'I saw how desperate they were for help': How Jimmy Carter became a Habitat humanitarian
After delivering the early morning homily at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, former President Jimmy Carter returned to his hotel, changed his clothes and went out for a jog.
As he navigated the grid of New York City streets, he passed by a derelict apartment building on the Lower East Side.
The six-story, burned-out tenement shell was built in 1902. By 1984, the building known as Mascot Flats was among the last standing in a neighborhood plagued by crime and drugs.
Outside the East Sixth establishment, Habitat for Humanity volunteers worked to rejuvenate the crumbling structure and make it suitable for people to live there.
Carter stopped and took notice.
"I saw how desperate they were for help," Carter recalled more than three decades later. "I just said, in the spur of the moment, 'We need to come back and help you.' "
A few months later, Carter took 42 build volunteers from around his hometown in Plains, Georgia, up to New York by Trailways bus. They worked at the site, and when there was still more work to be done, they came back a second year.
The media detailed scenes of the former president bent over his tape measure marking wooden boards with the same concentration he once gave security briefs.
They described the vacant lots that sucked up the space beside the six-story tenement and the urban decay that ate away at the nearby cityscape.
The former president — then just four years out of the White House — stood on a scaffold, hammer in hand and assisted by his wife, Rosalynn, to make the place livable again. The Carters slept on the floor of a nearby church at night, returning each day to the decrepit shell of a building, trash-filled and virtually roofless.
The good work of that week sparked a decadeslong humanitarian effort known as the Carter Work Project, which focused on constructing and rehabilitating affordable housing for those in need across the country and around the world.
"And this is our 36th year we will be building Habitat houses," Carter, who turned 95 on Oct. 1, states with pride.
This week the mission comes to Nashville as the former president and first lady join hundreds of volunteers from across the country — including the city's own country music legends Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood — to help build 21 homes for those in need.
In total, funds raised through the 2019 Carter Work Project will serve 59 families in the Habitat-developed neighborhood of Park Preserve in North Nashville. The work addresses an urgent call across the city. More than a hundred people die on Nashville streets every year. Thousands can barely afford their rent.
"Nashville is this thriving, growing city, but we don’t have enough affordable housing," said Yearwood, who along with Brooks has been working beside the Carters for more than a decade. "It’s been an issue for a while, but it's becoming more of an emergency, really."
'Tearful with emotion'
So often, the Carters begin with something that's not there — just a concrete foundation and a vision.
They have attached siding to the front of a Habitat for Humanity home in Georgia. They have constructed wood framing for walls of a new place in Washington. They have passed nails between them, hammering together a house in Memphis.
Of all the builds, the most memorable for Carter was working on homes along the Mekong River in Southeast Asia. They visited five countries on that trip in 2009.
They built homes for families living in a garbage dump in Cambodia, for fishermen sleeping in their boats in Vietnam and for those devastated by the 2008 earthquake in the Sichuan province of China.
He also fondly remembers a trip to the Philippines, where they built 293 homes in just five days.
Each experience is unique, but the feelings resonate across oceans and borders.
"Every year during the 35 years, we’ve been excited and thrilled and sometimes tearful with emotion," Carter said.
The affection comes from working alongside the future homeowners and their families. They get to know each other. They share stories. They stay in close touch with some of them.
At the end of the five-day build, the Carters often give the new homeowners the keys to their new house and a Bible.
"They are unapologetically faith-based," Brooks said, "and they truly believe 100% that they are better off serving others than themselves."
Over the course of three decades, the Carters have worked alongside more than 103,000 volunteers in 14 countries to build, renovate and repair more than 4,330 homes.
They have inspired millions of others through their dedication to the mission.
Along the way, the Carters also have built deep relationships. One of the most enduring has been with Yearwood and Brooks.
"We’ve gotten to be very close of friends of theirs," Carter said. "And we are bound together in many ways."
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The love affair with Habitat
Two years after Hurricane Katrina ripped apart New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward still languished.
Cut off from the rest of New Orleans by a shipping channel, the neighborhood was submerged after the flood walls of the Industrial Canal gave way. The raging current pushed houses off their foundations. Flood pools, rising up to 12 feet deep, swallowed some places for weeks.
It was the last neighborhood to have power restored and be pumped dry. Two years later, Yearwood remembers, there still was no grocery store, no gas station, no Walmart.
Brooks and Yearwood were supposed to arrive, talk to the media, take some photos and go home. They planned to be there only two hours.
"I learned how to frame a wall that day," Yearwood remembers. "And I thought, 'I want to do this more.' That began the love affair with Habitat."
