The roiling controversy in eastern Baltimore County over the new federal Move to Opportunity subsidized housing program may seem new, but it isn't.
It's merely the latest expression of a hard-as-stone attitude -- often racially tinged -- that has been an open political sore in Baltimore County since the start of the white migration from Baltimore City in the late 1950s.
For 30 years, the fear among whites that the federal government might pay to help poor black people follow them to the suburbs created a distrust that drove eastern Baltimore County politics. And since eastern county politicians have virtually dominated county government since then, those attitudes have had powerful expression in county government policies.
In 1964, for example, County Executive Spiro T. Agnew, then considered a liberal Republican, sparked a furor by advocating urban renewal for Catonsville and Towson and a county housing code to attack blight. Beneath the "hysterical" opposition, according to Neal A. Brooks and Eric G. Rockel in their book, "A History of Baltimore County," was "a fear that urban renewal would bring unwanted public housing."
Mr. Agnew lost his battle, and was replaced in 1966 by conservative, eastside Democrats who campaigned on their promise to keep federal housing programs for the poor out of the county.
This year, those fears have gained strong new expression in the opposition to the Move to Opportunity (MTO) program, and local politicians are either trying to profit from it or are running for cover.
At a crowded church basement meeting in Dundalk on July 27, for example, James M. McKinney, a Democratic candidate for House of Delegates and until recently a staff aide to Republican County Executive Roger B. Hayden, tried to help himself and shield his former boss from political harm.
He told an angry anti-MTO crowd that he protested the program on Mr. Hayden's behalf and that the county executive has cut funds to the Community Assistance Network (CAN), the county's anti-poverty agency that has contracted to administer MTO. Robert Gajdys, director of CAN, said the program has not experienced any budget cuts related to the MTO program, however.
Mr. Hayden has complained that the county government was left out of planning for the MTO program, but he has not condemned or praised the program itself.
The irony is that the pilot program will likely have little impact on the county's east side, despite wild rumors to the contrary.
The federal Housing and Urban Development program will spend $12 million to move 285 families from poor inner-city neighborhoods to nicer areas that they choose in the city and the surrounding metropolitan counties starting this fall. Many families are expected to choose to stay in the city, close to their extended families, while others may go anywhere in the area, including Howard, Harford, Carroll and Anne Arundel counties.
Mr. Gajdys said recipients may not choose census tracts with more than a 10 percent poverty level, which excludes parts of Dundalk and Essex. He speculated, however, that very few, if any, will choose those communities anyway, because they might expect to face hostility there.
Residents in older eastern county areas, already worried about absentee landlords, drugs, unemployment and crime, don't believe that. They think they are primary targets for government experiments in what they regard as social engineering. They fear that talk about demolishing high-rise public housing in downtown Baltimore means that those residents could be moved en masse into their midst. They believe their economically depressed neighborhoods have been targeted to become new ghettos by well-paid, uncaring federal bureaucrats who live in wealthy suburbs far away.
Baltimore is one of five cities chosen for the MTO program nationwide, and only in eastern Baltimore County has there been a fuss.
Participants in the program will be divided into two groups, one that gets counseling and one that gets no support besides the rent subsidy, for a 10-year period. The hope is to break the cycle of poverty and defeat and encourage the children, if not the adults, to change the pattern of their lives.
The fear the program has aroused in the county is just the 1994 version of the protests that erupted exactly 30 years ago.
That fear is the reason Baltimore County, with a population nearly equal to Baltimore City's, has never built any public housing,and had no official home in county government for housing programs until 1987, when former executive Dennis F. Rasmussen created the Department of Community Development.
The lack of any government housing office in 1972, when the federal Section 8 program, which provides subsidies for low-income renters in private housing, began, resulted in the county awarding a contract to administer the program to a private Realtor -- a political crony of former County Executive Dale Anderson.
