Mary Holmes has seen the best and worst of public housing.
People treated her like family when she moved into the George B. Murphy Homes a quarter-century ago. And she became a mother figure to the neighborhood. It was a comfortable role for Holmes, mother of 12, grandmother of 31, great-grandmother of 41.
Over the years, she endured the terrible changes crime and poverty brought to Murphy Homes. She watched the project change from a neighborly place where children went trick-or-treating and residents set up their stereos for impromptu "block parties," to a violent place nicknamed "Murder Homes."
Now Holmes, 73, is witnessing another change in public housing.
The old project along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is gone, the land cleared of the 14-story towers where children played "drug dealer" and squatters turned empty apartments into shooting galleries. Construction crews still swarm over the 32-acre site, building a $63 million, 260-unit townhouse complex called Heritage Crossing.
Officials marked their progress last month with an open house celebration. Three families have moved in so far, slightly more than a year after construction began.
Paid for with public and private dollars, Heritage Crossing is part of the large-scale, nationwide federal effort Hope VI, Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere. The goal was to tear down and replace the nation's worst public housing. Baltimore has been a leader, the first city to demolish all of its high-rise projects.
Six were torn down. Heritage is the third to be built. The intention, in each case, is to create new, mixed-income neighborhoods that look and feel like middle-class communities.
"Hope VI? It brought this here," Holmes said one afternoon as she surveyed the site, alive with skip loaders, bulldozers and dump trucks. "It had to happen, and God knew it. He knew we needed a decent place for our people to stay."
To gauge the success of Hope VI - and the potential of Heritage Crossing - look no further than Pleasant View Gardens in East Baltimore or the Townes at the Terraces in West Baltimore, the city's first two Hope VI communities.
Neat rows of townhouses have replaced Lafayette Courts and Lexington Terrace, public high-rise housing projects that were as notorious as Murphy Homes.
They are filled today with people like Andrea Jackson, who finds strength and pride on a street named New Hope Circle; former renters such as Andre and Betty Eldridge, who bought themselves a piece of the American Dream, complete with porch and back yard.
"It was unbelievable," Jackson said of her first look inside one of the new homes at Pleasant View. "I was like, 'We're going to actually have nice houses.' 'Cause in my mind the nice houses are all in the county."
As nice as the new developments are to residents such as Jackson, they fall far short of meeting the needs of poor people in the city. Many who once lived in the decayed high-rises have been effectively excluded from the new communities and find themselves in deficient housing in bad neighborhoods.
Although the six public housing complexes razed since August 1995 had more than 4,000 units, their replacements will provide fewer than 2,000 - and only about half will be purely public housing. The rest will be owner-occupied townhouses and market-rate rentals beyond the means of former tenants.
"I think that [Hope VI] was hijacked and turned into a program to primarily provide cities with monies for urban renewal," said Barbara Samuels, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in Maryland.
Pleasant View was completed in the fall of 1997. Two years later, the first residents moved into the Terraces. In addition to Heritage Crossing, new communities will replace Broadway Homes, Flag House Courts and Hollander Ridge. All projects in the $426 million program should be completed in the next three or four years.
For those fortunate enough to have found homes in Pleasant View and the Terraces, life is much better, much safer than in the violent days of the high-rises.
The Terraces
The change in landscape along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is so striking, so complete, it is hard to remember the forbidding towers of Lexington Terrace that once stood there on the west side of downtown.
Gone are the trash-strewn, claustrophobic streets. Now the streets are clean and quiet. Two-story rowhouses give the area a simple, standard Baltimore look, though white picket fences adorn some porches.
Across West Saratoga Street, the Parren J. Mitchell business park, housing a Rite-Aid, offices and headquarters for the housing authority police, completes the neighborhood.
Andre Eldridge, 43, and his wife, Betty, 45, bought their home at the Terraces three years ago. They had been living in Cedonia in East Baltimore in a one-bedroom apartment that cost them $409 a month.
Betty Eldridge had dreamed of owning a home in a decent neighborhood, after having lived in public housing and Section 8 subsidized housing, and having spent 13 years in apartments.
One day her husband saw the new, reasonably priced homes being built along the west side of MLK Boulevard.
Their pride in their $72,000 home is evident: They have shellacked the front porch, fenced in rose bushes in the front yard, decorated their kitchen and master bedroom walls with flowery borders and bought patio furniture for their deck.
"You come in and you don't hear people walking over top of your head," said Betty Eldridge, a meat wrapper and cashier for the Food Depot on Belair Road.
