Vacant Houses

When then-Mayor Martin O'Malley initiated an ambitious effort to take control of 5,000 vacant houses in Baltimore in 2002, the program was touted as a sweeping attack on blight and a targeted way to redevelop neighborhoods. The goal to acquire the properties within two years turned out to be unrealistic, and five years later the program hasn't entirely delivered on its promise. Moreover, the city attempted to take on only a fraction of the estimated 40,000 vacant houses that pockmark Baltimore neighborhoods.

City Council president candidate Michael Sarbanes proposed a neighborhood revitalization program yesterday that would use congregations to reclaim abandoned properties around their churches. Dubbed "Dollar Houses for Safe Streets," the proposal would have the city acquire and then sell its vacant properties for a dollar or reduced prices to nonprofit entities working with religious congregations, or to people willing to fix and maintain them and live there. A $100 million bond issue would finance the program, said Sarbanes.

The city should continue to demolish vacant houses while it improves communication with neighborhoods where the practice is occurring, Baltimore residents argued yesterday in a packed City Council hearing.About 75 residents crowded council chambers to speak on a council resolution introduced two weeks ago asking Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke to stop toppling vacant city houses. The resolution received unanimous council support.The housing committee will move the resolution to the council in the next two weeks for a final vote on whether to send it to Schmoke.

Nathan Moore's feet are falling apart. Racked by a rare orthopedic disorder, the 52 tiny bones that carried him across the frozen ground of Korea and the sizzling tarmac of an air base in Vietnam are separating inside his shoes.At 67 years old, the retired Air Force master sergeant can barely carry a bag of groceries -- much less climb a ladder to fix a slumping corner rowhouse he owns on Chase Street."I'm done," he says wistfully. "I'm not half the man I used to be."Three heart attacks and a stroke haven't helped.

With three months remaining to Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's tenure, the Baltimore City Council is taking steps to halt one of his key housing initiatives and legacies: demolition of abandoned housing.Councilman Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr. of West Baltimore has introduced a resolution -- unanimously supported by the 19-member council -- calling for the city to suspend demolition of abandoned homes because of rising complaints over the empty lots left behind.Council members campaigning over the summer received complaints from numerous residents across the city who are seeing the vacant lots become weed-filled eyesores and trash dumps, Mitchell said.

A Baltimore Circuit Court judge sealed all court records yesterday in a $500,000 wrongful eviction lawsuit brought by two former tenants of George A. Dangerfield Jr., a 29-year-old convicted drug dealer who owns more than 125 rental houses in the city.Judge Bonita J. Dancy issued a gag order requested by Dangerfield's lawyers, barring the parties from talking about the case in public. She then took the unusual step of sealing all court records, including tape recordings of yesterday's hearing.

For almost three years, neighbors have watched the rowhouses in the 400 block of N. Madeira St. in East Baltimore decay into dens of drug trafficking and attack-dog training.From their windows, many see young men storming through the trash-cluttered houses, children playing among shattered beer bottles and wall fixtures, and dogs killing cats for sport.Relief might be on the way. The Housing Authority of Baltimore City announced Wednesday that the houses could be razed within a few weeks.

Plan to seize homes must be improved to protect innocentContrary to your article "City asks for right to seize house" (March 19), the American Civil Liberties Union testified in support of a bill that would give the city a fast-track process to take vacant houses from irresponsible owners who don't pay taxes and leave them to fall into ruin. We joined other witnesses in suggesting amendments that would improve the bill.Like many in the community, we are concerned about the impact the bill would have on homeowners who live next to vacant houses, typically retired people who have lived in their homes for decades.

SPACE-AGE technology is coming to Baltimore's slums now that the city is starting to seal some of its worst abandoned properties with rented polycarbonate metal planks to deter both criminals and vandals.The plan to rotate the security devices among the "top 10" most problematic abandoned properties is a stop-gap measure and a publicity stunt.It shows how unsuccessful officials have been in coping with Baltimore's roughly 40,000 vacant houses. An estimated 11,000 of them are abandoned, vandalized and open to casual entry.

It's a half-million-dollar monument to government waste on wheels.Nearly a year after the city bought a $555,515 crane in a rush to crush vacant houses, the gleaming Link Belt squats idle on a hill.The city can't find anyone to run it. So for the past nine months, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's administration has paid tens of thousands of dollars renting cranes from private companies to do the Link Belt's work.Heralded as the newest weapon in Baltimore's attack on blighted housing, the crane has become a vivid symbol of the city's misfires.

