cleanliness has been established for all to see. Any deviation from it should now raise immediate questions and action by the Housing Authority.

The image is rivetting and clear: police officers with guns cocked walking through the streets shouting angrily at an unruly crowd. It could be Bosnia, Soweto or Belfast, where civil wars have shredded the fabric of civilization.But this chilling scene hits closer to home.It occurred last weekend in West Baltimore at the public housing project known as George B. Murphy Homes during bloody September on the streets of Baltimore.In a three-day span, the local high-rise projects once again played host to violent crime.

Baltimore housing officials laid out plans yesterday to tear down six high-rise apartment buildings at Lafayette Courts next spring, the first stage of an ambitious agenda to overhaul the city's most outdated and dangerous public housing projects.The city will begin demolishing the worn, cramped towers in April to replace them with modern rowhouses under a plan approved last night by the Board of Housing Commissioners.Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III hopes eventually to level the public high-rises at Lexington Terrace, Flag House and Murphy Homes as well in a $293 million program that would be financed by the federal, state and city governments.

As he toured the blighted Lexington Terrace public housing complex on Wednesday, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros apologized to an aide for the unscheduled visit that added one extra hour to a tight schedule."

NEW YORK -- Housing starts are at their lowest levels since 1982, and homebuilders are suffering, with bankruptcies expected among the weakest of them. There is talk of a real estate bust that in magnitude will rival the post-World War II boom.But, in the face of that stream of bad news, the stock prices of homebuilders, including Columbia-based Ryland Group, are rising sharply. In the last month, an index of shares of homebuilding companies has climbed 28 percent.Many investors, it would appear, do not believe the gloomiest of the forecasts.