Habitat Chesapeake: 800 new homeowners and more to come

As I note in today’s column in The Baltimore Sun, Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake recently reached the 800-home milestone — that’s 800 low- to moderate-income families placed in houses in the Baltimore region (the city and surrounding counties) over the last 40 years. In the photo atop this blog post, Kanieka Neal, one of the new Habitat homeowners, stand with her parents, Darryl Neal and Lena Savoy, at her recently completed home in Baltimore. Her little boy’s name is Jerome. Habitat recently held ribbon cuttings for new homes in Curtis Bay and Pigtown, and more are in the pipeline. The nonprofit is a player in the housing trend described in the column: Baltimore is issuing permits for new housing at a level not seen in years and running counter to Census Bureau reports of a falling population.

And yes, former President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter worked on some of the Habitat Chesapeake houses over the years. They helped build new houses in Sandtown in West Baltimore and in East Baltimore during separate visits to the city. This is important work, creating homeownership among people who never dreamed they could afford a house while converting some of the city’s vacant houses and lots into zero-mortgage homes for families. More could be done, of course, with property acquisitions and rehabs financed by some of the too-many American billionaires created through the obscene concentration of wealth that occured since the time of Ronald Reagan, the man who defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980. Reagan never lifted a finger, much less a hammer, to help the poor.