To western eyes, Isabel Espinosa’s new home in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, would be nothing to celebrate. She occupies a small, sparsely furnished apartment on the top floor of a three-storey whitewashed building on a dusty side street. Yet, one week after moving in, the 46-year-old office cleaner is still struggling to believe her good fortune. “It’s like moving to heaven,” she says, sitting on one of two wooden chairs in an otherwise empty living room.
To understand her joy, you have to visit the home where she lived for the previous 10 years.
From the outside, the one-room shack looks like a dilapidated storage shed. It is made from flattened oil barrels, has no windows and is perched precariously on a muddy hillside. Inside, thin beams of light pierce through ruptures in the flimsy metal roof. Piled in the corner are two filthy, damp mattresses that Espinosa used to share with her four children and, later, three grandchildren. Their toilet was a bucket outside.
Returning to her former home for the first time since moving, Espinosa bursts into tears. “What I remember most is how the children suffered,” she says.
Espinosa’s life changed when, through her chruch, she learned about Habitat for Humanity, the faith-based homebuilding organisation, and applied for one of the apartments it was building in Santo Domingo.
She is among the latest of more than 1m low-income people rehoused in more than 200,000 homes built by Habitat since it was founded in 1976. The US-based organisation, which operates through more than 2,000 local affiliates in 94 countries, has become one of the world’s biggest and fastest-growing non-profit groups. It completes a new home every 24 minutes and boasts annual revenues exceeding $1bn. If it were a commercial enterprise, it would be America’s 18th-biggest building company.
But with rapid expansion have come challenges and upheaval. Habitat was plunged into turmoil two years ago by the acrimonious departure of Millard Fuller, its charismatic founder, following a rift with the board. He was succeeded by Jonathan Reckford, a former investment banker and corporate executive whose career has included stints at Goldman Sachs and Disney. But the task awaiting him at Habitat was more daunting than anything he faced on Wall Street. “Habitat has been through this enormous growth but the need for afford-able housing is growing even faster,” he says.
More than 1bn people around the world live in sub-standard housing and the number is forecast to double by 2010, according to the United Nations. The crisis stems from an accelerating migration from countryside to overcrowded cities, with 70m people making the switch each year. It’s estimated that in 2007, for the first time in human history, the majority of the world’s population will be living in urban areas.
Among those waiting for Habitat’s help is Dilenia Montero, a 36-year-old Dominican hospital cleaner, who lives with her husband and three teenage children in a Santo Domingo shanty town called La Lata (The Tin). From a bridge over the Ozama River, La Lata can be seen sprawling for miles along the marshy riverbank and up the side of the valley, its dense patchwork of wood and tin shacks clustered around a maze of narrow alleyways. La Lata receives running water only two days a week and electricity at certain times each day.
In spite of its limitations, the Monteros are proud of their home. The outside walls are painted bright peach and turquoise and the living area is decorated with fresh flowers and a family photograph. But the house, like thousands of others in La Lata, is located perilously close to the river. “When it rains I cannot sleep because I know the water can take away my children,” Montero says.
Habitat has been exploring options for relocating some of the most vulnerable families from La Lata since hurricane Georges devastated the community in 1998. Negotiations are under way to secure land on the edge of Santo Domingo for 200 families. “It’s like a dream I’m waiting for,” Montero says. “Habitat is the one chance we have to escape.”
Contrary to popular misconception, Habitat does not give away homes. Instead, it recoups construction costs through no-interest mortgages spread over 15 to 30 years. Income from the mortgages is ploughed back into building more homes. “We offer a hand up, not a handout,” Reckford says.
To qualify, a family or individual must earn between 20 and 60 per cent of the median wage in their local community – high enough to make monthly repayments but low enough to rule out a commercial mortgage.
Habitat’s homes are made more affordable by the use of volunteer labour, which reduces construction costs by up to half. Volunteers come from all walks of life but students and church groups are especially well represented. Homebuyers also take part in building work as part of the 250 hours of “sweat equity” they are required to commit.
Every new Habitat homeowner is given a bible but Reckford insists the group does not discriminate in favour of Christians. “There is no faith test and we do not proselytise,” he says. “We just want to demonstrate the love of Jesus Christ by helping those in need.”
The role of faith and voluntary work at the heart of Habitat’s mission helps explain how it has attracted supporters as diverse as former US President Jimmy Carter, rock star Jon Bon Jovi and Bill O’Reilly, the rightwing US talk show host. “The need for decent housing is something everyone can agree with,” Reckford says. “Conservatives like the spirit of volunteerism. Liberals like the fact we are helping the needy.”
Habitat’s position in the public consciousness was sealed by its response to the Asian tsunami in December 2004 and hurricane Katrina in 2005. More than 5,000 Habitat homes have been built in tsunami-hit areas and nearly 1,000 have been constructed along the US Gulf coast. But while Habitat’s most high-profile work is in disaster areas and overseas slums, most of its building takes place in ordinary US cities.
Reckford says the need for affordable homes is at an all-time high in the US after a long real estate boom that has excluded millions of low-income families from the housing market. The average cost of a three-bedroom Habitat home in the US is $59,000, compared with the median US home price of about $220,000.
One of Habitat’s newest US homeowners is Shaesha Shoulders, a 29-year-old mother of two from a violent, drug-ravaged neighbourhood of Detroit. She had her first child at 17, got married at 21 and divorced at 24. Eager for a fresh start, she moved to Atlanta, attracted by its reputation as a city of opportunity for African-Americans. “I wanted to break the cycle,” she says. “I wanted to get my kids away from the drugs and the killing.”