It might be the biggest cover-up in Baltimore. And the most unsuccessful. For decades, the hollow shells of vacant rowhouses have served as the most visible and poignant reminder of city blight, a "Welcome" sign to addicts, dealers and criminals. The 16,400 abandoned buildings mar the landscape, their sagging brick and Formstone walls outnumbering livable and lived-in homes on blocks throughout the city. Tired residents and overwhelmed city officials - stymied by delayed court hearings, held up by lengthy foreclosure proceedings, frustrated by absent and uncaring owners, hampered by urban scavengers and waylaid by a plodding bureaucracy - have struggled to find innovative ways to make the boarded-up homes look palatable.

The neighbors knew Ricardo Paige as "Pops," a kind man who lived and worked as a handyman in the Pen Lucy neighborhood renovating vacant houses for landlords. But Paige, police and prosecutors believe, unknowingly crossed the wrong people in the neighborhood. Authorities believe that drug dealers who used vacant houses on the block thought Paige might have turned over a drug stash to police. On March 20, 2007, they confronted him in the house where he was living and working, in the 500 block of E. 43rd St., and shot him six times, including once in the mouth.

An urban oasis is rising from the rubble of vacant rowhouses in East Baltimore. Cherry trees and dogwoods have been staked into new dirt. Beds of sedum, rose, sage and yarrow have been planted. Wood-chip walkways wind through lots neighbors once feared to enter. Hard against the old stone wall of Green Mount Cemetery, two new gardens are part of a movement by Oliver residents to reclaim their neighborhood. They got police to clear drug dealers from a courtyard, and neighbors now gather there for lunch.

The few residents who were left living in the 2800 block of W. Lanvale St. last month coped with bullets flying in broad daylight, as Baltimore police exchanged gunfire with a gang member who had shot and wounded a fellow officer. Yesterday, residents and others gathered for the latest spectacle on this West Baltimore block: the demolition of several vacant houses - a move by the city that many people said was long overdue, pointing to the danger posed by crime and rats. Dozens watched and some clapped as a large excavator tore through a dilapidated brick duplex with its steel shovel.

When then-Mayor Martin O'Malley initiated an ambitious effort to take control of 5,000 vacant houses in Baltimore in 2002, the program was touted as a sweeping attack on blight and a targeted way to redevelop neighborhoods. The goal to acquire the properties within two years turned out to be unrealistic, and five years later the program hasn't entirely delivered on its promise. Moreover, the city attempted to take on only a fraction of the estimated 40,000 vacant houses that pockmark Baltimore neighborhoods.

City Council president candidate Michael Sarbanes proposed a neighborhood revitalization program yesterday that would use congregations to reclaim abandoned properties around their churches. Dubbed "Dollar Houses for Safe Streets," the proposal would have the city acquire and then sell its vacant properties for a dollar or reduced prices to nonprofit entities working with religious congregations, or to people willing to fix and maintain them and live there. A $100 million bond issue would finance the program, said Sarbanes.

The bill passed Monday by Baltimore's City Council that will require developers to include a percentage of affordable housing units in new developments is a welcome strategy to provide more opportunities for low-income residents to remain in the city. Similar policies have been successfully implemented in Montgomery and other counties. This major step forward should work in Baltimore - so long as it dovetails with the city's efforts to convert vacant houses into viable places to live. Like many surrounding areas, Baltimore's housing prices have climbed significantly in recent years.

I NEVER thought I'd read that city planners would propose turning the city's schools headquarters into an apartment house, but then I never thought that the kind of people with the money to pay the rents envisioned would want to live at Calvert and North. But five decades of observing Baltimore have taught me not to be surprised. And, if I had any ability to predict the upward swings of Baltimore real estate, I'd have bought the houses in Federal Hill my brother suggested nearly 30 years ago. I'll give the city's Planning Department credit for a bold, pre-emptive assertion that the North Avenue building, which I persist in calling Old Poly (for Polytechnic Institute, where my namesake uncle was a graduate)

When Chad Wright first saw the three-story, 19th-century rowhouse on Madison Avenue in Reservoir Hill, he fell in love with it, even though it was infested with termites and had a tree growing through the back wall. The house had been vacant for years, but that didn't dissuade him. "I saw the potential," said Wright, 26, who bought the rowhouse for $25,000. His settlement was in April 2004, and he began work on the house the next weekend. Almost a year and $200,000 later, he is in the final stages of the rehabilitation, which he has done mostly in his spare time while he worked by day designing sprinkler systems for Livingston Fire Protection.

The city's housing department has launched an aggressive citywide effort to force owners of approximately 6,000 vacant houses on stable streets to sell or repair their properties - or else. Vacant housing has long been one of Baltimore's most intractable problems and a blight that deters private investment in some city neighborhoods, especially when boarded-up properties are peppered along otherwise healthy blocks. "These vacant houses are like a cancer on the block," said Eric Booker, the department's chief of housing inspections.