[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 82 (Thursday, June 10, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6885-S6886]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         PLEASANT VIEW GARDENS

 Mr. SARBANES. Mr. Chairman, recently the Washington Post 
contained an article recognizing an innovative and successful approach 
to public housing in Baltimore, MD. Pleasant View Gardens, a new 
housing development, holds great promise as a new approach to public 
housing in the Nation.
  The birth of this new project began in 1994, when the City of 
Baltimore in cooperation with the Department of Housing and Urban 
Development and the State of Maryland, made funds available for the 
demolition of Lafayette Courts and began the process of replacing it 
with the new Pleasant View Gardens. As the Washington Post reported, 
high rise buildings in the ``densest tract of poverty and crime in 
[Baltimore] city'' have been replaced by low-rise, low density public 
housing where in the evenings you hear ``the murmur of children playing 
on the jungle gym at sunset,. . .police officers [chat] with 
residents..[and] the street corners [are] empty.'' Residents who once 
referred to their housing as a ``cage,'' now allow their children to 
play outside.
  Pleasant View offers homeownership opportunities and affordable 
rental housing to its residents as well as a medical clinic, a 
gymnasium, a job training center, an auditorium and includes a 110-bed 
housing complex for senior citizens. Pleasant View is part of a plan to 
replace more than 11,000 high-rise units in Baltimore with 
approximately 6,700 low-rise units to be completed by 2002, with 
remaining residents to be relocated throughout the city. I believe that 
the Pleasant View initiative offers a new path for public housing in 
the future and demonstrates that working with the community, the 
government can help to make an important difference. I ask that the 
full text of this article be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

                   [Washington Post, April 26, 1999.]

   Pleasant View Lives Up to Name--New Public Housing Has Less Crime

                            (By Raja Mishra)