In the time since, Yearwood and Brooks have traveled to Carter Work Projects across the country, enjoying the stolen moments when they can sit with the former president and first lady and soak up the modesty of a couple who has shunned the spotlight in pursuit of simplicity and service.
"There are people you meet in your life that breathe different air," Yearwood said. "They have gotten to a place in life where they are wise. It doesn’t always come with age, but a lot of times it does.
"To have an opportunity to sit down and have a meal and have a conversation, a chance to be quiet and listen and try to learn — there’s life lessons in the smallest conversations.
"He is all about love and compassion and inclusiveness. He’s a treasure, and so is she."
It is because of the lasting relationship between the two couples that the Carter Work Project is coming to Nashville this year.
'The need is the same everywhere. ... People need roofs over their heads'
The costs of growth and change in Nashville are significant.
Between 2011 and 2017, rents in Nashville rose by 64%. During the same period, wages rose by only 14%. The disparity has displaced many residents from their neighborhoods.
In 2015, there was a shortage of 17,754 affordable rental housing units to meet the need of people who earn 60% or below median household income. Half of all Nashville renters and more than a quarter of all homeowners spent more than 30% of their income on housing.
Increasing the supply of housing is an important step. If enough new affordable housing is not built by 2025, Nashville is projected to have a shortfall of 31,000 housing units for low-income residents.
"As much as I want to always say that our home is the coolest place on the planet, the thing is … the need is the same everywhere," Brooks said. "The need in South Bend last year was the same need that was in Haiti. People need roofs over their heads."
The Carters bring a sense of community to a place of hardship.
Yearwood fondly reflects on the keen look the former president, often outfitted in a hard hat and jeans, can give as he moves through a build site — one directed at anyone who looks like they need something to do.
"I always think: 'Please let me be working on something when he walks by,' " Yearwood said with a laugh.
"Nobody on that work site works harder than the two of them. That keeps them vibrant."
Long-term success
In 2013, the Carters returned to what was once the dilapidated dwellings of East Sixth Street.
Now, the Lower East Side is a desirable place to live, bustling with people and traffic.
Just before their visit, the apartment building next door to Mascot Flats had sold for nearly $2 million.
And, inside, what they had once gutted now filled their hearts. The Carters spent nearly an hour there, meeting with some of the 12 original homeowners who still lived there.
It was the celebration of a milestone. And the Carters saw there what they see across the country.
"They are very proud of their new ownership," Carter said. "... It just changes the whole attitude. There's no graffiti. None of the windows are broken. Lawns are kept very neat. It totally transforms a dilapidated area of a community, and eventually the people who have been all around there raise their standards of keeping up their homes, as well."
In an interview that ran that week in The New York Times, then-CEO of Habitat New York City Neil Hetherington talked about the best way to measure the impact of Habitat’s inaugural Carter Work Project at Mascot Flats.
"For me, success is: How well did the children do? Did we break the cycle of poverty?" he said. "Ninety-eight percent of the children (at Mascot Flats) not only graduated from high school but went on to community college, or college or university.
"Long-term success is what this organization is all about."
Looking to the future
Now, the Carters turn to Nashville.
Park Preserve is the Nashville Area Habitat for Humanity's fifth affordable housing neighborhood. Construction began in 2010, and the first six homes were dedicated on Oct. 17 of that year.
In the last decade, it has grown to 125 families, many who previously lived in public housing. The 1,100-square-foot, three-bedroom homes that started at $135,000 now have an appraised value of more than $175,000, said Danny Herron, president and chief executive officer for Habitat of Greater Nashville, pointing to the revitalization of that North Nashville area.
With help from the Carter Work Project build, Park Preserve will continue to expand. The neighborhood is expected to be complete with a total of 175 Habitat homes by the end of 2020.
The 2019 Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project will be in Nashville through Friday.
The former president will lead a devotion Monday morning and then work alongside Brooks, Yearwood and the Nashville community to construct homes for working-class neighbors in need.
At the end of the week, the Carters will attend a show at the Grand Ole Opry.
Carter, who said he has "always" been a lover of country music (having been on stage with Willie Nelson six times, he noted), hopes Brooks and Yearwood might perform for he and his wife. He hopes, too, that the "hardest working" country couple will one day take over leadership of the Carter Work Project's volunteer groups.
He doesn't know what will come, only that the hard work will always be worth it.
"It shows you what people can do if they cooperate with one another," Carter said.
"We don't pay any attention to what kind of religious beliefs we have, or what kind of political beliefs we have, or anything else. We just work as a common group all sharing the same ideals and the same kind of dedication and the same kind of gratification.
"And I hope that someday we will see that situation exist all over the United States."
Reach Jessica Bliss at 615-259-8253 and jbliss@tennessean.com or on Twitter @jlbliss, and please support local journalism.