Moving vans line up along Fremont Avenue as the first residents take up housekeeping in a rowhouse cluster that has arisen from the rubble of one of Baltimore's much-maligned 1950s housing projects.
Newly quartered families -- several of whom lived in the Lexington Terrace or other battered apartment towers -- are putting up curtains in a new-as-wet-mortar neighborhood where a third of the residents (100 families) will own their homes, pay monthly mortgages and annual city taxes. The other two-thirds (203 apartment dwellers) will receive government assistance on their monthly rents.
These first nine families, who have moved in since December, are in the vanguard of an ex- panding category of city resident -- those who are investing in the much-changed world of government-funded housing, a sales category modeled off the private sector. Prices for these homes range from $43,000 to $65,000, but another $1,000 will buy you a working gas fireplace.
"The last two landlords we had were so bad I wanted to be my own landlord," said Andre Hill, an electric light fixture assembler who grew up in West Baltimore's Murphy Homes housing project and bought one of the 1,900-square-foot homes on Fremont Avenue with his wife, Delores.
When Hill left the settlement table, he found he was paying $452 a month -- $2 more than he had for an apartment off Frederick Avenue.
Unlike the 1950s-style housing projects where Hill spent his youth, the houses have no elevators to break down, long halls, chain-link fences or dreary balconies. Hill feels The Terraces are safer -- and not as crowded as the 40-year-old projects. Nothing here is higher than a three-story rowhouse.
By design, The Terraces is supposed to be more like a traditional Baltimore neighborhood, with a corner Rite Aid drugstore -- a new one at Saratoga Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard -- and churches nearby and lots of neighbors. New streets created within the neighborhood are named Cherry Blossom Way and Daisy Drive.
"I was there the day they swept the construction trash out of my old [high-rise] apartment," said Virginia Starke, a widow who raised her two sons and two daughters at the then-new Lexington Terrace beginning in 1959.
Starke experienced a clean and agreeable Lexington Terrace then. But it deteriorated, and she moved to Poe Homes, low-rise public housing on Saratoga Street near Fremont Avenue.
In December, she was the first to move into a trim new Fremont Avenue rowhouse. She has another first too -- this is the first time she's owned a home.
"I like this neighborhood and didn't want to move because of all the bus lines. I can go anywhere I need to," said Starke, a retired geriatric nursing home aide.
Starke likes the look of her new neighborhood and agreed with housing commissioner Daniel P. Henson III -- the man behind the local campaign against projects -- that warehousing people in tight quarters is no way to help them live.
"The old images of public housing hang on for a long time," said Ted Rouse, The Terraces' builder and a partner in the firm of Struever Bros., Eccles & Rouse. The Terraces' rental units will be supplied with a computer tied into a network so they can access the Internet.
'It is hard work'
This summer, more outdated high-rise public housing will fall. The city's Department of Housing and Community Development is moving ahead with plans to demolish West Baltimore's Murphy and Emerson Julian homes, beginning July 1. In these areas, the percentage of for-sale units will be increased -- to 90 percent of the homes planned along George Street and Myrtle Avenue -- alongside King Boulevard.
"It is hard work, very hard work," said Henson last week of the process of transforming the brownfields-like public housing sites into new neighborhoods.
Henson explained that when his agency pulls down an old high-rise, the site has to be reconstructed with underground conduits and utility lines that the public never sees.
"That's an expensive job," he said. The federal government pays most of the $90,000 cost of building a house. New roads, schools, site preparation, recreation and day care centers add to the bill. The price of The Terraces is $43 million (including a business center), spread over 19 acres.
The problems do not evaporate when townhouses, senior citizen apartments, schools and community centers are built, as the city did in 1997 at Pleasant View Gardens (former site of Lafayette Courts), adjacent to the main post office on Fayette Street in East Baltimore.
"I'm constantly mediating arguments between management and the residents. I'm having to remind the people this isn't the old Lafayette Courts," said Henson. He believes the higher percentage of homeownership at The Terraces will make the place more stable. Pleasant View has 10 percent sales and 90 percent rental.
National model
Henson, who grew up in West Baltimore, characterizes the city's experience with transforming its 1950s public housing as a national success model. Federal Housing and Urban Development officials regularly visit Pleasant View and The Terraces -- about 200 HUD employees visited the sites Friday. "Unlike the old high-rises, which were built as cheaply as possible, we are building communities that will last 100 years," Henson said.
The housing commissioner said he's learned several lessons from starting fresh on the road from public projects to single-family homes.
"If you don't work with the communities around the site, you'll make major mistakes. You'll fail. Community transformation is not something architects and engineers can plan," he said.
Pub Date: 3/25/99