Suburbs

BEHIND A controversial plan that would enable poor black Baltimore families to move to middle-class, majority-white areas, there is a simple idea: Living in more affluent neighborhoods can help people escape poverty.The plan touched off a political uproar in Baltimore County last fall when it was proposed to settle a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland on behalf of black public housing tenants. The suit alleges that Baltimore and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- For the first time in U.S. history, nearly half of the population lives in suburbs, and that simple fact is changing the nation's political priorities. If you live in a major city, your concerns are no longer at the top of the heap.While the number of Americans living in cities stayed a flat 31 percent from 1975 to 1995, the number residing in suburbs grew from 37 percent in 1975 to 47 percent in 1995, according to U.S. Census Bureau reports.Growing trendMeanwhile, cities are losing their political clout.

LIKE THE ROOSTER who thinks the sun rises because he crows, county planning directors are fooling themselves if they believe they've found the secret to corralling residential sprawl.Perhaps they're being sated by new Census Bureau data that show migration from Baltimore and Washington and into the first circle of suburbs slowing for the first time this decade. But the same survey also reveals explosive growth in more distant suburbs -- 35 percent in Maryland's Calvert County and 55 percent in Virginia's Loudoun County.

BARBARA ANN Mikulski knows the virtue of a good quip. She is the best one-line comic in the U.S. Senate. Humor has helped Ms. Mikulski in her campaigns and political dealings. But so have her studious approaches to issues, her determination to succeed through compromise and her ability to identify with working people as well as business leaders.She faces a modest challenge this time. Dr. Ross Z. Pierpont, the 81-year-old Republican warhorse, has been wheeled out again to take on a dominant Democrat.

Over the past three years, half a dozen corporate, county and federally funded programs have sprung up to fill in transportation gaps that are keeping workers who live in Baltimore out of increasingly plentiful jobs in the suburbs.Sarita Johnson of Patterson Park knows how hard it is to manage a "reverse commute" -- going from the city into the suburbs. Every morning for a year, she spent two hours taking three buses to get to a $6-an-hour job as a customer service representative in Towson.

CITY DWELLERS and suburbanites often see each other through smudged lenses. Their vision is clouded by preconceived notions of what life is like for people who live in neighborhoods different from their own.Extreme views of the city as drug-infested amalgams of poverty are as wrong as depictions of suburbs as tidy villages without fault.In reality, city and suburb are as alike, in some respects, as they are different. Disregard the differences in housing styles and population densities. Both are populated by ordinary people.

Joan Diamond didn't need the U.S. Census Bureau to tell her that the population boom in Baltimore's suburbs is slowing.Diamond, a registered nurse in Franklin Square Hospital Center's maternity ward, has seen the number of births at the eastern Baltimore County hospital drop from 3,910 in 1993 to 2,987 last year.The result: fewer nurses on the floor and more frequent calls telling her not to come to work."Obviously, no one likes that," she said yesterday.It's the same in nearby counties.Although the suburbs continue to grow, the pace is more moderate -- in some counties, about half the rate of the early 1990s.

TRAFFIC CONGESTION is becoming the bane of the suburbs.Virtually any development proposed in Anne Arundel County generates complaints that it will aggravate traffic.Whether it is the Riverdale Baptist Church, with its planned 1,500-seat sanctuary, in Davidsonville or an athletic complex in Lake Shore, with two ice-skating rinks and an indoor soccer arena, the prospect of more automobile traffic elicits immediate and loud protests.Suburbs and automobiles are inextricably linked. Except for a few communities that developed around old rail lines, most suburbs today have only one transportation option: cars.

"SHOW ME the money,'' it isn't. But as new phrases go, ''smart growth'' has caught on in Maryland to an extent that should cheer Parris Glendening.Before the governor coined the term a year ago to define his plan to check suburban sprawl, a reader of The Sun was more apt to find those two words in Julius Westheimer columns on investments or an occasional feature on new cures for hair loss.That a lot of folks are discussing ''smart growth'' in Annapolis and beyond is in itself a victory for the governor, although he would like the General Assembly to approve his legislation, too.His bill would require the state to consider land-use patterns when deciding whether to invest in a new road, school or other infrastructure.

GAYS AND LESBIANS look for the same comforts that everyone else wants in their community: safety, sanitation, serenity. Even schools. There is one more element that attracts homosexuals to a town or neighborhood. Tolerance.These factors explain why Columbia has become a safe domicile for many gays and lesbians. Fear doesn't discriminate. Pick any demographic -- male-female, black-white, young-old, gay-straight -- and it's clear that fear of urban problems has driven some of each to the suburbs they consider secure.

