Urban Development

County Executive James N. Robey will be host today of Howard's Employee Recognition Ceremony, to be held at 5:30 p.m. at Ten Oaks Ballroom in Clarksville. Colleagues, friends and family members are expected to attend. Dora Rivera, recently named the county's Employee of the Year, will be honored along with other county employees for outstanding performance and commitment to public service. Rivera works in the Department of Housing and Community Development's Grants Management Division, which helps clients obtain affordable housing.

Along a block of North Calvert Street, surrounded by crumbling and boarded-up rowhouses, homebuyers are shelling out $400,000 and more for luxury townhouses sprouting on the site of long-demolished buildings. At Clipper Mill in Hampden, residents are moving into a cluster of former industrial buildings converted to apartments and condominiums and are snapping up new townhouses. And in Owings Mills, bulldozers have just begun digging ground for a nearly 50-acre town center of homes, offices, shops, restaurants, a hotel, community college branch and public library.

Former hoops superstar Earvin "Magic" Johnson, whose dazzling playmaking earned him a spot in the NBA Hall of Fame, is bringing his latest game to Baltimore: Deal-making. Targeting projects in urban communities, Johnson's investment fund has put up most of the equity for Village Commons, a development that will bring 170 condominiums, stores, restaurants and parking structures to Charles Village. Johnson, who will be on hand for today's groundbreaking, said yesterday that urban neighborhoods crave coffeehouses, movie theaters and the kind of quality housing typically found in suburbs.

I'VE ALWAYS been fascinated by the way history connects events, and looking at this paper's account of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Baltimore visit of Oct. 30-31, 1964, it occurred to me how politics can bring unexpected consequences. The paper said it was an openly political mission. The 1964 presidential election was a couple of days away, and King was asking voters to cast ballots for Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate. Goldwater's unabashed right-wing politics were at odds with the growing progressivism of the 1960s.

Baltimore officials selected yesterday a team of developers known for suburban business parks and urban redesign to build a $32 million industrial complex on one of the biggest remaining parcels for redevelopment in the city. Baltimore Development Corp. chose Hollander Rock LLC to build a warehouse, distribution and manufacturing center over three years on 51 acres in Northeast Baltimore, site of the demolished Hollander Ridge public housing project. The new business park is expected to generate 462 jobs, according to BDC estimates.

WASHINGTON -- Baltimore is the epitome of the transit conundrum -- a place where transit is extensive and patronized but suffers deteriorating ridership. While Baltimore ranks eighth in the United States in total ridership, it has experienced a net loss of transit riders of 20 percent during the past 20 years. Among city residents, the decline during the 1990s was nearly 30 percent. Transit commuting continued to grow among suburbanites, but city residents are the primary market, so it is necessary to redouble urban development near transit lines.

David S. Cordish was supposed to be a lawyer. In the early years after graduating from the University of Maryland law school in 1963, Cordish toiled in Baltimore courtrooms, working for his father's Eutaw Street practice. But then a group of desperate investors persuaded Cordish to underwrite and manage their flailing Harford County retail project, and one of the nation's most-acclaimed developers emerged. When the Edgewood Shopping Center opened in the early 1970s - the first among dozens of strip malls that he would build and own - Cordish's future as a practicing attorney was effectively ended.

Eyeing a "major opportunity" for redevelopment, the city wants to acquire and raze a sprawling, nearly vacant subsidized apartment complex in West Baltimore and create a mixed-income community of hundreds of homes. The city's plans for the Uplands Apartments, off Edmondson Avenue near the Baltimore County line, are particularly significant because of the location of the complex amid stable middle- and upper-income neighborhoods, the size of the site and the number of units that would be demolished.

The Housing and Urban Development Department released a study last week, Discrimination in Metropolitan Housing Markets: Phase I, showing that housing discrimination nationwide against African-Americans and Hispanics seeking to buy a home is down more than 25 percent since 1989. For those seeking to rent a unit, housing discrimination against African-Americans is down 18 percent, but is unchanged for Hispanics. "These results illustrate that we are making efforts but there is still work to be done," said Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez.

THINK FOR a minute about the kind of neighborhood you would like to live in and why you would move there. There's a good chance your reasons will include convenience, style and amenities. Most of us wind up living in what urban experts call "a community of choice." Baltimore has a number of thriving communities of choice. With just a little financial help, some vision and - especially - energetic, committed neighbors, there can be many more. But if you relied on the media's view of Baltimore's 300-plus neighborhoods, you would think there were only two extremes: the upscale locales, such as Canton, Fells Point, Guilford and Roland Park, where housing values are on the rise, and the inner-city areas, where social and economic problems are so advanced the housing market is nonexistent and redevelopment requires massive subsidies.