SOME OLD-TIME Baltimoreans remember Edmondson Village as a west-side rowhouse development of 20,000 people that, with a splendid shopping center, presaged post-World War II suburbanization. Others recall how racial fears, fanned by blockbusters, led to panic and flight. Within a single decade ending in the late 1960s, the neighborhood changed from all-white to all-black.

Since then, quiet middle- and working-class life has continued on many well-maintained and stable side streets, even as Edmondson Avenue has deteriorated into a thoroughfare pockmarked by drug peddling and crime.

Recently, signs have been posted throughout Edmondson Village offering cash for houses. This has alarmed activists. They fear that real estate speculators, by repeating scare tactics of the blockbusting era, are trying to induce the heirs of longtime homeowners to dump the properties they no longer want.

"Very rarely do people get fair market value or full worth when people are trying to buy through these kinds of ads and phone numbers," warns Ken Strong, a city housing official who coordinates the Flipping and Predatory Lending Task Force.

With an aging homeowner base, Edmondson Village is vulnerable. Its community organizations should seek advice from their counterparts in Belair-Edison and the Neighborhoods of Greater Lauraville Inc., which have had some success with residential revitalization.

For a long time, speculators employed similar sign tactics in Belair-Edison, a racially changing northeast area that has only recently started to recover from years of destabilization. In some cases, such signs led to flipping, where investors bought houses cheap from fleeing whites and then quickly resold them to blacks at prices two to four times higher.

After a regulatory crackdown started three years ago, almost four dozen speculators, appraisers and mortgage company employees have been sentenced on various flipping charges. Meanwhile, many buyers, unable to handle the payments, have been forced into foreclosure.

No amount of regulatory oversight and enforcement is going to cure the situation, unless buyers and sellers pay more attention to what they are doing.

In an ordinary person's life, a real estate transaction is among the biggest investment decisions of a lifetime. That's why one should approach it with more seriousness than going to a dollar store for a bargain. Know what you are doing and with whom you are dealing. That's the best way to avoid scams.