The days when free or at least cheap parking in the Washington suburbs was a right are waning fast. In an era of carbon footprints, greenhouse gases and crippling congestion, the goal of today's planners and politicians is maximum inconvenience for drivers. The District of Columbia is pulling up parking lots and putting in expensive meters and spots priced to move drivers out of their cars and onto a train, bus, bike or their feet. Montgomery County in Maryland and Fairfax County in Virginia are thinking along similar lines, considering changes to codes to reduce the number of parking spaces builders have to include.

The former mayor climbed from the car and reached back 40 years. He remembered this corner, Broadway and Fayette Street, when it was on fire. "It was completely engulfed," said Thomas J. D'Alesandro III, as he gestured to the site where a warehouse was torched by rioters. He had been mayor for barely four months when, on April 6, 1968, the city erupted in violence after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King. Now 78, D'Alesandro held in his mottled hands a photograph of this place, showing the young mayor looking grim as fire hoses doused the smoldering ruins.

Marylanders are increasingly diverse and better educated and endure commutes more grueling than those in nearly any other state in the nation, according to figures released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. Immigrants are fueling population growth even in places not previously known for having ethnic enclaves. While the Washington suburbs have long been a magnet for thriving immigrant communities, the Baltimore region was home to about 200,000 foreign-born residents in 2006, an increase of nearly 38 percent since 2000.

All politics is local," said Tip O'Neill. All art is local, too. The Sopranos was great when it depicted mob life as it is lived in the lower depths and upscale suburbs of New Jersey. But when it indulged its creator's preoccupations with middle-class angst, it wobbled into the treadmill-like oblivion of its life-goes-on finale. And that's a failure at the highest level. Too many "realistic" Hollywood movies take place in the same generic suburbs where they end up being shown. In periods when movie art pops up mainly in foreign, classic and "indie" cinema, filmgoers come to trust independent theaters like the Charles, Senator and Rotunda, for showcasing the best of it. In a week when The Sopranos went down in flames, Baltimoreans can return to thrilling movie-going days of yesteryear with Mafioso at the Charles.

At first it seemed like one of those what-do-you-know moments. A study of Census data by the Brookings Institution determined that since 2005 more poor people have been living in America's suburbs than its cities. The rate of poverty is still higher in the urban centers, but because the suburbs are so much more populous, and so much less stable than they once were, they are now home to more low-income people. The study found that suburban poverty had increased the most in the low-wage metropolitan areas of the South and in the no-wage manufacturing centers of Ohio and Michigan, which have lost hundreds of thousands of jobs.

LONEHILL, South Africa - The turning point for this suburb north of Johannesburg came when a carjacker fired 70 rounds from an assault rifle into Steve Parrymore's silver BMW, wounding him in the stomach, right shoulder and legs. That attack five years ago convinced residents of Lonehill that they could not rely on police and instead needed a private security firm with a control room in the heart of the suburb and dozens of guards and a fleet of cars. Crime is a major issue for South Africans of all races, one of the legacies of apartheid having made the gap between rich and poor into a chasm.

The coming of the Chinese New Year in Baltimore was announced this year by a tattered lion dancing in what was once known as Baltimore's Chinatown. The old lion's head - made of papier-mache and now held together by tape - looked much like its surroundings: faded colors, frayed edges with a general appearance of deterioration. "Chinatown isn't what it used to be," explained the lion's owner Arthur Lee after 10 minutes of dancing in front of a small crowd, which consisted mostly of bewildered white parishioners from an Episcopal church.

SOWETO, South Africa - In the last years of apartheid, if you were black, had money and lived in Soweto, odds were good you had a house in Diepkloof Extension, or wanted one. The hilltop neighborhood of 1,300 single-family homes was the most desired address in Soweto, an otherwise desperately poor township where the country's white rulers corralled some 1.5 million black South Africans. Once freedom arrived in 1994, many neighborhood residents fled to formerly white suburbs, jumping at the chance to leave behind the teeming township.

For the Field family of Hampden, making do with one car is a matter of fervor, frugality, flexibility - and sweat. Christopher Field leaves home at 6:10 a.m., bicycles to Penn Station, takes the MARC train to the Washington suburb of Seabrook, jumps on a second bicycle he keeps at the station and pedals to his office near Goddard Space Flight Center. Kimberly Field stays in Baltimore and drives 7-year-old daughter Lucretia to school in the five-speed Saturn, the family's only car. The Fields are part of a small segment of the American population - middle-income couples with children who don't believe it's necessary to have a gas-powered vehicle for every adult in the household.

Christopher B. Leinberger is a man on a mission - a real estate developer who is building to reclaim the past. When not spearheading an ambitious redevelopment of downtown Albuquerque, N.M., he crisscrosses the country, trying to sell builders, planners and the public on converting the nation's sprawling, car-addicted suburbs into more compact, walkable communities - like the neighborhood he grew up in outside Philadelphia. At stake, contends the silver-haired, Santa Fe, N.M.-based developer, is nothing less than our personal health, and that of the planet.