Once again, a plan to house poor people in an area of relative affluence is roiling a Baltimore neighborhood.
At issue are 15 long-vacant rowhouses owned by the Housing Authority of Baltimore City in Butchers Hill, a steadily improving community north of Fells Point, where the asking price for some properties is upward of $200,000.
For the past several years, Butchers Hill residents have tried to persuade the housing authority to turn over the buildings to the community to rehab and sell at market-rate prices, arguing that such a move would help boost homeownership and secure the neighborhood's future.
But the public housing agency recently decided to transfer just two of the 15 properties to the Butchers Hill Community Development Corp. Of the remainder, two are to be set aside for public housing residents who qualify for homeownership under a special program and 11 will be fixed up and maintained by the agency as "scattered site" rental units -- at a cost of about $1 million.
Echoing a controversy that enveloped several northeast neighborhoods two years ago, the housing authority's decision has laid bare tensions that few in Butchers Hill, a diverse community of about 1,300 residents, thought existed.
'Divisiveness'
Those tensions were in full view at a recent and at times stormy community meeting. About 400 residents packed a school auditorium to confront Mayor Martin O'Malley and housing officials -- as well as each other -- on the issue.
One resident drew prolonged applause after criticizing the housing authority's "willful disregard for community concerns" and urging that it no longer manage property in the neighborhood; another raised the specter of race and class bias on the part of those wanting the houses to be sold at market rate; and some spoke in favor of the agency's position.
"I've never seen divisiveness like that in Butchers Hill," said Barry Glassman, past president of the Butchers Hill Association and head of the community development corporation.
The Butchers Hill properties are among 2,800 scattered site units the housing authority owns citywide, more than half of which are vacant and a significant source of blight in several city neighborhoods.
Housing Commissioner Paul T. Graziano said he wants to reduce the scattered site inventory to a more manageable 1,500 by demolishing some units and turning others over to community groups -- while trying to hold on to "a reasonable distribution" of public housing units in a variety of neighborhoods.
A decision by Graziano's predecessor in the fall of 2000 to purchase 10 vacant houses in northeast for public housing as part of a court decree was scuttled after hundreds of residents turned out to protest. It took until last summer for Graziano to unveil a new plan, involving fewer units and outside management.
Despite similarities in emotion, there are important differences between the situations in Northeast Baltimore and Butchers Hill.
In northeast, the housing authority was seeking to create new public housing units; in Butchers Hill, the agency is merely seeking to return to productive use properties it has owned for decades.
Also, in northeast residents felt -- correctly, census figures would later show -- that their neighborhoods were showing signs of distress; in Butchers Hill, everyone agrees the community is on the upswing.
Deriving its name from the 19th-century concentration of butchers who lived there, the average sales price of a home in the community has risen from $69,385 in 1998 to $115,313 last year. The neighborhood is 50 percent white and 40 percent black, with small concentrations of Hispanics, Asians and American Indians, according to Census 2000 data. The homeownership rate is 45 percent, slightly below the citywide average.
But perhaps the greatest difference between the situations is in the attitude of Mayor Martin O'Malley. In northeast, it was O'Malley who announced the city was withdrawing its plan, criticizing the court decree. In Butchers Hill, the mayor is firmly behind the housing authority, which has begun work on three properties.
"I can't shield any neighborhood from public housing without going to jail," O'Malley told the community meeting at Commodore John Rodgers Elementary School.
Acknowledging the "sensitivity" of the issue, the mayor promised, "You will not be inundated [with public housing]. ... You all are going in the right direction. I have no intention of screwing that up on my watch."
The housing authority and the mayor have an ally in a frequent adversary, Barbara A. Samuels, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit that led to a consent decree aimed at desegregating public housing.
Even when adding the 11 rowhouses to be renovated to the 19 occupied housing authority units in the neighborhood, Butchers Hill has far fewer public housing units than such predominantly poor and black neighborhoods as Sandtown-Winchester and Johnston Square, according to Samuels.
The Butchers Hill properties "are some of the few units that the housing authority has in a mixed-income community," Samuels said. "This is the type of housing we're trying to create more of, not sell off."
Bias suspected
Public housing tenants believe that the community's move to gain control of the properties is a form of bias.
"It's a way of keeping low-income residents out of the community," said Angela Copeland, a self-described "proud resident" of a scattered-site unit in Butchers Hill.
Annie Chambers, president of the scattered site tenants' group, agreed.
"To take a perfectly good house and sell it -- it's like this house is too good for poor people," said Chambers, who lives in a housing authority-owned rowhouse in Charles Village.
The decision to turn over two houses to the community was a show of "good faith," said Chambers, who signed off on the plan.
"We tried to work with them," she said. "If they don't want to work with us, fine and well."
Proponents of the community's purchase of the properties counter that there are issues of economics as well as equity.
Based on an estimated average sales price of $160,000 each, they calculate that the city would get $56,000 a year in additional property taxes if all the rowhouses were put back on the tax rolls.
"You need to consider the health of the whole city," said Andrew Gray, who criticized the housing authority at the community meeting. "It's bad to miss an opportunity for growing the tax base and growing homeownership."
Gray bought a three-story, HUD-foreclosed rowhouse on Baltimore Street for $12,000 in 1995. After investing tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of his own labor, the house is assessed at $96,430 -- and Gray figures he could get twice that if he wanted to sell it.
"A lot of people like me worked our tails off and a housing authority tenant gets a house -- that's fundamentally unfair," Gray said.
An online petition urging the housing authority to turn the properties over to the community on the Web site, www.neighborhoodsmatter.org, has drawn more than 100 signatories.
"This is a slap in the face to homeowners and renters alike who have worked hard to better our neighborhood," one petitioner wrote.
Some support for city
Not all Butchers Hill residents share those sentiments.
"Creating affordable housing in strong and stable neighborhoods is important," said Carolyn Boitnott, a resident and community activist. "We really need to find a way to bring neighborhoods together."
Tracy Gosson, a resident, said she is more concerned about privately owned blighted properties along East Fayette Street, on the northern border of Butchers Hill, than she is about the disposition of the housing authority-owned houses.
But Gosson and others said the agency's longstanding ownership of vacant buildings and neglect of many of its occupied units contributed to opposition.
"The problem is the city's past reputation as a property owner," said Gosson, who heads Live Baltimore Home Center, a nonprofit organization that promotes city living. "It's been pretty pathetic."
Graziano, appointed after the northeast debate, appreciates the feelings.
"There's no reason the properties should have been sitting vacant for a decade or more," he said.
Besides budgeting $1 million to renovate the properties for public housing residents, the agency has allocated several hundred thousand dollars to fix the exteriors of 19 rental units in Butchers Hill.
"I wish all landlords in that neighborhood would make comparable investments," he said.