A glitzy Harbor East-type makeover is apparently the driving vision behind studying the feasibility of razing the Jones Falls Expressway, a $60,000 inquiry launched by Mayor Sheila Dixon and reported in The Baltimore Sun over the weekend. The idea is to redevelop the swath of land between the highway and the Johns Hopkins medical campus.

But even if the ugly elevated highway were erased from the landscape, could a design laid out for affluent urbanites really weave in some of the area’s more challenging features: including a prison and other assorted razor-wire topped correctional facilities?

Another question is that of affordable housing. Bleak though the neighborhood has become (body shops, parking lots, the once thriving, now-nearly vacant Old Town Mall) it has also historically supported workforce housing, which has been disappearing, in the shadow of redevelopment plans that never seem to gel.

In December, for instance, the city Housing Authority demolished Somerset Courts, eliminating 257 units of public housing. Another source of affordable rental housing, the privately-owned garden apartment-style Forrest Street Apartments, is also likely to fall victim if redevelopment goes forward.

(The city’s failure to replace the affordable housing units it demolishes has been well documented here.)

Still, the billion-dollar-plus junk-the-JFX idea is a ripe subject for everyone’s urban planning fantasies: a lovely boulevard, coupled with great mass transit and revitalized neighborhoods, with housing for all.

As long as we’re fantasizing, our additional vision is that the idea supports good journalism. How’s that?

 The Sun’s Calvert street headquarters backs right up to the JFX. In the event this massive redevelopment ever happened, it would probably increase the value of the Sun‘s property by magnitudes, a boost the ailing news organization could use to…..hire a reporter or copy editor or re-open the Towson bureau.

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UPDATE: The planning listserv “Envision Baltimore” was abuzz today with discussion of the rip-out-the-JFX idea. What would happen to the Sunday Farmer’s Market, which happens under the JFX? Shouldn’t transit be used to handle the overflow of traffic from a scaled-back JFX?

The conversation prompted a reply from one of the key players, Al Barry, of A.B. Associates, a consultant to Edison Properties, the New Jersey-based company that owns nine acres of land east of the elevated expressway.

“Thank all of you that have posted comments to date on this subject that my firm has been working on along with the Transportaion firm, Gorove – Slade and the architectural firm Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn for over 6 years now. To add to some of the questions raised to date, the plan has envisioned a rail shuttle from Penn Station to Inner Harbor East and we believe the remaining columns would allow the smaller vehicles the Charles Street Trolley envisions.The Farmers Market is also one of my favorite activities and can be accomodated in a more gracious style under the Viaduct. RKK will estimate costs and life expectancy but our earlier estimates were in the 300 million dollar range, still not cheap but when the bridge has to be completely rehabilitated, this will not be cheap either and with far less benefits and maintenance costs. This segment is original, over 40 years old and was not included in the earlier JFX rehabilitation. While the project may be ten years away, the imortant thing is to decide the overall benefits and begin planning in a way that the private and public sectors work toward it without precluding it. To those who believe traffic will be intolerable, the change would open up the possibility of a larger grid serving the north east instead of the funnel that now backs up at Fayette Street. “