Daniel P. Henson III, housing commissioner of the city of Baltimore and current punching bag for all who accuse him of wishing to bring back slavery, turns out to have a romantic heart.
He remembers his childhood with tenderness. He lived in the Poe Homes public housing project along Saratoga Street for six years. There was no money, but there was a sense of community. He wishes now to bring it back, with a newly approved plan requiring public housing residents to do community work as part of their lease requirement.
"I remember people looking out for other people's kids," Henson was saying yesterday, with flak still flying all about him. "People were involved. We need to get people out of their homes, functioning in the community. That's all I'm asking."
For this, we have expressions of outrage from those like Anna Warren, pictured on the front page of this newspaper over the weekend. She has lived in public housing for 35 years. On Friday, Warren seemed to be speaking for many public housing tenants when she told members of the city's Housing Authority to drop dead.
In a story by The Sun's JoAnna Daemmrich, Warren is quoted as declaring, "We're being treated like slaves, and we've got to do like you say, or we can't live there. You're telling us we ought to be getting down on our knees and saying we're thankful for living there."
To say such things is to misread both history and intentions. Slaves worked for those who owned them. Henson wants public housing residents to work for themselves. They're the ones who live where they live. He thinks community service can only make these places seem less like slums and more like communities.
For whatever it's worth, I agree. I have my own memories of public housing projects, having lived for four years on Abbott Court in the Latrobe Homes when I was growing up.
Like Henson, I have warm memories of public housing. But cleanliness isn't one of them. I remember trash everywhere, and too many people who didn't care. They figured they'd only be there for a little while. Thus, there was no emotional investment. If there's trash, if there are kids getting crazy, if there's grass that needs cutting -- let somebody else worry.
The day after the city's Housing Authority OK'd the community service plan, I went back to the old neighborhood. It looked like 40 years ago. There was trash everywhere, in courtyards and back yards, in the streets and on the sidewalk and some of it hanging from bare tree limbs.
A lot of the trash was just dumped next to big trash Dumpsters, as though folks knew where it was supposed to go but, having walked to the Dumpster, didn't think it was worth the effort to actually put it in.
And that's not all.
There were screen doors everywhere with the screens all gone. There was living room furniture lying on its back all over the street. Flocks of pigeons ate vagrant pieces of food from the areas near the trash bins, which people walked past and seemed to find nothing out of place.
"And I'm not just talking about trash," Henson said. "It's a function of caring about where you live, paying your rent but also getting involved. That's the other part of living here. Clean up around the Dumpster an hour a week, do some day care. You're gonna live here. There are no streets paved with gold any place, but let's do the best we can."
This sounds like slavery? When you have people working in their own communities, they've got an investment. They see somebody dumping trash after they've just cleaned up, they've got a reason to jump in that person's face.
This city has 30,000 adults living in 18,000 public housing units. About 86 percent of these residents are on some form of public assistance, from which 30 percent is taken for rent. The average rent is about $130 a month.
For this kind of money, it isn't required that you live in a slum. Some people just make it that way. Henson wants to break that mind-set. It isn't punishment, it's community productiveness.
"You know," he was saying yesterday, "I get 50 letters a week, minimum, from people complaining about where they live. They're complaining about their neighbors. If we don't get back to the point where we can count on neighbors, and they can count on us, then we're always gonna feel like victims."