In the spring of 2004, Ike Neal moved his family of five from a bullet-riddled East Baltimore public housing project to a peaceful block of upscale Mount Washington. The move—though just five miles from one side of Baltimore to the other—was like trekking from a war zone to a virtual heaven, as far as Neal is concerned. The children no longer heed a standing order to "hit the floor" at the sound of gunfire and, as Neal's wife, Veronica, puts it, "We have oxygen!"
   
Their new home is much more than just a tidy house on a safe street. It is actually part of the Housing Authority of Baltimore City's network of public housing units that offer federally subsidized rent.
  
 The Neals consider themselves lucky. There aren't too many low-income tenants who get to choose their neighborhood—choice being a luxury few poor people in this city can afford. With median housing prices jumping 108 percent from 2000 to 2006 (from $65,000 to $135,000), Baltimore appears to be on the verge of its most dire housing crisis in decades.
   
Despite the desperate need for affordable housing, today the city has a stock of 42,000 vacant housing units (with 17,000 abandoned structures) and forty percent of city tenants live in substandard housing. 2000 Census figures showed one-quarter of Baltimore families earning less than $15,000 a year.
   
But help may be on the way.
   
Two groups—the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Citizens Planning and Housing Association (CPHA)—have stepped forward with strategies that they say will give more families the opportunity to live in racially and economically diverse communities of their choice.
   
Both the ACLU and the CPHA have put forth plans for integrating poorer families into a diverse network of neighborhoods with better schools, jobs, and transportation. These are not solutions for the politically conservative or those uncomfortable with racially and economically integrated neighborhoods. Rather, they provide solutions that strive to make this town a place where the operable word is "inclusive" not "exclusive."
   
"Mobility is empowering," says ACLU lawyer Barbara Samuels. "Especially a decision by a parent to make a voluntary move to a new neighborhood to provide a better life for his or her family." Samuels has spent the last decade in court trying to desegregate the deep pockets of poverty in Baltimore, pockets that are growing as gentrifying city neighborhoods become increasingly polarized from the poorer ones. With prices of once working-class homes soaring, the underbelly of the city's renaissance has regressed in poverty-stricken communities—almost exclusively occupied by poor African Americans.
  
 Earlier this year, Michelle Robinson, a former city resident who lived in a impoverished, drug-ridden neighborhood, testified in federal court as part of the lawsuit that Samuels helped file for the ACLU. A judge had already ruled in 2005 that the federal government had erred by segregating poor African Americans in public housing projects in only a few parts of the city while failing to consider regional approaches to provide housing opportunities. Now the case is in its "remedy" phase, as the ACLU asks the judge to correct the mistakes of the past by ordering federal housing officials to help 6,750 families move to suburban areas over the next ten years.
   
Robinson is one of the few who has already moved (with the help of the ACLU) from Park Heights to Columbia with a federal rent voucher.
   
On the witness stand, she called the homes in the neighborhood she left behind "abandominiums."
   
Surprisingly, the city actually spent tens of millions of federal dollars just twenty years ago on housing and commercial revitalization in dozens of communities like the Park Heights neighborhood in the northwest and Poppleton just west of downtown. The Housing Authority of Baltimore City once renovated 2,800 rowhouses as public housing units—often the most sought after houses on their struggling blocks. But today, fewer than 1,000 remain due to poor management and vandalism. 
   
Compounding the management problem was the little-reported fact that between 1998 and 2002, the Housing Authority of Baltimore City was so inept that it was forced to return $117 million in federal housing vouchers for poor tenants, according to federal audits. Its reputation for paying landlords late—or overpaying them—prompted some reputable property owners to drop out of the subsidy program altogether.
   
Though the housing authority has cleaned up its act (getting a clean bill of health from the federal government earlier this year), it was too late for many of the 15,000 Baltimore families who had been languishing on the waiting list for housing subsidies all those years. Today, the housing authority reports that there are approximately 8,000 families on the public housing waiting list and 5,000 on the waiting list for the Housing Choice Voucher Program (also known as Section 8 housing).
   
This July, a city-council-appointed task force issued a comprehensive report to the council tackling the city's entrenched housing affordability problems from many angles, including the use of zoning and tax laws. The fifty-eight-page report is called At Home in Baltimore: A Plan for an Inclusive City of Neighborhoods. The task force was chaired by Michael Sarbanes, executive director of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association, a city nonprofit group that has been helping Baltimore neighborhoods for more than sixty years.
   
"Where there is high opportunity, there is no affordability, and where there is affordability, there is no opportunity," Sarbanes told a conference of housing advocates several months ago.
   
Though the task force report is limited to city remedies, Sarbanes' CPHA is also studying the problem regionally and has found, not surprisingly, that in suburbs with good schools, plenty of jobs, and good mass transit, houses are prohibitively expensive. And in many Baltimore neighborhoods, houses are affordable, but the schools are failing and there is nowhere to work nearby.
   
"The housing market is seriously out of balance," says Sarbanes.
   
The thirteen-member task force led by Sarbanes conferred with more than one hundred people and met for eight months. Of its many recommendations, here are some highlights:
   
The city should establish an "Inclusionary Housing Trust Fund" that uses twenty percent of the city transfer and recordation taxes from property sales. The fund would finance a variety of tools that make homes affordable: financing for homeownership and rental housing, rent assistance, subsidizing rents for the homeless, financial support and counseling to people facing foreclosure, and financing development that will offer homes to people of diverse incomes.
   