       BALTIMORE.--On a recent April evening in the Pleasant View 
     public housing development here, the ordinary was the 
     extraordinary.
       The only sound was the murmur of children playing on a 
     jungle gym at sunset. Police officers chatted with residents 
     on the sidewalk. Street corners were empty. Just over three 
     years ago, Lafayette Towers stood on this spot five blocks 
     northeast of the Inner Harbor. The half-dozen 11-story high-
     rise buildings were the densest tract of poverty and crime in 
     the city.
       Public planners trace the lineage of Lafayette Towers--and 
     hundreds of high-rise buildings like them in other cities--to 
     modernist European architects and planners of the post-World 
     War II era. When the need for urban housing gave birth to 
     such places, the term ``projects'' was viewed with favor.
       Plasant View residents who once lived in Lafayette Towers 
     had their own term for the buildings: cages. Life in the 
     project remains seared in their memories.
       ``I had to lug groceries up to the 10th floor because the 
     elevator was always broke,'' said Dolores Martin, 68. ``But 
     you're afraid to go up the steps because you don't know who's 
     lurking there.''
       Eva Riley, 32, spent the first 18 years of her life in 
     Lafayette Towers.
       ``It gives you a feeling of despair,'' she recalled. 
     ``You're locked up in a cage with a fence around you and 
     everything stinks.''
       In Pleasant View, the federal government's more recent 
     theories of public housing--which stress low-rise, lower 
     density public housing rather than concentrations of massive 
     high-rises--have been put to the test.
       The physical layout of Pleasant View is the heart of the 
     new approach. Each family has space: large apartments, a yard 
     and a door of their own. There are no elevators or staircases 
     to navigate. Playgrounds and landscaping fill the space 
     between town houses. There is a new community center.
       One year into the life of the new development, the results 
     present a striking contrast to life in the old high-rise 
     complex: Crime has plummeted. Drugs and homicide have all but 
     disappeared. Employment is up.
       ``Folks are revitalized. The old is but, the new is in. And 
     the new is much better,'' said Twyla Owens, 41, who lived in 
     Lafayette Towers for six years and moved into Pleasant View 
     last year.
       ``People who live here care about how it looks and keeping 
     it safe,'' said Thomas Dennis, 63, who heads a group of 
     volunteers that patrols Pleasant View. ``We all pull 
     together. There was nothing like that at Lafayette.''
       ``Federal housing officials say they view Pleasant View as 
     their first large-scale success in rectifying a disastrous 
     decision half a century ago to build high-rise public 
     housing.
       ``It's an acknowledgment that what existed before was not 
     the right answer,'' said Deborah Vincent, deputy assistant 
     secretary for public housing at the Department of Housing and 
     Urban Development.
       The about-face is a welcome change for longtime critics of 
     high-rise projects.
       ``I don't hold any real animosity to the people who sat 
     down in the 1940s and planned Lafayette Towers,'' said 
     Baltimore City Housing commissioner Daniel P. Henson III. 
     ``But, boy, were they short-sighted.''
       In retrospect, it seems as if the idea of the urban 
     apartment project was destined to lead to problems, several 
     housing experts said.
       It concentrated the poorest of the poor in small spaces set 
     apart from the rest of the city. The idea is thought to have 
     originated with Le Corbusier, considered one of the giants of 
     20th century architecture.
       Le Corbusier was grappling with the problem of crowding in 
     big cities in France as populations swelled at the beginning 
     of the century. Slums were rapidly expanding in urban areas. 
     Rather than move housing outward, Le Corbusier thought it 
     would be better to move it upward: high-rises. He conceived 
     of them as little towns unto themselves, with commerce, 
     recreation and limited self-government.
       As hundreds of thousands of young Americans returned from 
     World War II, eager to find transitional housing for their 
     young families, and a mass migration began from the rural 
     South to the urban North, Le Corbusier's thinking influenced 
     a generation of U.S. policymakers.
       In this country, cost became a central issue. The new 
     projects were designed to house as many people as possible 
     for as little money as possible.
       ``Who wanted to put poor people in lavish housing? So they 
     used shoddy materials and were built poorly,'' said Marie 
     Howland, head of the Urban Studies and Planning Department at 
     the University of Maryland at College Park.
       The tall high-rises soon because symbols of blight.
       ``Then the sigma of public housing increased because 
     everyone could just point to the housing high-rises,'' said 
     Sandra Neuman, interim director of the Institute for Policy 
     Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
       As the ex-servicemen departed for new suburban 
     developments, many of the projects took on the appearance of 
     segregated housing, particularly in cities south of the 
     Mason-Dixon line. Baltimore housing department officials 
     unearthed official city documents from the 1940s that refer 
     to the planned high-rises as ``Negro housing.''
       The most public initial concession that high-rise public 
     housing had failed came on July 15, 1972, when the notorious 
     Pruitt-Igoe projects of St. Louis were demolished with 
     explosives.
       High-rise projects have been crashing down across the 
     country with increasing frequency in recent years. They have 
     been replaced with low-rise, low-density public housing in 22 
     cities, including Alexandria, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia 
     and Atlanta.
       The $3 billion effort there aims to replace more than 
     11,000 high-rise units. HUD hopes to have all the 
     construction done by 2002. Most of the new units will be town 
     houses. There will be a few low-rise apartments and some 
     stand-alone homes as well. Those who do not get space in the 
     new units will be relocated in other, existing low-rise 
     apartments.
       The facilities reflect other shifts in public housing 
     philosophy; social needs must also be addressed and a 
     positive environment must be created.
       Twenty-seven of the 228 homes in Pleasant View are owned by 
     their occupants. The city is trying to coax some of the 
     renters, as well as others, to buy. The idea is to have a 
     mixed-income population with long-term responsibilities. All 
     residents are required to have a job or be enrolled in job 
     training.
       ``Before, you had too many people with too many social 
     problems concentrated in one area. Here you have a mix of 
     incomes,'' said U-Md.'s Howland.
       Pleasant View has a new medical clinic, a gymnasium, a 110-
     bed housing complex for senior citizens, a job training 
     center and an auditorium, where President Clinton recently 
     delivered a speech on homelessness.
       Pleasant View also has its own police force, a small cadre 
     of officers from the Baltimore City Housing Authority police 
     unit.

[[Page S6886]]

     From a small station in the community center, officers 
     monitor the community using cameras that are mounted 
     throughout the neighborhood.
       In 1994, the last year Lafayette was fully operative, there 
     were 39 robberies. In Pleasant View, there have been three. 
     In 1994, there were 108 assaults; Pleasant View had seven. 
     Lafayette had nine rapes, Pleasant View none.
       Four hundred of the 500 people who lived in Lafayette 
     Towers have returned to live in Pleasant View, among them Eva 
     Riley. After a childhood in the high rises, she left as soon 
     as she could afford subsidized housing in another part of the 
     city, vowing never to raise her children in a place like 
     Lafayette Towers.
       But when she visited Pleasant View shortly after its 
     construction, she decided to return to her old neighborhood 
     with her children, Jerod, 13, and Lakeisha, 11.
       ``It's much safer,'' she said. ``I don't mind my kids 
     playing outside in the evening.''

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