Habitat for Humanity

The story behind Habitat for Humanity is that the founder, Millard Fuller, was a self-made millionaire by age 30 at which point his wife told him she was miserable and wanted a divorce. The jet set life was not in line with her Christian values and she hated it.

He gave away his money and they founded Habitat for Humanity and paid themselves a modest salary for running it. He did this to keep his wife because she mattered to him more than the money.

Millard Fuller's lawyer tried to talk him out of giving away his money and founding a nonprofit. He advised him to sleep on it as it was a rash decision.

Fuller told him "no." He knew it was a rash decision and he didn't want any sense talked into him. He wanted his wife to stay.

So he wanted to act on the impulse immediately. He didn't want time to come to his senses and do the "rational" thing.

He got what he wanted. She stayed and they apparently lived happily ever after.

Habitat for Humanity is the only nonprofit I ever regularly gave money. I gave them money regularly enough that they began asking me to pledge a monthly gift and I may have downgraded how much I gave them after that because I've never been wealthy. I gave a few bucks when I felt I had it to spare and it bothered me that they thought I was rich enough to commit to a monthly bill.

At that time, they would send you written literature in the mail talking about their programs to ask for more money. I actually read everything they sent me, so I probably know stuff about the organization I can't readily verify by searching the internet.

They aren't really a charity. They are a nonprofit. 

His wife, Linda Caldwell, told him something like "We were happy when we first got together and we're living by our Christian values." He gave away his money to resume living a Christian life with her and that's the origin story of the organization.

So Habitat for Humanity was founded on Christian values from the Bible where you don't do things like lend money to poor people for profit and pretend you are helping them when you are probably actually preying upon them because they are vulnerable. 

This is in line with Fuller being born in Alabama and founding Habitat for Humanity in rural Georgia. The Deep South is much more religious than the rest of the rest of the US and it's overwhelmingly Christian and they aren't all barefoot and pregnant heathens. 

Given that the American Civil War was fought predominantly on Southern lands, some portion of that barefoot and pregnant crap can reasonably be attributed to the poverty and trauma of a culture in a wartorn landscape. Those are ignorant people just trying to survive for whom formal education is seen a luxury item they can't afford.

It's kind of like the scene in the movie Dangerous Minds where two of her Black students drop out and begin working and when this White teacher goes to talk to their mother, she gets open hostility and told they don't have time to learn shit like poetry. They have bills to pay.

My father dropped out of high school in the tenth grade because he was a big guy and capable of earning a man's wage and it was The Great Depression. He grew up on a farm and to this day, most US k-12 schools have spring break and summer off.

That schedule wasn't designed as vacation time for precious middle class kiddies who didn't have the stamina to study had all year. Children attended school only when they could be spared.

They couldn't be spared during spring planting and summer. If you were over the age of four and living on a farm -- like most Americans did for most of the history of this country -- you worked to help bring in the harvest so the family and community didn't go hungry. You went to school during down time when your labor wasn't required. 

Church tends to deal with emotional stuff to some degree. In a post-Civil War traumatized South, attending church twice a week was likely an attempt at community building, giving people in pain something positive, a socially acceptable way to feed and care for the poorest members of the community without embarrassing or disrespecting them and education.

Stained glass windows in European churches weren't frivolous pretty works of art. They depicted Biblical scenes to help tell the stories in the Bible to illiterate peasants whose only learned activities involved listening to a preacher read from the good book and explain it to them.

In poor homes where the Bible may have been the only book they owned, reading the Bible every night wasn't simply religious brainwashing of the children. It was the only reading material available to learn to read.

Frederick Douglass was a slave forbidden to learn to read. His owner's wife had about a second grade education in an era when average education for women in the US -- who were mostly homemakers and mostly living on farms -- was between second and fourth grade level. 

He learned to read because this woman broke the law on the excuse that he was the age of a second grader and she needed a reading partner to help her be a Good Christian and learn to read the Lord's words. She later stopped, having affronted too many people and unable to push that cover story further. 

To this day, there are exactly two texts used to teach intro to Classical Greek. One is a secular text and one is a particular chapter of the Bible. 

I took Classical Greek in Georgia where most people taking it were taking it because they were Christian, so we studied the Bible. But that chapter isn't used to teach the Bible. 

It's used because it contains vocabulary and grammar essential to introductory Greek and Classical Greek is a dead language. We aren't writing new texts in it.

So Millard Fuller was a Christian and an educated man with experience with business success behind him. He knew enough about the secular end of legal stuff for making a viable incorporated entity. 

That's from Latin and it means giving a business or organization it's own body. In other words, it's own life separate from the founder, so it can live on after the founder retires or dies.

