Today is Christmas all over again for many Dundalk residents and Baltimore County officials.
County Executive Jim Smith will sit behind the controls of an excavator to demolish the first of 56 blighted, low-income apartment buildings, clearing room for what residents hope will be cleaner, safer homes. The county still has nine properties left to purchase in the 8-acre neighborhood on Yorkway Road, but expects to have full ownership in the near future, officials said.
“We?ve wanted them down for years,” said Carolyn Jones, president of the Greater Dundalk Alliance, a community organization. “It?s finally coming to fruition. It?s a sense of hope.”
County officials announced in March an $11 million plan to purchase all 56 buildings in the complex, and spent $7.6 million on the first 20 buildings ? 79 units in a section formerly known as the York Park Apartments, where police said they responded to more than 3,800 calls in 2005.
But with strategic property owners holding out for more money as acquisition neared completion, the project has run over budget. County officials last week approved contracts for three more buildings costing almost $1 million and said they now anticipate costs to total $17.2 million.
The county issued a press release for today?s event, described as an opportunity for Smith and Councilman John Olszewski, D-District 7, to take a ceremonial “first swipe” at neglected, vacant buildings. The complex is also dubbed a long-troubled “center of neighborhood instability.”
The buildings were not vacant earlier this year, however. Many Yorkway residents said the county relocated them there after they were displaced by county-sponsored redevelopment of the Tall Trees and Kingsley Park complexes in Essex. As of December, county spokesman Don Mohler said the county successfully moved 51 Yorkway families to other units. Olszewski has said the county expects to recoup costs by selling the property to a private developer. Greater Dundalk Alliance members said they hope to see the site transformed back into the quiet neighborhood it once was.
“When people my age first got married, we all lived there,” said community activist Sharon Beazley. “They were reallynice. But it?s gone downhill so much.”