"You don't hear loud music playing all night long. When I would leave out of my apartment, I'd have to step over people sitting on the steps smoking blunts, people who didn't even live there. Now I have my own yard, my own little patio. I can sit on my front porch. I can paint my house like I want to."
She enjoys many of the features Hope VI was meant to provide first-time homeowners. But there is a dire lack of neighborhood amenities near the 17-acre development.
Built by Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse with a design that incorporated the city's existing street grid, the Terraces is a short walk from the University of Maryland Medical System. But while there is a Rite-Aid across Saratoga Street, that's not the same as having a Giant supermarket, or even a Sav-a-Lot, in your midst.
Other problems have aggravated residents.
There's an empty lot where the community's heart should be. Plans for a school and recreation center to replace the old Lexington Terrace Elementary-Middle School have been delayed. For now, the community that replaced the Lexington Terrace housing project has a few empty acres of fenced-off grass and a bruised ego.
Another, perhaps more painful issue, was especially evident during monthly tenant council meetings last fall.
There was "division between the renters and the homeowners," said Betty Eldridge, and with it the attendant suspicion about income and class.
Homeowners were claiming everything was geared toward the renters, some of whom, they say, don't keep up their property. Renters were saying the homeowners "look down" on them and have forgotten that the Terraces wouldn't exist if the old neighborhood had not been razed. It is a stinging truth and is at the heart of any debate over Hope VI.
Eldridge found the accusations and finger-pointing troubling and unnecessary.
"I used to live in public housing, in Latrobe Homes," she said. "I feel that we are all the same."
A similar suspicion between homeowners and renters was common during the early days at Pleasant View Gardens, but it has been overcome by time and a sense of cooperation.
Paul T. Graziano, city housing commissioner, said he was confident that relations would improve.
"Change is always difficult. Anything that changes to varying degrees is stress inducing," he said. "I'm sure that with further dialogue it will be resolved."
Andre Eldridge has been more disturbed by certain quality-of-life issues. Sometimes he has thought about packing up and leaving the brand new home he found for his wife, the home near work and family, the home where they decided to build a future. Though crime has dropped significantly since the wild days of Lexington Terrace, petty crime continues.
Eldridge, block captain of Benjamin Quarles Place, where he and his wife live, said he would consider moving if he got offered enough money.
But he knows his wife won't hear of it.
"I'm still happy here," Betty Eldridge said. "I love my little house. It's nice and comfortable. All we need is something for the kids. That's the main thing. I remember being a kid, and I had somewhere to go.
"They need to build the recreation center for the kids. They're just playing up and down in the little alley. They need an outlet, something to keep them out of trouble."
Pleasant View
"If you would have told me in 1979 that this would be a nice townhouse community, I would have laughed in your face," Detective Sgt. Anthony Bickauskas, 47, said one afternoon in police headquarters as he recalled the 20 years he spent patrolling Lafayette Courts. "It wasn't exactly a park-like atmosphere."
Pleasant View Gardens, nearly 5 years old now, is built on the site of what was once a battleground for rival drug gangs led by Maurice D. "Peanut" King and Anthony Grandison.
Former tenants remember the project with their own brand of dark humor. They joke about the broken elevators and the poor living conditions the way veterans might laugh over shared war stories.
Andrea Jackson, 33, couldn't wait to get out of Lafayette Courts, and nothing city officials said could interest her in the new development that would replace her old home.
"I moved to Cherry Hill with the intent that I was not coming back. My belief was that it would be the same thing," said Jackson. "I thought that maybe the people were going to tear up the houses and it wasn't going to stay nice like people wanted it."
She and her two children were one of the first families to leave the aging East Baltimore public housing complex, the largest in the nation outside of Chicago. In August 1995, demolition crews used nearly 1,000 pounds of explosives to level its six towers in about 20 seconds.
Jackson watched the construction of the 21.5-acre, $93 million development from the window of the No. 23 bus that carried her to and from work. She ignored the letters inviting her to visit the future Pleasant View Gardens. After all, she had made up her mind. She was not going back.
But after the third or fourth letter, curiosity got the best of her. She toured the new houses.
"When I went inside I was like, 'Oooh, a big front room, and there was a big kitchen and a breakfast window, and out the back door I had a big yard,'" said Jackson, a secretary at one of the complex's social service agencies who pays about $400 in rent for her home.
A new townhouse was more than many could imagine.
Patricia Brightful, 54, smiles whenever she recalls the new floors shining from wax and polish.
