Habitat for Humanity, part of Jimmy Carter's legacy, still helping Long Islanders realize homeownership dreams 

Before the Velasquez family moved to a Habitat for Humanity home in Mastic Beach, they rented part of an illegally subdivided house in Copiague on Oak Street.

Drunks from the bar nearby drove into the front door. The ceiling sagged ominously and the air stank of the cigarettes smoked by the men who lived in eight single-occupancy rooms in the back of the house.

So the death last Sunday of Jimmy Carter, the most famous volunteer in Habitat history, felt momentous, said Betty Velasquez, 64, a retired licensed practical nurse. "Thank God for his 100 years," she said.

She recalled, in an interview this week in her living room, reading one of Carter's many statements about decent housing as a human right. "That stuck in my head, those two words. I’m sure a lot of people don’t think it should be a human right to own your own house, your own place."

The Velasquez house is modest but comfortable, two stories with a front porch on a little more than a tenth of an acre. They moved into it in 2020, about two years after Betty Velasquez attended an informational meeting held by the group's staffers and after many years of trying, and failing, to save enough on their own to afford a house.

Between Betty's income and that of her husband Humberto, 64, who works at a company that makes commercial banners, they had saved a few thousand here and there to try and buy a home. But their savings dwindled when she left her job, first to recuperate from illness, then to care for a son, Fabian, 33, who has special needs. Another son, Steven, 28, lives in Rochester.

"I remember thinking, I work so hard, and there was a time when I worked 11 to 7 in the morning and 8 to 4 trying to save the money" for a down payment, Velasquez said. "Then things would happen ... as soon as I had something in the bank, [prices] kept going up."

Median home value is about $659,000 in Nassau and $540,000 in Suffolk, according to the Census, and across the region, more than a third of homeowners with mortgages pay at least 30% of their income. "Buying a house on Long Island: This, for the regular person, is very hard," Velasquez said.

The Long Island chapter for Habitat, a nonprofit Christian organization dedicated to eliminating substandard housing and homelessness, says it has built 247 homes across the region, from Hempstead to Orient Point.

Most of them are in Suffolk. There, when Habitat’s work started in the late 1980s, the land where they built tended to be cheaper and sometimes free, sometimes donated by the county or the towns of Islip or Brookhaven.

Since the early 1980s, Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, helped build 4,447 houses worldwide, according to Habitat’s national organization, which says it has built or improved homes for more than 62 million people.

Carter the amateur carpenter never worked on Long Island — the closest he got was helping to rehab an apartment building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1984 in his first project as  a Habitat volunteer. But he drew crowds of thousands when he visited Hofstra University as a presidential candidate in 1976 and a Huntington bookstore in 1996 on a tour to promote a book about his Christian faith.

"He helped tremendously," said Diane Manders, interim CEO of Habitat’s Long Island chapter. "There was a bump" in people willing to donate labor, materials and money to Habitat because of Carter’s own volunteer work, she said. "That got the word out, worldwide, about what Habitat was doing."

Habitat uses volunteer laborers working under experts to build its houses, sometimes with donated or discounted materials. It helps arrange low-cost mortgages for the people who buy its homes, who also contribute what the group calls "sweat equity" by helping build their own houses.

Habitat Long Island gets about 200 applications for every four or five houses it builds. A committee selects awardees from qualified applicants based on need. The Long Island chapter gets about 2,000 volunteers a year and could use more, Manders said, though the biggest challenge is not labor but the high cost of ownership.

Habitat homes are open to families who earn up to 80% of area median income, a sum that starts at $87,500 for one person on Long Island and climbs by household size. But to ensure that prospective owners can keep their new home, there is also an income floor: Candidates for ownership can spend no more than 35% of their income on carrying costs, including the mortgage, taxes and insurance. Those restrictions exclude some candidates, Manders said, though some candidates have found workarounds, like three-generation households. 

Habitat’s own costs are high too, Manders said. Material costs have doubled over the past decade, she said, and land donations dried up during the pandemic. Last week, after 37 years of building on donated sites, the group bought its first site.

When the model works — fewer than 5% of Habitat homes fall into foreclosure or disrepair on Long Island, Manders said — "It creates generational wealth and changed lives. Because people are able to live in a safe space, it enables them to spend more on education, to get better training," Manders said.

Carter, in a 2009 introduction to a book about Habitat, "If I Had a Hammer," said he was looking for a worthy way to spend his post-presidential life when he joined the group. He settled on teaching Sunday school and building houses. He described Habitat’s home-building as a democratic act in a world stratified by class because it "brings together people of different backgrounds and stations of life to create an environment in which everyone is equal," he said.

The last day of a project, when it was his habit to hand the homeowner house keys and a Bible, gave him a feeling of "exaltation," he said.

In a living room still festooned with Christmas ornaments, Betty Velasquez said her family's path to ownership had not been neat.

COVID-delayed building permits nearly cost them the Habitat home altogether, she said, when her husband's company came close to laying off its workers. Without his income, the family would not have qualified for a mortgage. After the family finally moved in, the shooting death of a young man near the new house made them wonder what they’d gotten into.

But those problems were outweighed by the benefit, Velasquez said. The financial literacy classes Habitat required her and her husband to take made them better equipped stewards of their new asset. Humberto loves the beach and has developed a hobby of walking there with his metal detector in the mornings before work. Fabian, who in the Copiague apartment slept in a converted bathroom, has a bedroom of his own.

The house is, Betty Velasquez said, "a blessing."