And he knew the Bible and he interpreted the Bible through the eyes of an educated, sophisticated man and applied Christian principles to this organization in a way that made it the best in the world at what it did.

Habitat for Humanity requires sweat equity from people receiving a home from them. Getting volunteer labor to fix up donated houses that need some work helps lower the cost. 

It also weeds out potential charlatans because everyone likes free stuff. These houses aren't free. They don't give them away.

But it also teaches poor people essential home maintenance skills who may not have any because they've only ever lived in a rental in the ghetto with an abusive landlord. Being able to DIY a few minor repairs helps middle class people have good quality of life affordably because calling a certified plumber or whatever every time something goes wrong gets expensive and not calling them tends to grow minor little repairs into major problems. 

The house is donated abd then fixed up with volunteer labor. This means the price the recipient pays is below market value. It's typically something like 80 or 90 percent of what the asking price would be if it were bring sold on the open market.

And then in line with Christian principles, this loan charges no interest.  

I don't know what interest rates are these days, but when I was in my teens and twenties and reading a lot of shelter magazines and real estate books, the interest portion of a mortgage was typically two to three times the cost of the house by the time you paid off your thirty year mortgage. 

Prior to World War II, the thirty year mortgage wasn't the norm. The norm was a seven year mortgage with a balloon payment at the end and you bought or built a house and lived there for life. 

Currently, the average age of a first-time homebuyer in the US is something like 41 and the typical mortgage is a 30 year mortgage with front loaded interest. 

That means your first sky high payment is almost all interest and maybe $20 to $50 is going towards equity in the house and your final payment is almost all equity with maybe $20 to $50 going towards interest. 

And few Americans live in their house until it's paid off. Odds are good that five to ten years after buying it, you will probably take a job elsewhere and sell the house.

After owning a house with a 30-year mortgage for ten years, you absolutely do not have a third of its value in equity. You've mostly been lining the pockets of bankers.

So paying below market value and no interest means a house that should have, say, a $700 per month payment is more like $150 per month. And you can get permission from Habitat for Humanity to sell the house if, say, you have now graduated college and wish to accept a job offer elsewhere. They have a process for that.

So Habitat for Humanity doesn't trap you in poverty the way some programs do. They don't cut you off or throw you out into the street if you improve yourself and this leads to better income.

In countries outside the US, the single biggest headache they have is trying to deal with screwed up real estate laws and secondarily backwards cultural practices.

They have trouble getting free and clear title to donated properties and I imagine bringing in their lawyers to sort this mess likely has positive knock-on effects for locals who all are struggling with this mess.

In Africa, they gave pushback against the practice of demolishing a man's house if he dies, leaving his probably much younger widow with nothing. They got permission somewhere to symbolically destroy the house and just break off a little piece of it.

My sister complained to me they wouldn't take her old dish washer as a donation "Because if we put at dishwasher in one house, then everyone expects that."

I don't actually know what their policy is nor why. It's possible their experience is donated dishwashers don't work and aren't worth the hassle. They probably weren't replaced for anesthetic reasons, but telling rich assholes who may also be financial supporters "We don't want to haul away your trash for free, bitch." isn't diplomatic and could cut your funding. 

I don't know if they had better answers when Millard Fuller and Linda Caldwell were still alive. Those are extremely big shoes to fill and the organization probably sorely misses their uncommon wisdom. 

Project SRO advocates for a built-in dish rack above the sink. Co pilot currently has a commercial where someone is using copilot on their phone to find and properly clean some filter or something in the dishwasher and exclaims triumphantly "No more smelly dishwasher!" at the end.

I no longer use a dishwasher and don't want one. If you need to clean and maintain the dishwasher so it actually cleans your dishes, how much of a labor-saving device is it?

Studies link gut issues to some of the chemicals used in dishwashers. If your dishwasher has an uncleaned filter giving off odor and you don't know that it needs to be cleaned, odds are good those dishes aren't actually germ free.

I want a built-in dish rack directly above my sink like I saw in some upscale kitchen in some shelter magazine years ago. THAT sounds like a real convenience feature to me and one more environmentally friendly than a dishwasher. 

I think if the founders were still alive, you might be hearing something like "Thanks for your generosity, but we install dish racks, not dishwashers, in all our habitat homes. That's policy from the national organization and we would be happy to point you to educational literature as to why we have that policy."

It doesn't necessarily need to say one word about donors gifting them trash and we don't need this headache when you decide your dishwasher isn't good enough for you anymore but some single mom working two jobs should be thrilled to be saddled with this piece of junk so you can feel virtuous about it not going to a land fill.