[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 9] [Senate] [Pages 12398-12399] [From the U.S. 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Washington Post reported, high rise buildings in the ``densest tract of poverty and crime in [Baltimore] city'' have been replaced by low-rise, low density public housing where in the evenings you hear ``the murmur of children playing on the jungle gym at sunset,.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 [[Page 12399]] 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.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.'' ____________________