Eric Hartley from Capital on Public Housing (good read)

Taken from the Capital, March 23 

For decades, Annapolis leaders have mostly talked around the edges of the city’s public housing problem, never really asking, let alone answering, the toughest questions.

That might be starting to change.Some people are talking about a radical solution: spreading subsidized housing throughout the city, rather than concentrating it in designated neighborhoods.

There are a million questions to be answered about how it could happen. But the best argument for such an approach might be the simplest one: Nothing else has worked.

“We’ve got people on reservations of poverty and crime. We need to stop it,” Alderman Sam Shropshire, D-Ward 7, said last week.

Mostly occupied by hard-working, law-abiding people, Annapolis’ 1,104 public housing units are nonetheless plagued by open-air drug markets and the resulting violence.

When there’s a homicide – like last week’s shooting of a 17-year-old boy in Robinwood – there’s an immediate response. Police trumpet a few low-level drug arrests, like the teens rounded up in Robinwood four days after the slaying. (Of course, officially at least, the raid and the shooting were unrelated.)

People toss around ideas like surveillance cameras, license plate scanners or a curfew. Politicians solemnly “crack down” with programs with catchy names like HotSpots and C-SAFE, both statewide initiatives, and the new Annapolis-specific Capital City Safe Streets Coalition.

The police are doing their best at an impossible job, and the politicians are well-intentioned. Give them credit for trying, and let’s hope the new federal-state-local partnership has positive effects. But it won’t be enough.

Alderwoman Julie Stankivic, an independent whose Ward 6 includes many public housing neighborhoods and was the backdrop to all four homicides so far this year, agreed that the city can’t continue clustering its poorest people in enclaves. And she said the big ideas for change have been ignored for too long.

Would this change solve all the city’s problems? No. The same underlying problems of family and educational dysfunction that lead to poverty, drug abuse and crime will still be present and have no easy solutions.

Ending the isolation of the poor won’t eliminate crime. But it could largely eliminate the open-air drug markets that lead to the worst violence.

The cold, hard truth is that open-air drug markets wouldn’t be tolerated for an hour in Murray Hill or Admiral Heights. But they’ve existed for decades in public housing, where residents have little political pull.

It’s not an accident that Mr. Shropshire uses the word “reservations.” It’s easier to look the other way when you can feel safely isolated. Too few middle-class and wealthy people in Annapolis see violent crime as their problem.

Sandra Newman, a Johns Hopkins University professor who has studied public housing, said many cities have experimented with such income mixing, in very different ways. She said there has been little research, though a study in Baltimore showed some increase in property crime, but no increase in violence, after poor people were moved into a “low-poverty” neighborhood.

The idea would likely meet resistance from both sides in Annapolis. Public housing residents would feel they’re being uprooted from communities and cry gentrification, while the mostly white residents in the rest of the city would fear that a criminal element was being transplanted in their midst.

Even though the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban development oversees the Annapolis Housing Authority, the city could force changes if it pushed hard enough. For now, the housing authority is wary of such sweeping change.

Executive Director Eric Brown said he’s committed to fundamental reform – renovating the aging housing stock and urging private ownership. He hopes a pilot program will lead to as many as 50 private owners in the Clay Street area in the next four years.

But he said it’s not realistic to spread public housing residents throughout the city, partly because there’s so little affordable housing elsewhere in Annapolis in which to put them.

But consider today’s housing prices, and then consider the land and homes owned by the housing authority in Eastport, downtown and elsewhere. What would the land under those 1,104 units fetch at market rates? The mind boggles.

Some of that money could put residents elsewhere, and the communities could be rebuilt – as in other cities – with a mix of subsidized housing and market-rate homes.

Mr. Brown hit the nail on the head when he acknowledged after some prodding: “In a financial sense we could probably make it work. The practical and political reality, that’s another thing.”

Everyone knows things need to change, but no one in power stands to gain politically from the kind of real change that’s needed. So who will take the lead on a problem no one wants? Who has the political capital and the will?

That – not plastic bags and the Market House – should be the central issue of next year’s mayoral race.

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Posted in September 2007