"When I first looked at that house I thought, 'Oh, my God. This is beautiful,'" she said. "It just was and it still is beautiful to live down here."
Earlene Carpenter, 41, said she cried about "going to someplace new and fresh and clean." It was glorious and wonderful to be the first ones to move into a home that even had a powder room on the first floor. "That made you feel 'county,'" she said.
At the 110-unit senior citizen apartments that are part of the development, Thomas Dennis, 65, has patrolled the building's grounds and hallways like a cop walking a neighborhood beat.
Leaning on his walker, he would keep an eye out for illegally parked cars or signs that a tenant's younger relative is overstaying a welcome.
So far, Dennis and other residents have met the challenge of maintaining a safe, stable neighborhood. There also are programs that promote volunteerism and community support.
The renters, all of them former public housing residents, point to the lease as a key reason why Pleasant View remains a good place to live.
Like many, Jackson chafed against the rules laying out who could stay in your apartment, how loud you could play your music, what your children could and could not do.
She has since embraced the lease as indispensable to life on New Hope Circle, a quarter-mile of asphalt that loops around a central plaza and ends in the 200 block of Aisquith St. It is a street of trimmed lawns and tidy townhouses, the kind found in suburban subdivisions and trendy urban developments.
"I don't even say I live in Pleasant View Gardens," said Jackson, who is divorced. "I just say I live on New Hope Circle."
She can go on at length about what the street's name means to her, how it symbolizes "a new hope for new people." She sounds so hopeful and smiles so warmly you wonder whether she's sincere or just repeating lines from a brochure. Then she tells the story of her odyssey before she arrived at Pleasant View Gardens.
She was robbed one night in a rough part of West Baltimore while on her way home from work. She lived in a house where every time it rained the kitchen floor would swell over the spot where a previous tenant dropped dead. At Lafayette Courts, drug dealers, gun boys and folks who plain didn't care made the housing project an often violent and unforgiving place to raise a family.
Life on New Hope Circle will never be like that, said Jackson.
"Nobody is going to let that happen; the renters, the homeowners, nobody, because that's what we're trying to get away from," she said. "We don't want it to go back to how it was when the buildings were here. ... Nobody wants all that mess. People want to live happy."
In addition to its townhouses, Pleasant View also has a day care center open to tenants and downtown office workers. With room for about 70 children, the center is a safe, convenient, inexpensive place for people to leave their children.
The heart of Pleasant View is its recreation center. It is the community's meeting ground and for much of last year was home to Freedom Missionary Community Church. The Rev. Charles Dunn, who lived in the Lafayette Courts in the early 1960s, said his congregation worked out a deal with the tenant council that allowed them to stay until Freedom Missionary found a new home.
The church held outdoor services, gave away food baskets and joined in on the summer block party. "It worked out really good for both of us," said Dunn.
For Jackson, life at Pleasant View Gardens has meant a new start. She said there had been so much drama before, violence and just plain bad luck. Now she can enjoy the simple things many take for granted: a quiet street, a view of trees and benches, a patch of grass where she can have a backyard barbecue.
"I wouldn't say that we are lucky. I would say that we are all blessed," she said. "It's just great to be able to say, 'Well, I can just walk in and don't worry about security. I can just put my key in the door and just walk in.'"
Heritage Crossing
Like Jackson, Mary Holmes wasn't interested in the new development that government officials promised to build on the site of Murphy Homes, demolished by 375 pounds of dynamite on July 3, 1999. Holmes changed her mind after seeing what replaced Lafayette Courts on the east side of downtown.
"When I went to Pleasant View, it looked so good," she said.
Heritage Crossing will have a recognizable community center, a park around the old Perkins Square gazebo and fountain. The resident mix will be completely different from the other two developments. Only 75 of the 260 townhouses will be for public housing tenants. The rest will go to anyone who can afford the $70,750 to $99,000 asking price. That doesn't upset Holmes, who moved to McCulloh homes when Murphy was vacated.
"If you're on welfare and you want a house, then get you a job and get off welfare and buy you a house," said Holmes, a former laundress who grew up in rural Mecklenburg County, Va., during the Great Depression. "[They're] not supposed to make it easy for us. We got to work and get our own."
Even though the neighborhood immediately north and west of Heritage Crossing remains unchanged with vacant houses just a block away, Holmes is keeping her attention on the new community that will be her home.
"It's going to be beautiful," she said. "I'll be back. I said at first I wasn't, but I'm coming back."