Townhouses

Two side-by-side townhouses that were once home to former Gov. William Donald Schaefer and his longtime companion, Hilda Mae Snoops, go on sale Thursday in Pasadena's Chestnut Hill Cove community. Schaefer has donated both properties to the Baltimore Community Foundation, which hopes to sell them and use the proceeds to help endow the William Donald Schaefer Civic Fund, the foundation announced Wednesday. The fund, created a year ago with Schaefer's leftover campaign funds, supports a program that awards neighborhood grants.

Fourteen families are getting ready to buy new, low-priced townhouses and condominiums, thanks to the latest Howard County moderate-income housing lottery. Thomas P. Carbo, deputy county housing director, said a lottery drawing last week awarded five new townhouses in Shipley's Grant on Route 108 near Snowden River Parkway, at $168,000 each; five Elkridge Crossing condominium apartments on U.S. 1, priced at $178,000 each; and four Elkridge Crossing garage townhouses at $204,000 each. Carbo said the housing winners were people employed by Howard County General Hospital, the county state's attorney's office, the National Institutes of Health, county schools, police, the state health department and Enterprise Community Partners.

Anne Arundel Medical Center officials have picked four largely residential projects as finalists for development of their 5-acre downtown Annapolis site, which residents and city leaders have anxiously watched since the hospital announced two years ago that it would move to Parole in 2001.The four proposals feature a mix of townhouses and single-family homes or condominiums and market-rent apartments. Three include plans for retail stores and one factors in office space.In three proposals, the hospital's 291,000-square-foot building is demolished, while the fourth involves major renovations of its interior and exterior to fit in residential units.

Construction workers grading a parking lot in Maryland City accidentally ruptured a six-inch gas main yesterday, forcing emergency workers to shut down Route 198 during the morning rush hour and evacuate about 30 people from a hotel and nearby townhouses.Anne Arundel County police closed Route 198 from Whiskey Bottom Road to Russett Green West and rerouted traffic around the gas leak onto local streets, causing delays of 2 1/2 hours.Three children at Maryland City Elementary School were treated for minor ailments -- a stomachache, a nosebleed and asthma -- that might have been related to the gas fumes, said Capt.

SMART GROWTH: Gov. Parris N. Glendening has been credited with coining the term (though it's unclear that he did). Vice President Al Gore has championed it. Everyone from the Sierra Club to homebuilders claim they're for it.But they don't all agree what constitutes Smart Growth.Here's our view of it:Smart Growth is the government weighing the long-term impact of investing in roads, schools and infrastructure.Smart Growth is not a one-size-fits-all building code, as Mr. Glendening proposes.

Joel and Melanie Goron had to feel satisfied after reading a notice posted by their builder, at The Preserve at Rocky Gorge, where the Gorons broke ground for a home in October."

The Howard County Council voted unanimously last night to deny an extension of sewer service to a proposed townhouse complex for senior citizens at the edge of rural western county.The 5-0 vote to approve a resolution reaffirming the county's desire to keep sewers out of the western county belied the soul-searching by several council members, who took pains to describe how carefully they examined the issue to be fair to developer Ahmad Bagheri."I've put more time into this bill than any other bill so far," said Guy Guzzone, a Laurel-Savage Democrat.

Some believe the future character of Ellicott City's Historic District has come down, with apologies to President Clinton, to what the meaning of "act" is.If "act" means one thing, 27 townhouses could be built off Fels Lane in Ellicott City, a stone's throw from Main Street with its historic buildings and the ever-present smell of eucalyptus. If "act" means another, those 27 townhouses will never exist other than on one hopeful developer's blueprints.Yesterday, Howard County Circuit Judge James B. Dudley listened to two lawyers argue for an hour the legal meaning of the verb "act" as it is used in a statute governing the activities of the county's Historic District Commission.

Sales of new homes in August in the Washington metropolitan area were virtually unchanged from August 1998, falling by 0.5 percent, according to the Meyers Group, a Washington firm that tracks new construction.Condominium sales were up 16.3 percent and townhouse sales were up 4.5 percent, while single- family-home sales fell 7.1 percent. Overall year-to-date sales remained up, 15.3 percent from last year.Average prices increased for all three home types in August: 0.78 percent for single-family homes ($265,932)

August new-home sales plummeted 17.21 percent in the Baltimore metropolitan area compared with August 1998, according to statistics released by the Meyers Group.Sales of single-family homes were down 7.67 percent in August and townhouse sales plunged 31.3 percent. But condominium sales fell only 1.19 percent.While the number of houses sold continued a slide that began in May, the average sales prices of single-family homes and townhouses were up 7.29 percent and 5.63 percent, respectively.

