December 21, 1986

The standard form of housing in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn is still the two- or three-family house in which the owner occupies one floor and rents out the rest. But large down payments, landlord responsibilities and maintenance of such housing have made condominiums an appealing alternative.

PORT CHESTER, a community that has long taken pride in its ethnic diversity, is now facing questions about racial balance in its public schools. At a recent Board of Education meeting, Walter McClain, president of the Port Chester-Rye chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, raised concerns about elementary school enrollment patterns and the quality of education offered to minority students. Mr. McClain said the district had failed to achieve racial balance for elementary students and asserted that minority students in elementary grades were being ''short-changed.'' He also criticized the district for failing to hire more minority teachers and administrators. In a recent interview, Mr. McClain stressed his desire to work cooperatively with school officials to address the situation. He said, however, that he could not rule out the possibility of a lawsuit if no progress were achieved. The N.A.A.C.P. stated in a position paper that ''de facto segregation'' existed in the district, and that it would consider ''as one of its options'' a class-action suit.

New Yorkers' utility bills would drop for the first time since the 1960's under a plan proposed yesterday by Governor Cuomo to grant consumers some of the savings that utilities will gain from lower interest rates and Federal tax changes. Mr. Cuomo asked the State Public Service Commission to cut gas, electric and telephone bills by $2.15 billion over two years, a plan that could lower rates by 5 percent to 10 percent. Approval of the plan would reverse more than a decade of annual utility rate increases that were spurred by inflation and rising interest rates. Because the changes in the Federal tax code affect all utilities in the nation, consumer advocates say that consumers may begin to see decreases in their utility bills as early as January and further reductions as the new tax laws are phased in over the next two years. About half the states have begun investigating such rate reductions.

GREG BERGAN, the man in charge, watched the shoppers filing through the jazzy angles of the Southdale Center, clutching their bulging shopping bags. From the outside, the three-level mall looked like a pile of blocks. Inside, however, everything was engineered to cause people to spend money. The spatial grandeur and the tranquillity acted as a balm to jerky nerves. Christmas ornaments festooned the central walkway, where squalling children were lined up to get their pictures snapped with Santa Claus. Shopping malls are fantasy cities in which no one lives but everyone buys. Southdale is 144 stores, 1.1 million square feet, 6,500 parking stalls, an indoor structure where the temperature is always 68 degrees - a climate-controlled, rigidly programmed selling machine. As Mr. Bergan roamed through Southdale, the hubbub registered as sales per square foot, a key ingredient of the rent formula. He looked at J.B. Hudson Jewelers, one of the prides of the mall, and saw $650 a foot. The jewelers, he pointed out, do best. Women's apparel stores, though, dominate the mall. Mr. Bergan grinned when he passed The Limited; it was doing better than $600 a foot.

Sunday: Nicaragua said Sam Nesley Hall, a self-styled counterterrorist and brother of Representative Tony P. Hall, Democrat of Ohio, had been arrested at an air base near Managua and accused of spying. Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North, who was dismissed from the National Security Council staff for his role in the sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of funds to the Nicaraguan rebels, was reported to have helped a campaign to defeat Congressional candidates opposed to aid for the contras by collaborating with a conservative lobbyist, Carl R. Channell. No evidence emerged that funds from the arms sales went to the political campaign.

A MOOD of frustration and uncertainty gripped the capital last week as three Congressional committees tried unsuccessfully to discover the full story behind the Administration's secret arms deal with Iran. The attempts by investigators to follow all the twists in the tale kept running into the same obstacle: the refusal of the two key players, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter and Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North, to tell what they know. At week's end, Representative Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, the Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said, ''We really don't know the answers to the key questions.'' The task of finding those answers now shifts to two select committees, one in each chamber, that were named last week by Congressional leaders. But these panels, which will be formally established when Congress reconvenes in January, will also have responsibilities far broader than the search for specific facts and figures.

IN his novel ''Roger's Version,'' John Updike pits a skeptical theologian, desperately clinging to the distant God of Karl Barth, against a conservative and naive divinity student in a fierce debate over whether the existence of God can be proved. As I sit at my desk, looking at a slender volume entitled ''Jesus and the Word'' (1926) by the skeptical and sometimes Barthian Rudolf Bultmann, and the much larger and more confident ''Jesus and Judaism'' (1985) by E. P. Sanders, I wonder whether the 20th century has not witnessed a similar debate over the historical Jesus. The comparison is not quite apt. Mr. Sanders, neither conservative nor naive, does not represent the antithesis to Bultmann; that role belongs to the exegetical acrobats of an earlier generation, conservative Protestants and Roman Catholics who wrote lives of Jesus that desperately sought to harmonize the discordant testimony of the four Gospels. The Catholic lives seem especially poignant today, since often they were the result of official pressure. Many of their authors knew better, but they were subjected to censorship and silencing by the Vatican. Mr. Sanders' book, by contrast, is an honest attempt to avoid both the minimalism of a Bultmann and the uncritical acceptance of the Gospels by fundamentalists who treat them like videotape replays.

FREEDOM from exile for the dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov. The end of the Soviet nuclear testing moratorium. The ouster of a non-Russian Politburo member and the open reporting of a subsequent anti-Russian riot in Soviet Central Asia. These extraordinary events last week reflected the growing power and boldness of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, although the Soviet leader was invisible most of the week. The rapid-fire developments seemed to distill in an usually clear way some of the major themes of Mr. Gorbachev's first 20 months in office, including his efforts to enhance Moscow's image, give its diplomacy a new look, induce greater domestic candor and reshuffle the leadership.

THIS is the dawning of the age of the Aquarium in New Orleans. Plans for a $40 million aquarium and riverfront park in downtown New Orleans linking several major developments moved a step closer to reality Dec. 11 with the selection of a design team of 15 architectural and engineering concerns. The proposed 10-acre site of the aquarium, the financing for which was approved last month in a property-tax referendum, is along the river at the foot of historic Canal Street in the central business district. Construction is scheduled to begin late next year and be completed by the fall of 1989.

The Islanders rebounded from their worst defeat of the season two nights ago to score a 5-2 triumph over the Rangers tonight at Nassau Coliseum. ''Like everybody else, I wanted to get my act together after the game in Philly,'' said the Islanders' Brent Sutter, who had his first hat trick of the season. ''I was ready to play.'' It was obvious from the outset that the Islanders were eager to erase the memory of the 9-4 defeat in Philadelphia Thursday night. Except for the early stages of the second period, when the Rangers were the aggressors and were often in Islander territory, the Islanders were the better team, limiting the Rangers to 17 shots against Kelly Hrudey.

WHAT started out 33 years ago as a personal gesture by a theatrical producer and six friends to re-enact George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas Day in 1776 has turned into an annual pageant involving 200 costumed volunteers. St. John Terrell, whose Lambertville Music Circus provided musical theater under canvas from 1949 to 1970, retired as General Washington in 1978 after 25 crossings. He was succeeded by the Olympic oarsman Jack Kelly; on Mr. Kelly's death in 1985, James W. Gallagher took over. This year's re-enactment is scheduled to start at 1:30 P.M. with the assembling of 150 soldiers in Washington Crossing State Park, on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware. They will then march down to the river, where 32 of them will join 44 boatmen in four reproductions of the Durham craft that Washington used in the crossing.

Love it or loathe it, Minimalist music, with its patterned repetition, seemingly endless length and stubborn refusal to come to conventional climaxes, is everywhere these days. Right now, the fifth act of Robert Wilson's controversial ''CIVIL warS,'' a full-blown opera with music by Philip Glass, is in the midst of a run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But no matter where one turns, Minimalism is being enjoyed by eager young devotees and denounced by rival composers and unsympathetic critics. In either case, it's a subject that won't go away. At a panel discussion on the state of contemporary music at the Aspen Music Festival in 1985, it was finally decided to place a moratorium on any mention of the name Philip Glass, since it otherwise cropped at every point and on any subject as a sign of redemption or corruption. For critical observers, the current ubiquity of Minimalism offers certain ironies. The best-known Minimalist composers, Mr. Glass and Steve Reich, now reject the term as irrelevant to the music they have composed since the late 1960's. Whether one accepts that rejection - composers are notoriously nervous about labels - it still seems accurate to place Minimalist music's creative peak at least 15 years ago.