She came to Cherry Hill as a child. She’s happily still there, 64 years later.

From the windows of her Cherry Hill townhouse, 74-year-old Deborah Harris can see the public housing complex where she and her five siblings spent part of their childhood.

Harris has called the South Baltimore neighborhood home for more than six decades, and for about half that she has been a proud homeowner in the community of her youth.

“This was the first home I owned,” Harris said as she sat in her red leather sectional, surrounded by family photos. “I’m the only person that lived here, and I’m comfortable.”

Baltimore’s thousands of abandoned homes and empty lots make neighborhood blocks look like smiles with decayed and missing teeth. Vacants are frequently in the news as Mayor Brandon Scott and Gov. Wes Moore pledge to tackle a problem that stretches back generations.

But some of the same places that struggle are home to pillars of their communities — men and women who have lived in and loved their neighborhoods for decades.

There are at least 129,000 homeowners in Baltimore, and a third of them have been in their residences for 20 or more years, according to a Baltimore Banner analysis of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Longtime homeowners tend to be older, Black and women, the analysis found.

City Councilman James Torrence, a Baltimore native who represents Mondawmin and other west side neighborhoods, is used to hearing stories from longtime homeowners. They’re believers in Baltimore who stay even if “they’re the only person left on the block” among vacants, he said.

“A lot of them being here is a symbol of hope,” he added.

Harris moved to Cherry Hill’s public housing with her single mother and five siblings when she was 10 years old. As a child, she remembers standing in government assistance lines to get cheese and canned pork. Her mother did what she needed to do to keep them together, Harris said.

“It was different when we came to Cherry Hill,” said Harris, adding she felt a sense of stability and safety there compared to her previous neighborhood in East Baltimore off Greenmount Avenue.

Harris attended neighborhood schools, including Cherry Hill Elementary. In the summertime, she’d take trips to Druid Hill Park or Hersheypark with her family. She took advantage of a summer jobs program when she was a teenager.

When she started growing her own family, Harris stayed in Cherry Hill’s public housing. She also started taking college courses and landed a job in the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development, followed by a stint with social services. She retired from the city after 29 years, she said.

In the early 1990s, flyers started popping up around the neighborhood about Nehemiah townhomes, newly constructed affordable housing. Harris was intrigued. She was already paying market rate in public housing because she was employed.

“I always took pride in making sure I stayed on top of my bills, and I said I am going to give it a try,” Harris said. She wanted her four kids to grow up in a home of their own.

The move into her new home in 1995 could only be described as a “daze,” Harris said. She shared the exciting milestone with her mother, who got to see her “reach a dream that she never did” before she died.

Harris’s section of the brick townhouses, at the bottom of a street, is occupied by mostly older residents.

Harris became involved in the community. She chaired the homeowners association for 13 years and is considered a point person for getting the word out about community happenings.

Kin “Termite” Brown-Lane, a 53-year-old lifelong Cherry Hill resident and activist, considers Harris a grandmother figure who is always spreading the word about community resources and programs.

“She is very strong in helping get things done,” Brown-Lane said.

Speaking of getting things done, Harris’s house is no exception. The running joke is that she hasn’t tired of decorating and renovating the two-story townhouse after three decades. Her home, where she once grew flowers in the front yard, is close to her place of worship, Church of the Living God, and the fairly new Middle Branch Fitness and Wellness Center.

In her backyard is a keepsake from her childhood in Cherry Hill, a clothesline from the public housing property that she bought when they were being taken down.

“I came from the projects, and I love hanging clothes,” Harris said.

Yisheka “Sheka” Budu-Addo, one of her daughters, knows her mom loves Cherry Hill and doesn’t see her ever leaving. When she and her siblings were coming up, none of their friends’ parents had houses.

“I was glad she made that decision because it showed us something different,” Budu-Addo said, “and it gave us something to look toward.”

All of Harris’s children are homeowners, and that mindset has passed to her grandchildren as well.

Harris has 17 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. Her daughters say her house is the meetup spot, even if she doesn’t always like a crowd.

Family often squeezes around the marble-top island in the kitchen near a sign that reads, “The kitchen is the heart of the home.” (With only her 21-year-old grandson in the house these days, Harris isn’t keen on cooking big meals anymore.)

Her kids no longer live in the neighborhood. They’re in different parts of Maryland, and one is in Delaware.

“If you’re at my mother’s house on the weekend, it can be a reunion of any sort,” Budu-Addo said. She tries to offset the hosting load for holidays, but it’s “not the same” as being in her childhood home, she added.

Budu-Addo left the city nearly 15 years ago because she didn’t see it as a positive place for raising her son. The father of her two oldest kids was shot and killed in the city.

In Cherry Hill, several neighbors, including Queenie Williams, who has lived a few doors down from Harris for 31 years, think the media paint a negative portrayal of the neighborhood.

“A lot of people think that Cherry Hill is bad,” Williams said. “They think it’s drug-infested, but drugs are everywhere.”

Williams added that she has stayed in the neighborhood because she knows where the good areas are and where to avoid. She’s comfortable there — and welcomes the occasional salutation of “Miss Queenie” or some iteration of “aunt” from youngsters.

It saddens LaKeisha Harris, Deborah Harris’s oldest daughter, that the neighborhood seems to have lost some of the sense of community she remembers. But she is convinced her mother “is an institution out there, and she’s not going anywhere.”

Many of her friends have left Cherry Hill or died, Deborah Harris said. But she admires how people show up for older residents of the area. Harris briefly paused an interview while a woman delivered her lunch as part of a program for seniors at Cherry Hill United Methodist Church.

“That’s why I don’t think I’m leaving the community. My kids abandoned me,” she joked, “but the community really hasn’t.”

Banner reporter Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this article.