If walls could talk, could they tell us how many dreams have been drowned in public housing? How many hopes have been smothered as they slept by the crushing burden of impersonal poverty?

        Apartment 16C on Heath Court at English Woods is empty. A fresh coat of unconcerned beige covers layers of paint like tree rings for each family that moved in and out.

        Ancient hardwood floors are varnished the color of beer in a glass, scarred by scuffs and stains like initials carved in a desktop.

        The bedroom closets have no doors. It's a fitting metaphor for the 700 “units” at English Woods, which are less homes than letter slots — numbered boxes behind little locked doors in long brick buildings that look like old post offices.

        A tiny kitchen is paved in mental-hospital linoleum, with a 1960s stove crouching against a wall. The smell is a mix of stale air, cockroaches and futility. The windows look out onto yards that seem beaten down. Stick-figure saplings are dwarfed by extra-large Dumpsters outside each door to reduce the litter that skitters across parking lots and infiltrates the surrounding woods like an encamped army of milk cartons and disposable diapers.

Hazardous sadness

        Some people think the “projects” are trashed by people who don't care. I've always wondered if the people are trashed by housing that doesn't care.

        If homes can be ruined by radon and other “environmental hazards,” isn't it possible that the walls in a public housing apartment can get so saturated with misery that they are no longer fit for human habitation?

        Sadness seeps out of every surface. Anyone with a heart can sense it. Here is the scene of marriages, babies, first days of school, lovemaking, family dinners, carefully packed school lunches, quarrels, drinking, wife beatings, divorces, anger, loneliness, failure, drugs, fear and random killings of the human spirit.

        How many children have pressed tear-stained cheeks to the glass and wondered why they were born to this?

        Doctors, judges and business leaders have lived here, I am told. It's a testimony to the triumph of the human spirit. But for each one who struggled to the surface and gulped the sweet air of success, how many sank to the bottom?

Bulldoze it

        English Woods was built in 1942, as part of a strategy to dam up ponds of poor people that could be managed like a flood-control project. It reached its acme of cruel compassion in the 1960s “Great Society.”

        Bulldoze it all. Bury the foundations and scatter the bricks.

        The Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority wants to level English Woods and build new homes for the poor, side-by-side with homes that go on the market: For Sale — city views, close to downtown. Poor families could rent and gradually own homes next door to neighbors who inhale hope and exhale ambition like the ordinary air they breathe. That would do more for the poor than all the sanctimonious boycotters combined.

        I've seen the new homes CMHA is selling at City West. They have airy, open floor plans and smell like joint compound and fresh-cut lumber — the new-car smell of a home that has never been lived in.

        The walls are as crisp and white as a clean sheet of paper — a place to begin a family story.

       Contact Peter Bronson at 768-8301; fax: 768-8610; e-mail: pbronson@enquirer.com. Cincinnati.Com keyword: Bronson. Watch him on Hotseat on Channel 9, Sundays at 10 a.m.

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