That lasted until 1981, when the state revoked the contract amid charges that the Realtor treated the program as his personal fiefdom, giving rent subsidies to relatives of his political patrons. In December 1981, the Realtor was indicted on 63 counts of misappropriating $187,723 in federal Section 8 money, and for perjury. The Realtor, the late Ross Diffenderffer, pleaded guilty to one count in early 1982.
The Diffenderffer case showed two ways the dominant eastside conservative Democratic political organization used the housing issue.
In public, politicians such as Mr. Anderson trumpeted the people's fears and railed against federal "low-cost" housing programs as a waste of tax funds and an affront to everybody who works for a living. Hostility was the rule then in city-county relations.
In private, they profited from those same federal programs by giving the fee-earning contracts to their own supporter, and then by watching as federal Section 8 certificates were awarded to their own relatives while others waited years. Mr. Anderson's niece, for example, got a subsidy certificate.
The issue of race was generally not addressed in public but was always lurking beneath the surface. One rare exception occurred at a September 1970 political rally in Rosedale, when several prominent white county politicians openly joked about blacks living in Dundalk's historic black enclave of Turners Station.
Wallace Williams, the Dundalk district county councilman, told the all-white crowd in Rosedale that night that "Dale Anderson and the rest of the team will continue to fight hard to stop any major government-subsidized programs with strings attached from coming into Baltimore County. And you know what I mean," he said twice to knowing nods from the audience.
He then said he had to leave early to go to Turners Station for some campaigning. "Those Dundalk people don't like me messin' around with Turners Station much," he said. "But I'm nice to them, and they're nice to me. . . . You know what I mean," he said to laughter.
County Council Chairman Harry Bartenfelder later joked to the crowd that instead of singing a song called "Snowbird," as he had in Rosedale, Mr. Williams should sing a version called "Blackbird" in Turners Station. The crowd laughed more.
For years during the 1970s, Baltimore County missed out on millions in federal Block Grant funds because it lacked the requisite urban renewal powers. Attempts to get those powers failed twice, in 1974 and 1979, during the administrations of County Executives Theodore G. Venetoulis and Donald P. Hutchinson.
And the current lopsided distribution of Section 8 recipients, with 30 percent in the northwestern county's heavily black areas and 35 percent in Essex, Rosedale, Middle River and Dundalk, reflects the county's failure to plan ahead and take an active role in the distribution of low-income housing.
Although times have changed and prevailing racial attitudes with them, the old ones keep popping up in the eastern county.
Republican House of Delegates candidate Stephen Xintas, an Essex bar owner, is spreading rumors about city project dwellers moving en masse to Essex if the city high-rises are demolished.
Another Republican delegate candidate, Michael J. Davis, has attacked County Councilman Vincent J. Gardina, D-5th, for participating in routine, procedural, unanimous County Council votes approving receipt of federal Section 8 funds for county residents already getting the subsidies. These votes have no connection to the MTO program.
Mr. Davis refuses to criticize Republican Rep. Helen Delich Bentley of Maryland's 2nd District, however, even though she voted directly to approve the MTO program.
Dundalk Del. Louis L. DePazzo, a candidate for County Council this year, told an anti-MTO crowd at a June 21 meeting at Chesapeake High School that city housing project dwellers "must be taught how to bathe and how not to steal." He's one of the several political candidates hoping to profit from the anti-MTO hysteria this election year.
Although Mr. DePazzo is careful to criticize only the alleged secrecy with which the program was planned, and not the program itself, he helped start the whole controversy by stirring up one of the primary opponents to the plan, Jerry Hersl of Rosedale.
That move may help him defeat his only opponent in the County Council race this year, Jean Jung. Ms. Jung is president of the board of directors of CAN, the group that has contracted to place half the 285 city families who will relocate under MTO.
Ms. Jung, a longtime Dundalk resident, former county deputy zoning commissioner and housing office administrator, said the issue of race is never far away in the campaign against the program. "It [race] is strongly present though never spoken in public," she said recently. The campaign against MTO, she said, "is a fear campaign, a campaign of problem making instead of problem solving."
Larry Carson covers Baltimore County government for The Baltimore Sun.