THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 19, 1994 TAG: 9407190013
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
Habitat for Humanity, whose mission is constructing houses for low-income families, will never meet the shelter needs of more than a minuscule percentage of Americans near the bottom of the income scale. But Habitat for Humanity and other philanthropic private-sector house builders and renovators are grace notes in a discordant world.
So it's pleasing to report that the South Hampton Roads Habitat for Humanity chapter expects to have added 11 new houses to the local housing stock before 1994 is out. It also will have transformed one derelict house into a place fit for a deserving family. These houses - most of them in Norfolk's Park Place - will bring the total number of completed South Hampton Roads Habitat projects to 22.
The dozen in prospect will come close to equaling the 14 that the faith-based Habitat ministry, which is headquartered in Americus, Ga., erected in 1976 - its first year in the field. They will be among 10,000 houses that Habitat intends to build around the globe this year.
With the help of hundreds of thousands of volunteers, Habitat has provided 30,000 houses worldwide since its inception. The current production pace of Habitat in the United States - 2,705 houses sold in 1993 - is fast enough to rank the not-for-profit organization, whose most famous volunteer is former President Jimmy Carter, as the nation's 17th largest home builder.
That's an astonishing achievement for an entity that didn't exist two decades ago and was the 113th largest U.S. home builder as recently as 1989.
Habitat's achievement is all the greater because the organization builds lives as well as houses; 70 percent of Habitat families improve their financial condition. All Habitat houses are grass-roots partnerships that draw churches, businesses, professionals, students and for-profit home builders, among others, into common enterprises. Each of Habitat's carefully selected families agrees to provide hundreds of hours of home-building labor - 400 hours is the South Hampton Roads requirement - as well as to make regular payments on an interest-free 15- or 20-year mortgage.
Generous donations of cash, materials and labor explain why the average selling price of a Habitat house in the United States is $35,000 compared with a national new-house average of $127,000. No private-enterprise home builder could produce for $35,000 a three-bedroom house that meets standard building codes - a house, moreover, whose taxable value in Norfolk is about $60,000.
There's no overall housing shortage in America. But there is a shortage of affordable housing - a problem the federal government has addressed by building public housing, providing low-income-housing-construction financial incentives and issuing vouchers that underwrite a portion of rental costs. More than 4 million low-income Americans were receiving some kind of housing assistance during the late 1980s.
Coming up with the wherewithal for shelter is still a problem for millions of Americans. Why? Because, as a senior policy analyst at the Brookings Institution pointed out several years ago, unlike most other peoples, Americans as a whole ``do not allow lousy - or low-cost - housing to be constructed.''
That political reality creates a gap not easily - and certainly not cheaply - bridged. Habitat's successes, however heartening, spotlight the dimensions of the challenge. by CNB