WILLIAM RUSSELL MOORE -- tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, pumped with the confident righteousness of those who are raised as beloved children to believe that the system is supposed to work for them -- moved into 230 East 167th Street in the Bronx two years ago. He says he felt he should be part of the community in which he worked. Also, he could walk to his office near Yankee Stadium.

A pre-World War II yellow brick building of 74 apartments, No. 230 is off the Grand Concourse between Sherman Avenue and Grant Avenue. The front buzzers work erratically and the lobby is bare of mirrors and furniture, but it still reminded me of the South Bronx buildings to which my parents dragged me as a kid to visit relatives left behind in the migration to Queens. The only shards of that time are a few painted-over mezuzahs on the brown door frames.

Most of the several dozen tenants I met one evening last week were African- and Caribbean-American women -- nurse's aides, bookkeepers, home health-care workers -- raising children alone in crowded apartments with rusted stoves, holes in the ceiling and walls, exposed wiring, cracked tiles and bubbling paint. Most apartments, which are stabilized, rent for $500 to $800 a month. I did not see a single tub in which I would bathe. Many tenants had been in the building for years. Why didn't they complain, form an association?

''Fear, I guess,'' said Lizzie Stanley, a middle-aged presser who works for a Manhattan dry cleaner.

She has lived in the building for 16 years. ''I'd call the super when my ceiling came down and he'd put me on hold so long I'd give up.'' she said. ''We didn't want to go to court. We were afraid of things like subpoenas. You know, some of us never been in court. After he moved in, it really changed things.''

Mr. Moore, who is 30, beamed at that. He had moved in with a flourish, his sharp suits, white shirts and aggressive ties in contrast to the tenants' discount warm-up jackets and white hospital pants and shoes. Born in Jamaica, raised in a nuclear family in Harlem where ''neighbors absorbed each other's problems.'' Mr. Moore graduated from SUNY Stony Brook with a political science degree and went on to work in the press offices of Mayor David N. Dinkins and, now, the Bronx Borough President, Fernando Ferrer. He's not exactly a landlord's dream.