Story by JOAN JACOBSON, photos by FERN SHEN

More than 100 irritated public housing tenants and their advocates packed the People’s Forum on Public Housing last night, wanting to know why the Housing Authority of Baltimore City is demolishing thousands of public housing units with no plans to replace them, why their homes are poorly maintained and why they get no respect from the powers that run the authority.

A Housing Authority spokeswoman who might have been able to answer their questions left in a huff, accusing the organizers of creating “a hostile environment.” The huffy vacuum created by an absent public official sort of fit the theme for the evening.

Although the hall was packed inside the historic Orchard Street Church, which is home to the Greater Baltimore Urban League, there were two conspicuously empty seats at the front of the room facing the audience. Each chair had a hand-written name tag. One was for Paul Graziano, HABC’s executive director. (He is also Baltimore’s housing commissioner.) The other was for his deputy executive director, Jemine Bryon, who runs the ever- shrinking public housing system.

Their decision not to attend the meeting did not sit lightly with frustrated tenants – or the organizations that represent them: ACORN, Citizens Planning and Housing Association, ACLU of Maryland, Maryland Disability Law Center, Homeless Person’s Representation Project and the University of Maryland Law School Community Development Clinic.

The forum was called to address the housing authority’s decision to demolish 4,100 public housing homes between 1997 and 2009, though only 154 are being replaced, said Barbara Samuels, ACLU’s fair housing attorney.

(An Abell Foundation study I wrote in 2007 also found HABC’s occupied inventory dropped by 42 percent over a 15 year period.)

Samuels also noted that there are 29,576 households on the public housing waiting list, most of them extremely low-income, earning below $24,000 a year for a family of four. The waiting list for Section 8 (or choice vouchers) is also closed, so the newly poor need not apply. To say the system is backed up is an understatement.

Although, like housing authorities across the country, HABC has been stymied by federal cutbacks that prevent replacing every unit demolished, Samuels noted that Baltimore has money it isn’t spending to build new public housing. Of $45.2 million for replacement housing, it has only spent $23 million.

But for those lucky enough to live in a subsidized home in public housing, it is no picnic.

ACORN member Wendy Foy, who lives in McCullogh Homes, recited a litany of problems, including no hot water, no water at all and poorly cut grass.

“If we stand together on these issues, we can get a lot of these issues resolved,” she said.

ACORN member Dominique Daniels told the crowd that the absence of Graziano and Bryon shows a “lack of respect to tenants.” ACORN organizer Michelle Moore said she was told flatly by HABC that no one from the agency would attend.

And ACORN’s chairwoman, Sonja Merchant–Jones, a former HABC employee, also noted the deteriorating of relationships between tenants and management in recent years.

But, despite the empty chairs, there was an HABC representative in the building, if only we could find her.

The spokeswoman who didn’t speak

Cheron Porter, director of communications for Baltimore Housing (both HABC and the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development) spent much of the meeting in a stairwell with a television reporter. She did not ask to speak to the crowd and said she was offended by a public announcement in the hall that she was ‘hiding’ in the stairwell.

When Brew editor Fern Shen and I found her there I asked why her bosses did not attend. Graziano and Bryon, she said, had previous engagements. But she had another reason: “This is not the appropriate forum. It’s not within HUD guidelines.”

I asked her what HUD guidelines prevent the directors of the city’s housing authority from speaking publicly to their own tenants and their representatives (from several well-respected non profit organizations.) She declined to elaborate.

I explained to her that the forum was planned because of dissatisfaction over a poorly advertised and poorly attended May 4 public hearing sponsored by HABC (and required by HUD) to seek public comment on the agency’s annual blueprint, which has the unwieldy bureaucratic name: “The 2010 Moving to Work Annual plan.”

“I’m not aware of a May 4 hearing,” said Porter.

Wow. If the agency’s communications director didn’t know about the HUD mandated hearing, how could anybody else find out about it?

But she wasn’t the only one in authority who didn’t attend the May 4 hearing, which drew only a few dozen people, according to attendees. Three out of four Housing Authority Commissioners were no-shows, according to advocates who were there. The commission, according to the city’s website  is the “governing body (that) sets policy guidelines and directions on all key operational and financial issues” involving HABC.
So much for setting policy in a democratic fashion. While in the stairwell, Porter handed Brew editor Shen a couple of pages of talking points, defending the housing authority.

They included HABC’s standard line, blaming the agency’s inability to build new public housing on the so-called Thompson Consent Decree, a 1996 court order (which set out to undo decades of housing segregation) limiting new subsidized housing in “impacted areas,” areas with high poverty rates, high percentages of African Americans, and a high concentration of subsidized housing.

(In Samuels’ Power Point presentation she suggested that “This is the perfect time to go out and buy affordable (scattered) housing to be converted to public housing.” Certainly, in this economy, Baltimore has plenty of cheap houses for sale. And they can’t all be in poor, African American neighborhoods.)

Porter’s fact sheet also defended the housing authority’s work to keep up its inventory, listing improved occupancy rates and 130,344 work orders completed last year. It also stated the housing authority’s commitment to creating affordable housing for city residents with “a wide range of incomes.” Too bad no one at the forum got to hear her side of the story.

Porter may not have been ‘hiding’ in the stairwell, but she never returned to the hall after her interview to hear what residents had to say. Instead, she apparently scuttled down the stairs and out a side door. At the meeting’s end, I saw her in the parking lot, talking into her cell phone and looking irritated.

In addition to Graziano and Bryon, Mayor Sheila Dixon, another invitee, was absent last night. (It would have been interesting to hear from her how her Ten-Year Plan to end Homelessness” fits in with her policy of demolishing thousands of homes for the poor.) City Hall did send a representative from her office to listen to the speakers. And there were several city council members, including Jack Young, Mary Pat Clarke, William Cole and Edward Reisinger.

Young will call for hearing on  public housing

Young’s 12th district includes East Baltimore’s Latrobe and Douglass Homes and Somerset extension (it also included Somerset Court, but its 257 units were recently razed). Pointing to the empty chairs reserved for HABC’s directors, he said he will introduce a resolution calling for a hearing on public housing. And he’ll ask Graziano and Bryon to attend.

“Public housing is something they’re trying to get rid of and they’re doing it because 85 percent of you don’t vote. You guys are the sleeping giants who can wake up this city,” he told tenants.

If only tenants would register to vote, he said, “that can change the whole culture of the city.”

At the start of the forum, each participant was handed a blank ‘report card’ to grade HABC on categories that included “respect for tenants,” “maintenance,” “response to grievances,” “transfer policy,” “availability of public housing and section 8,” as well as “grounds conditions” and “resident services.” On my way out, I peeked at a few dozen report cards they were being turned in. All F’s.