It’s Wednesday evening at the Lord Baltimore Radisson Hotel on the 100 block of West Baltimore Street, the city’s eponymous street that incorporates, at its center, the tourist and biotech high-rises that are the city’s preferred municipal icons, and, at its eastern and western brinks, the more chronically recognizable evidence of the Baltimorean institutions of poverty, of public housing projects and of failing corner stores. It’s night and the lights are dimming at the Radisson, as the waiters and waitresses, in black and white formal wear are serving collard greens and southern-fried chicken. The Mezzanine is set once again for the Fourth Annual Public Housing Residents’ Summit.

A short rank of booths sits perpendicular to these tables topped with buffet-bellied, stainless steel serving trays. Here, a line in file is forming along the balcony railing for the registration; near the booths this line forks: speakers and presenters on the right and residents and representatives on the left. The name tags in the former line, which are to be burnished, more often than not, atop black business suits or the floral-prints of Sunday’s best, bear titles such as Executive Director and Resident Commissioner; the latter tags read, most commonly, tenant council member or president – for it is typical that the money raised for their expenses of travel and of attendance have been collected from stipends issued by local Housing Authorities to this elected body of tenant representatives, for use at their discretion (the allotment being derived from a calculation of the number of tenants multiplied by $7.50, at least in Baltimore).

In this way, the summit serves the purposes of bringing together members of these delegate bodies for the reallocation of said funding into the private economy of the Radisson hotel, as, after all, it is only a matter of time until that funding drips down from the Royal Board Room on the 19th floor, and is summarily propelled by gravity back to the public, sea-level playground of the Inner Harbor. That steaming southern-fried chicken, for instance, is available for a price of $14.95, which might sound to be poorly-planned fare for a gather of low-wage and fixed-income earners, save that it is only added insult to the injurious summit cover charge of $250.00 per attendee; when coupled with the $110.00 per night hotel fee and the untold sums paid for travel expenses, the fare of the summit seems to be most carefully selected. One might assume that, in this instance, the price was arrived upon by demand, as, with only a couple hundred of resident attendees, it was would have been impossible to charge the bulk rate that might have been applied, had a larger number of residents of the nation’s 3,100 public housing authorities really attended.

The planning of this Fourth National summit was spearheaded by a committee consisting of Baltimore Housing Authority officials and public housing residents, including Mrs. Anne Warren and Ms. Michelle Holmes, the former and current chairpersons of the Baltimore Resident Advisory Board, respectively. Mrs. Warren also acts as the chairperson of the summit, and is credited by the summit catalogue as the founding organizer of the gathering, which has been held annually, in Baltimore, for the past four years.

The status of these women, confirmed at a Friday afternoon awards banquet, as well as by their table-of-honors seating at all major presentations and dinners throughout the summit, is, to use the term employed by several Baltimore Public Housing resident who helped to organize the summit, "legendary." Among their exploits cited at the awards banquet were traveling to the Virgin Islands to confront rampant mismanagement and illegal embezzlement on the part of the housing authority, as well as laying down on the floor of the Baltimore HA to protest attempts by the HA to cut funding for the summit. Throughout the summit these sorts of anecdotes worked to frame a narrative of the history of public housing, and the roles played by residents in wresting back resources from neglectful municipal agencies. Some local residents, on condition of anonymity, challenged that, despite these examples, it is very difficult to achieve a position of authority such as that of these two women, without being co-opted by the Housing Authority.

The rhetorical genealogy of the summit fixed the groundbreaking of these achievements in provisional benevolence, at the National Housing Act of 1937. This depression-era act provided the mandate for public housing and affordable housing subsidy at the federal level, which is administered to the states and overseen by local housing authorities. The summit, however, regarded this hagiography as lapsarian – whittled down by mismanagement and private interests from utopian skyscrapers to low-density houses. The slogan of the conference, “Salvation of Public Housing in America: Reclaim, Rebuild, Restore,” affirms the present status of public housing as an increasingly dispossessed service.

This shibboleth infers that public housing, as a right, should be the possession of the purported and needful public body. Yet, definitively, as a municipal investment, and, more accurately, as largely a rental materialization, a distinct lack of ownership and of improvable equity for occupants is implied in public housing. Thus, in these instances, the ‘public’ must be regarded as only a rhetorical entity, as it is variously used to promote subsidy (i.e. the ‘public’ needs help) or possibly detrimental redevelopment (i.e. this is for the ‘public’ good). Furthermore, as cities such as Baltimore progressively subsidize private developments (such as the Hilton Baltimore hotel, under construction in the Inner Harbor) predicated upon the rhetoric of empowering all in the community through the influx of capital that privately owned and operated developments will precipitate, the very assumption of a sphere of public ownership becomes a questionable ideal. As this summit was organized and funded through the Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC), which has in recent years been forced to settle suits for upwards of a million dollars for alleged patterns of discrimination for persons with disabilities and which, according the City Housing Commissioner Paul T. Graziano “gets a 10, the highest possible rating on [HUD]’s needs index, it might be necessary to question one’s incipient assumption that the slogan emblazoned on the cover of that summit catalogue is directed at residents, rather than at other, private, interests, which are playing an increasingly institutionalized role in public housing.