It's never been easy building new homes affordable to people with moderate incomes, but selling them - that's usually a snap. Which is why no one at a Baltimore nonprofit that finished eight townhouses in December expected they'd still be sitting empty today. Demand isn't the problem. It's the credit crunch. With home prices and apartment rents both falling nationwide, it might seem like a good time to get more people into residences that don't overwhelm their monthly budgets. But affordable-housing activists say the reality is just the opposite.

Two side-by-side townhouses that were once home to former Gov. William Donald Schaefer and his longtime companion, Hilda Mae Snoops, go on sale Thursday in Pasadena's Chestnut Hill Cove community. Schaefer has donated both properties to the Baltimore Community Foundation, which hopes to sell them and use the proceeds to help endow the William Donald Schaefer Civic Fund, the foundation announced Wednesday. The fund, created a year ago with Schaefer's leftover campaign funds, supports a program that awards neighborhood grants.

Howard County residents will have a baker's dozen more reduced-price homes to buy through October, including a new variety - three townhouses reserved for adults 55 and older. Until now, only rental apartments were offered to senior citizens under the county's Moderate Income Housing Unit program, which requires developers to include a small percentage of reduced-price homes among their market-rate units. At the 22-home Jones Station development north of Guilford Road in Jessup, three 2,480-square-foot townhouses that typically sell for $380,000 will be priced at $241,663 to qualified senior citizens.

The "ooohs" and "aaaahs" were noticeable as residents of Guilford Gardens, Howard County's public housing complex on Oakland Mills Road in Columbia, saw what could be their future. Instead of the drab, 28-year-old townhouses and apartments that make up their county-owned development, they saw color drawings and animated pictures of glitzy apartments and stylish-looking buildings adorned with amenities such as tennis courts, a swimming pool and a community center. Four private development partnerships are vying for the county's permission to redevelop and expand the rental community next to Guilford Elementary School into a mixed-income neighborhood.

A "work force" housing project of 99 townhouses and condominiums is slated to rise on a parking lot near the B&O Railroad Museum in Southwest Baltimore's Washington Village/Pigtown neighborhood. New City Partners, a Baltimore-based developer that targets neighborhoods in transition, is buying 2.5 acres in the 1100 block of James Street from the museum, which had used the surplus property occasionally for overflow parking. The developer is also planning to revitalize a block in the neighborhood's commercial district along Washington Boulevard.

In Kenneth Clark's Civilization, he describes the early invaders of the Roman Empire as "there for what they could get out of it, taking part in the administration if it paid them, contemptuous of the traditional culture, except insofar as it provided precious metals." The next wave of invaders didn't "destroy the great buildings that were scattered all over the Roman world. But the idea of keeping them up never entered their heads. ... They preferred to live in pre-fabs and let the old places fall down.

Near the crossroads of two state routes lies the unincorporated area named for John Elder, an early settler some 200 years ago. He wouldn't recognize it anymore: In the fast-growing region of southern Carroll County, Eldersburg has become the home of about 31,800 residents, with businesses and shopping centers along its main roads. But it's got a small-town feel, with a mix of older and newer homes, punctuated by occasional fields -- some sprouting corn, others with signs advising of development to come.

Many of the guests were developers with multimillion-dollar projects planned in Anne Arundel County. The price of admission was the state maximum for a campaign contribution: $4,000. And the host at Monday night's exclusive dinner at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront was County Executive John R. Leopold, who was swept into office pledging that developers would no longer be allowed "to drive public policy in the county." The event raised at least $100,000 for Leopold, who doesn't stand for re-election until 2010.

Fourteen families are getting ready to buy new, low-priced townhouses and condominiums, thanks to the latest Howard County moderate-income housing lottery. Thomas P. Carbo, deputy county housing director, said a lottery drawing last week awarded five new townhouses in Shipley's Grant on Route 108 near Snowden River Parkway, at $168,000 each; five Elkridge Crossing condominium apartments on U.S. 1, priced at $178,000 each; and four Elkridge Crossing garage townhouses at $204,000 each. Carbo said the housing winners were people employed by Howard County General Hospital, the county state's attorney's office, the National Institutes of Health, county schools, police, the state health department and Enterprise Community Partners.

Twelve moderate-income families are looking forward to buying new homes in two Howard County subdivisions, but county housing officials are looking for qualified buyers for 11 more townhouses and condominium apartments. More people may apply, starting next month, and the county will choose more buyers in August, according to Stacy Spann, the county housing director. Spann had scheduled a lottery Friday to choose buyers for 23 units in Shipley's Grant and Elkridge Crossing, two developments in the northeastern county, but only 12 of 216 families who applied were qualified for the drawing, he said.