NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSING WINS ANOTHER FIGHT VS. DRUG DENS

Russell and Sydny Ferguson sat on the stoop of their Moreland Street home yesterday awaiting the arrival of all the children who usually play football in the Roxbury field across the street.

"It's pretty quiet now but it comes to life," 11-year-old Russell said.

The Fergusons live in one of the many new homes built in the Roxbury neighborhood over the past several years in the name of urban renewal. Most of the homes are duplexes with tidy lawns rimmed by chain link.

But not 143-145 Moreland St. next to the Fergusons. No one has lived in the triple-decker since July 1995, when the city boarded up the windows and doors of the once-notorious drug den.

"No one lives there," Russell said. "But I saw people in there cleaning up last month."

City workers pulled 6 tons of debris out of the building's six apartments in preparation for today's announcement by Mayor Thomas M. Menino and a host of local and federal officials. After five years of legal wrangling, 143-145 Moreland St. will become the 71st and 72nd drug dens to be converted into affordable housing.

"It's good to see the city is going to fix the place up. That's a six-family and people need affordable housing," said Joao DePina, who lives around the corner.

Today also marks the 10th anniversary of the Ten Most Wanted Drug Houses Task Force, which has shut down 257 drug houses and generated 296 units of housing, according to Tom Gannon, who heads the initiative.

But converting a drug den into a useful part of the community takes time, according to police Commissioner Paul F. Evans. "It can be frustrating. You can go back and make arrest after arrest and nothing changes," he said. "It takes tenacity."

The city foreclosed on the Moreland Street home in 1997 but only in February did a state appeals court uphold the land-taking over $26,319 in unpaid taxes, Gannon said. The Public Facilities Commission voted Thursday to sell the building to Frederick Fairfield Jr., who plans to gut the structure before turning it into two separate two-unit homes. Work should start by November.

JacQuie Cairo-Williams has lived on Woodville Park behind Moreland Street for the past 25 years and remembers the bad times when drug dealers and drug customers were regular sights on her then-trash-strewn street.

"It was horrible," Cairo-Williams recalled. "I knew I couldn't let my family live like this."

So Cairo-Williams got neighbors to sign a petition asking the city to pave the private way. Thanks to the Top Ten Drug Den program, Woodville Park then came under the scrutiny of not only police but the city's Inspectional Services Department, Department of Neighborhood Development and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative.