On Habitat for Humanity.

Habitat For Whom?

Having served as the president of Habitat for Humanity of Colorado, the executive director of Habitat of Tijuana-San Diego, and the director of Habitat for Humanity International's education ministries, I take issue with Philip Chalk's "Jimmy Carter's Favorite Charity" (June 13), which seems to have the primary purpose of denying Carter credit for the one accomplishment most can agree is a positive one--his involvement with Habitat for Humanity. Indeed, had this piece come from the New York Times or the BBC, it would have provided excellent fodder for The Scrapbook.

Habitat for Humanity may not offer the most efficient way of providing affordable housing, but the cost extrapolations Chalk makes overlook the fact that it is a worldwide ministry, building in 100 countries at a combined annual rate of 23,000 units. Chalk's math doesn't hold up against the facts.

Admittedly, Habitat doesn't build for the poorest of the poor, but the suggestion that the partner families are "almost" middle-income will come as a great surprise to most of them. This assertion is akin to the elitist, out-of-touch journalism against which The Weekly Standard usually speaks so effectively. The generalized attacks on Habitat affiliates, donors, and beneficiaries, all to discredit Jimmy Carter, could have come from Howard Dean's playbook.

More egregious is Chalk's reporting on Millard Fuller, Habitat's founder and, until recently, its CEO. Chalk's suggestion that Fuller is the product of a hippie commune demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of both the man and his mission. Anyone who has spent any time with Fuller knows this representation is nonsensical. Chalk's assertion that Fuller was fired over accusations of impropriety makes me suspect that he did his research at the Washington Post.

Fuller was fired, along with his wife, over philosophical differences, many of which were tied to the organization's drift away from the aggressive expansion Fuller promotes. He has created a new organization, the Fuller Center for Housing, to allow him to continue pursuing his goal of eliminating poverty housing.

Habitat for Humanity is, indeed, a conservative's dream nonprofit. It requires its beneficiaries to help themselves, it provides for a voluntary transfer of wealth, and it creates new homeowners and taxpayers. Beyond that, Habitat provides a place for people of diverse social, racial, political, and economic backgrounds to come together for a common good. Cultural and ideological differences take a back seat when you're shingling a roof together on a hot summer's day.

David Snell
Fuller Center for Housing
Colorado Springs, CO

The sanctimony of Jimmy Carter makes Habitat for Humanity an appealing target, and Philip Chalk is right to critique the organization's saccharine style and cost structure. But, as a housing policy conservative, I would urge a more nuanced view.

The fact that Habitat's beneficiaries are the aspiring and upwardly mobile shows it is choosing well. One can never assume that those who advance would have done so anyway. Moreover, Chalk is certainly wrong to urge the organization to take more risks and thus countenance more delinquencies and foreclosures, in the name of assisting the poorest of the poor. Mortgage foreclosures and defaults represent a serious threat to the efforts of neighboring property owners striving to maintain their own homes and property values. Too-easy credit--urged by the U.S. government through the Federal Housing Administration and the Community Reinvestment Act requirements imposed on banks--has created de-facto "default belts" in lower-income communities across the country, threatening the efforts of those who do not default.

Further, Chalk seriously overstates Habitat's reliance on government support--a tiny $14 million line-item in a HUD budget that includes some $17 billion in Section 8 rent subsidies (a huge back-door welfare program that's grown like Topsy) is just not significant. Conservatives should focus instead on the fact that Habitat--whether it has done so as efficiently as possible or not--has demonstrated that a major national social program can be mounted in the post-welfare state era by relying almost entirely on philanthropy, volunteer labor, and donations.

In doing so, it has reminded us that small houses can be good houses--and that we need not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per apartment, as federally subsidized construction programs do, if we choose to provide housing for those of modest means.

Howard Husock
Brookline, MA

Philip Chalk responds: David Snell is apparently more concerned here with perceived slights visited on his new employer and on Jimmy Carter than he is with the article in question. I explicitly addressed only Habitat's U.S. activities rather than its overseas efforts, which consume a small fraction of the $1 billion or so that Habitat and its affiliates raise annually. Snell does serve up his own guess about whether Habitat beneficiaries might view themselves as almost middle-income. Similarly, I doubt many would describe themselves as "poor," and with good reason: They are not.

Given the opportunity, Habitat representatives did not dispute reports of Millard Fuller's firing based on allegations of groping female employees. And while it may be that there was somewhere a commune in the mid-1970s that could not be characterized as a hippie encampment, the odds are long that Fuller managed to stumble into just that one.

Howard Husock may well be right about Habitat's benefits for families in the second quintile of incomes from the bottom. All the more reason for the organization to bring its teary marketing into line with its practice, by dropping talk of those who are "poor" and "homeless," with whom it has virtually nothing to do.

And it is not "certainly wrong" for me to suggest in passing that Habitat "restore a focus on Americans in the bottom fifth of household incomes, and develop or expand more cost-effective programs for higher-risk clients." This could be accomplished in any number of ways--some already employed by more imaginative Habitat affiliates--that involve no direct lending or exposure to defaults at all. Finally, conservatives and anyone else interested in fostering home ownership and financial responsibility would do well to look past the obvious fact "that small houses can be good houses" and focus dispassionately on the question of what best could be done with $1 billion a year.