Wells Fargo cites condition of city-owned houses in its defense

An attorney for Wells Fargo offered a detailed and spirited rebuttal Monday to the city of Baltimore’s legal claims that the bank targeted African Americans for predatory loans, which led to hundreds of home foreclosures and millions of dollars in government expenses and lost tax revenue.

The city sued the bank last year, alleging reverse redlining in majority black neighborhoods, a practice that it contends ultimately cost hundreds of city residents their homes, expanded Baltimore’s stock of vacant and abandoned properties and increased the crime, rat and safety problems associated with them. In depositions for the city, two former employees of the California-based bank have described racially-discriminatory practices and incentives to steer high-cost loans to African Americans.

But Andrew L. Sandler, an attorney for Wells Fargo, disputed the city’s allegations in a hearing before U.S. District Judge Benson Legg. He derided the city’s case as a “theory in search of a lawsuit” and provided financial information on a handful of Wells Fargo foreclosures – data not previously disclosed — that undermined key elements of the city’s lawsuit. Read the rest of this entry »

By GERALD NEILY
A long time ago, the City killed most of its plan, hatched in the 1960s, to build the “3-A Expressway” across town. The part of 3-A that did go forward, the replacement of US 40 on Franklin and Mulberry Streets with a nine-block-long chasm, displaced thousands in west Baltimore.

Now, some 40 years later, the city is still promising to fulfill one promise made as part of the old 3-A plan. They say they will build a series of “caps,” developable land bridges across the highway to heal the split-apart community.

That goal is great, but this solution is not:  it doesn’t make economic sense, and these band-aids suspended over a river of traffic won’t foster a sense of community. Plus, the City’s latest plan is that the work on the project wouldn’t be completed until after 2043 …. a good 73 years after the original promise. Read the rest of this entry »

By GERALD NEILY

What’s dizzy about the city’s $28 million proposal for six new roundabouts isn’t that traffic circles are inherently bad. Roundabouts are often the best solution when dealing with intractable traffic problems isolated at a single complicated or high-speed intersection. They work well in rural areas, for instance.

But city transportation officials want to slap roundabouts onto all sorts of urban trouble-spots, whether or not they’re the best solution, showing once again their chronic failure to grasp the big traffic picture or to try simple fixes first. The most potent tool in an urban grid is to coordinate the traffic signals, for instance, which would go a long way toward calming some of Baltimore’s most clogged-up areas. Read the rest of this entry »

Sonja Merchant-Jones, of ACORN, addresses the crowd.

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. Read the rest of this entry »