The report recommends that state laws be changed to streamline the process for acquiring tax-delinquent properties that could be used for redevelopment. The city now has a lengthy court process that allows a property owner more than a year to reclaim an abandoned property after failing to pay taxes or city utility bills. The cumbersome process often delays attempts by the city from taking it over for redevelopment.The report also suggests that developers be required (for the first time) to set aside some of the homes they are building for low- and moderate-income people. Projects with thirty or more homes would need to set aside a percentage of units for low- and moderate-income people, such as teachers, physician's assistants, carpenters, and lab technicians. The number of units set aside would be greater if the developer is seeking rezoning or public subsidy from the government.
   
This comes at a time when developers find Baltimore City a desirable place to make money. Unlike the past, when they shunned the city—or did business only if lured with financial incentives—this once dowdy town is finding itself the most popular girl at the development prom. Thus, the timing may be right to leverage that popularity with new rules about accommodating homes for low- and moderate-income tenants and homeowners.
   
"We are looking for a common ground to allow the city to grow and allow neighborhoods of diversity of income because that's what makes a more interesting city," says Sarbanes. "When we talk about inclusionary zoning, we're talking about everybody."
   
He cautions, however, that a requirement that developers build low- and moderate-income housing should come with welcoming incentives to keep developers building in the city.
   
 Baltimore City Housing Commissioner Paul Graziano was noncommittal on the task force's recommendations, saying they needed further study. He said the city already requires mixed-income developments when city land or subsidies are involved. But he said there was not a "well thought out plan of action" by the task force and would not take a position on a broader use of the "inclusionary" housing plan for all city private development.
   
The ACLU, through its lawsuit, is taking a more aggressive regional approach to the affordable-housing dilemma. The organization wants to remedy the situation by requiring HUD to provide housing in higher-opportunity areas of both the city and the suburbs, especially areas that offer better schools and more job opportunities.
  
 Public housing residents are represented by the ACLU and NAACP legal defense fund. Together they now seek a court-ordered plan for helping 675 poor Baltimore families to move to high-opportunity neighborhoods (mostly in the suburbs) each year, over the next ten years. The families would receive counseling to help them care for their new homes and would only move out of choice to be close to mass transit, job opportunities, and good schools. The ACLU feels strongly that the regional tactic is one way to address the need for more affordable housing in the Baltimore area, while also addressing housing segregation.
   
"There is not enough affordable housing [in the city] that is in decent condition," says Samuels. "Therein lies a major problem with Baltimore. The housing authority and HUD have not been trying to house people in parts of the housing market outside Baltimore City where there is additional rental housing in good condition."
   
Graziano, who serves as both the city's housing commissioner and the executive director of the housing authority, puts an emphasis on a city-centered approach.
   
"Our focus is rebuilding and creating opportunities within the city and we are moving quite nicely in that direction," he says.
  
 One of the city's solutions is the recent formation of a $59 million affordable-housing trust fund. The money will be used, in part, for "blight elimination," says Graziano, to assemble land and buildings for redevelopment.
   
The very formation of this fund underscores the tensions in Baltimore between the housing ‘"haves" and "have-nots." Call it "the battle over safe zones."
  
 In 2005, the city council stalled its approval of a $305 million city-backed convention center hotel after religious leaders demanded that tourists' interest be balanced with the needs of Baltimore's poor.
   
In June of that year, Bishop Douglas I. Miles, representing Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), angrily accused City Council President Sheila Dixon of reneging on a campaign promise to back BUILD's neighborhood revitalization plan. Dixon, he said, sought "safe zones for tourists while we have no safety," according to the Baltimore Sun.
   
The pressure resulted in the $59 million fund, pledged by Mayor Martin O'Malley's administration to persuade council members to vote for the convention center hotel.
  
 It did the trick. The hotel is being built and the trust fund was born. (This is a different fund from the one recently recommended by Sarbanes' task force.)
   
Graziano says the housing authority is working on other projects to accommodate the housing needs of people of all economic levels, including projects in the neighborhoods of Barclay, Poppleton, Reservoir Hill, and Uplands. One large project in East Baltimore will include five hundred units of mixed-income homes.

Samuels acknowledges the complexities of the situation. "There is no magic bullet that is going to solve the housing problems of Baltimore. There is no magic bullet that is going to solve poverty in Baltimore, and no magic bullet that is going to undo our history of segregated housing and segregated neighborhoods."
   
However, she says, "There are an array of tools in the toolbox that have to be used in a coordinated way, which we have never done before. Breaking down patterns of segregation gives low-income African Americans opportunity. Some tools to achieve this include a strategic use of the federal voucher program, and a strategic targeting of future affordable housing to higher-opportunity areas. Inclusionary housing methods can be one way to do this.
   
For Ike Neal, the solution is personal. When he moved to Mount Washington, he could hardly believe he was living in such a nice house. "To me it was not real," he says.
    
Neal remembered being offended several years ago when an angry crowd of residents in Northeast Baltimore voiced opposition to having any public housing tenants scattered in their neighborhoods. "We tried to get them to view us in a different light," he says. "We're not animals. We just needed opportunities."
   
Today, Neal believes he has finally gotten that opportunity in an integrating community where he has befriended his new neighbors. "Last year was our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary," he says. "We had a big party and everybody came—black and white.
   
"The ladies across the street are our best friends," he says. "And they know we're from public housing because I told them."


—For nearly twenty years Joan Jacobson covered housing and neighborhoods in Baltimore City for the Sun and Evening Sun, including stories about slum landlords, housing speculators, and the misuse of federal housing dollars by city agencies and nonprofits.