LANDOVER – Reina Cruz wishes she could move away from Hunter’s Ridge Apartments in Landover to a real house where her 10-year-old granddaughter could have her own room and to a neighborhood where sirens do not pierce the night.
“The police always have to come around here because of drugs or something, and nobody comes by to fix this place,” Cruz, 53, said in Spanish as she pointed to the boarded-up windows and cracked stairwells that dominate the complex. “But the rent is affordable. That’s why we stay.”
A team of federal and local officials who toured Cruz’s neighborhood Wednesday said it is time for the federal government to reach into close-in suburbs like Landover and clean up neighborhoods plagued by absentee landlords and drug-related crime.
U.S. Housing Secretary Mel Martinez said Wednesday that the first step is the formation of a HUD task force that will examine housing needs and problems in Prince George’s County and use results as a blueprint to improve housing programs in similar communities throughout the country.
“This is not a problem that is specific to Prince George’s County,” Martinez said. “What we learn here is something that we can use as a laboratory as we try to meet the needs of the rest of the country.”
The task force will also look at successful programs in Prince George’s, like the Hawthorne Hill neighborhood that Martinez visited with Maryland Democratic Sens. Barbara Mikulski and Paul Sarbanes during a bus tour of the area Wednesday.
The community was built on the site of Capitol Hill East, a ramshackle complex that the local housing authority demolished in 1998. Now, 40 single- family homes — complete with landscaped yards and interlocking brick walks — have been sold for $140,000 to $195,000 to middle-income families, some earning as little as $35,000 annually, contractors said.
County Executive Wayne Curry said the project was possible because of federal HUD grants and a local public-private partnership.
Curry stressed that as long as housing within the District is expensive, the government should help create reasonably priced housing inside the Beltway for low-income residents like Cruz, who works as a short-order cook in Washington.
“The same federal government that is doing all that gentrification in the District owes us a debt to help us take these other decaying properties and turn them into something healthy,” Curry said.
Officials also toured the Fairmount Heights home of Rosalind Bailey, a 33- year-old mom who last week purchased a three-bedroom house for herself and her two teen-aged children through HUD’s $1 Home Program. The new initiative brings local governments and charities together to renovate vacant houses for first- time homebuyers.
“It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it,” Bailey said. “It feels good to finally have a home of my own.”
Overall, officials said the combination in Prince George’s County of successful programs and of neighborhoods that still face housing problems makes it a good place for the task force to focus its work.
“This is an opportunity to take what is a drag on the community and make it an asset,” Sarbanes said.