Once in Atlanta, she secured a $22,000-a-year clerical job and rented an apartment. With an income below half the city’s median, Habitat was her only chance for home ownership. “My sons have struggled academically because of the divorce and the move,” Shoulders says. “Having our own home will help them settle.” Earl, 13, and Darrien, seven, will have separate rooms for the first time and a garden to play in. “They want a dog,” their mother adds, rolling her eyes.
One Saturday morning in February, Shoulders could be seen helping assemble the wooden frame of her new home in a leafy, middle-income neighbourhood of Atlanta with dozens of other volunteers. Among them was John Dowhy, a 35-year-old sales manager with computer company Lenovo. He has been volunteering every Saturday for two years. “I spend the week doing intangible work with contracts,” he says, taking a break from hammering nails. “Saturday is the one day when I can look at something and say: ‘Gee, I did that.’”
Habitat has helped regenerate areas of inner-city Atlanta that commercial developers once refused to go near. “When families own a home, it gives them a stake in their community and that has all sorts of positive effects,” Reckford says. But rising land prices in many parts of the world are making it harder to find affordable places to build. “Land scarcity is our single biggest challenge,” he says.
One solution is to use land more efficiently by building apartment blocks, such as the one that Isabel Espinosa shares with 23 other families in Santo Domingo. Another tactic has been to forge partnerships with building companies to integrate Habitat homes into commercial developments.
Reckford started his working life with Goldman Sachs in the 1980s but became disillusioned with the gulf between his high-flying lifestyle and the poverty he saw in parts of New York. “Walking to work each morning past homeless people was overwhelming,” he says. “I felt a gap opening between the person I perceived myself to be and the life I was living.”
Reckford quit Goldman Sachs and headed to South Korea for a job with the organising committee of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. A keen rower, he ended up coaching the host nation’s Olympic rowing team. His next stop was Stanford business school, followed by a series of senior roles in the US corporate sector. But Reckford, who grew up in a church-going family in North Carolina, was still not satisfied. “I felt a personal calling to put what I had learned in business into Christian service,” he explains.
His first step into the non-profit world came as executive pastor of a 4,000-member Presbyterian megachurch in Minnesota. Two years later, he received a call from headhunters searching for a new chief executive for Habitat. “It was the job I had been waiting for,” he says.
The man Reckford replaced also started in the private sector. Millard Fuller launched a direct-mail marketing firm while still at school, selling cookbooks and candy to housewives. He was a millionaire by the age of 29, with two homes and collections of speedboats, horses and luxury cars. But, like Reckford, he found that wealth could not buy fulfilment. In a bid to save their faltering marriage, Fuller and his wife, Linda, gave away all their possessions and joined a Christian farming community in rural Georgia. “God was calling us to choose a different path,” he says.
Koinonia farm is 130 miles south of Atlanta near the small pecan-growing town of Americus. It was founded in the 1940s as a place for Christians to live a simple, agrarian life. But its commitment to pacifism, shared wealth and racial integration made it a target of Ku Klux Klan attacks and anti-communist investigations through the 1950s.
Fuller arrived in 1968 and encouraged the community to start building affordable homes for low-income families in the area. Four years later, he moved to Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he enlisted missionaries and local volunteers to build hundreds more homes. Convinced that his model could work anywhere in the world, Fuller returned to Americus and founded Habitat for Humanity.
But as Habitat grew, tensions emerged between the strong-willed Fuller and the supervisory board. Matters came to a head in 2004, when a female employee accused him of sexual harassment. Fuller denied the allegation and an internal investigation found “insufficient proof of inappropriate behaviour”. But he was fired months later for making critical statements about the board – a decision that divided Habitat. An online petition demanding his reinstatement drew 4,000 signatures and symbolic work slowdowns were staged at some construction sites.
The acrimony worsened following Fuller’s departure when he launched a breakaway group called Building Habitat. The name was eventually changed to the Fuller Center for Housing after Habitat sued him for copyright infringement. “Habitat sees me as competition,” he says. “If there was a shortage of need that might be so. But it would take Habitat 7,000 years to build homes for all 1bn people in substandard housing. We need more organisations like Habitat, not fewer.”
One of the issues that split Fuller from the board was his refusal to consider moving Habitat from Americus, a small town of 17,000 people where half the children fail to graduate from high school and mobile phone coverage is patchy. Board members feared the location was making it too difficult to recruit skilled professionals, while the two-and-a-half hour car journey to Atlanta airport was a growing inconvenience for an organisation active in all 50 US states and every continent except Antarctica.
As a compromise, Habitat has kept its main headquarters and 300 jobs in Americus but moved 100 senior positions to Atlanta. Even that was a step too far for Fuller. “A hundred jobs means nothing to Atlanta but they make a huge difference to Americus,” he says. “I see Habitat as a ministry. A ministry goes where it is needed and Habitat is needed in Americus.”
Back in Santo Domingo, Isabel Espinosa has never heard of Fuller or Reckford. To her, Habitat appears to be influenced by higher powers. “God is delivering through Habitat,” she says, with a beaming smile.
Her grandsons have their own room in the new apartment and there is an inside toilet, a small kitchen and a dining room. On the dining table rests a well-thumbed bible and a Spanish-English dictionary. Espinosa says she dreams of going to college to become a teacher but her first priority is to give her grandsons, aged two and five, a good education. “It will be easier for them to concentrate at school in future,” she says. “They are going to have a better chance in life because of this home.”
