Via memeorandum, this:
RESIDENTS of a model housing estate bankrolled by Hollywood celebrities and hand-built by Jimmy Carter, the former US president, are complaining that it is falling apart.
Fairway Oaks was built on northern Florida wasteland by 10,000 volunteers, including Carter, in a record 17-day “blitz” organised by the charity Habitat for Humanity.
Eight years later it is better known for cockroaches, mildew and mysterious skin rashes.
A forthcoming legal battle over Fairway Oaks threatens the reputation of a charity envied for the calibre of its celebrity supporters, who range from Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt to Colin Firth, Christian Bale and Helena Bonham Carter.
The case could challenge the bedrock philosophy behind Habitat for Humanity, claiming that using volunteers, rather than professional builders, is causing as many problems as it solves.
April Charney, a lawyer representing many of the 85 homeowners in Fairway Oaks, said she had no problems taking on Habitat for Humanity, despite its status as a “darling of liberal social activists”.
While at memeorandum, I saw that Malkin had linked to this, and I was curious: who will get the hate? Will it be the “darling of liberal social activists,” or will it be the poor, shiftless, lazy SOB’s who get the house for free, sponging up the hard work of others?
It really is a tough call. Answer after the flip.
C’mon, folks, you knew the answer- BOTH:
The road to hell is paved with good intentions — and, apparently, the homes in the neighborhoods along that hellish path are built by Jimmy Carter and Habitat for Humanity.
***All Jimmy Carter-bashing and schadenfreude aside, do the residents have a bona fide case or are these professional moochers trying to pin blame on others for their own lack of personal responsibility?
Probably a bit of both. A few of the houses seem to have been clearly uninhabitable. In 2005, the cracks in one foundation reportedly “became so severe that the house had to be lifted and settled on piers. Engineers hired by HabiJax found six feet of debris buried under the soil,” reports the NYT.
But was the entire project tainted?
***I’ve watched enough of these “environmental justice” activists to know that they coach their clients to complain about vague ailments (”mysterious skin rashes”) that have no relation in reality to the environmental conditions they claim are the cause. These professional grievance-mongers have blocked countless private redevelopment and remediation projects — and milked tens of millions in settlements — based on bogus scientific and medical claims.
So much hate, so little time.
dmsilev
But, and the question must be asked, what type of countertops were installed in these houses?
-dms
Xecklothxayyquou Gilchrist
C’mon, folks, you knew the answer- BOTH
Wow! I did guess it before even clicking the "read the rest" link. How did I know?
And does Malkin realize the houses aren’t given away?
The anger that Habitat for Humanity arouses in the fRighties always amazes me. I guess it’s because it’s a Christian project that – blasphemously! – follows Jesus’ teachings by helping the poor, and it attracts liberal celebrities. I don’t understand the loathing that liberal celebrities inspire, either, but it’s clearly a potent force.
This is the first time I’ve heard of a complaint about build quality of Habitat homes, too.
matt
Hehe!
mcd410x
Professional grievance mongers?
Were there CEOs involved?
sgwhiteinfla
How anybody can call themselves a Christian and not support the efforts of Habitat for Humanity however flawed those houses are is beyond me. If they are the darling of liberal activists where is the "conservative" counterweight that is also trying to rebuild homes for people that need help? They talk so much about how conservatives give more to charity I guess that only counts when a tax break is involved.
Of course Malkin is CINO so this should surprise no one.
Scott
Has Michelle looked in a mirror lately?
smiley
Michelle Malkin: Science and medical expert. So expert, in fact, that she can diagnose remotely. Just like Bill Frist.
Rosali
Maybe Bush can go knock back a few beers on Trent Lott’s porch now that it’s been rebuilt with FEMA funds.
DougJ
I hate to say this, but I’m also suspicious of "mysterious skin rashes".
DougJ
Any word on what kind of countertops they had there?
sparky
wouldn’t be cool if we could bottle the cognitive dissonance of these folks? imagine what leaps of uh logic we could perform. once it was isolated from teh stupid, of course.
r€nato
in my experience at least, every single fucking time I’ve encountered someone who takes their Xianity very seriously – whether they are a born-agin’er or a hardcore Catholic or whatever – they turn out to be the most hateful, hypocritical people you’ll ever meet.
TheHatOnMyCat
Hmm, something is odd about the story. If you bury garbage for eight years, you get compost. I don’t know of any health problems associated with compost. I have grown tomatoes in it successfully.
Cockroaches live in the mansions of Great Neck and Scottsdale. They live anywhere there is water and food.
Mildew will grow in the shower right here in Arizona, especially during the monsoon season.
What exactly is the real problem here? There’s not enough information in the linked story to figure it out.
Zuzu's Petals
Well, except that it says right in the article that the charity rep says the skilled work is performed by professionals.
And don’t the houses still have to pass all the normal building inspections?
r€nato
people like this – professional sociopaths – will never have any empathy for anybody else’s misfortune until they themselves are stricken.
That’s why I say that Malkin ought to get ALS. It’s for her own good, it will teach her to have some compassion for her fellow human beings.
DougJ
I would say that is true of most I’ve met but certainly not all. For example, Jimmy Carter himself takes his Xianity pretty seriously. I don’t know him but I know half a dozen serious Xians who are similar.
Atlliberal
Habitat for Humanity is the type of charity that conservatives should love. The recipients of the home do not get it for free. They have to earn it by working a certain amount of hours on other houses and still have to pay for the house.
Conservative bloggers seem to have to be really stretching to find things to accuse liberals of these days.
Bad Horse's Filly
While doing research for a documentary on Habitat, I found out something interesting – they’d prefer not to use volunteers. Seems they’re annoying and unreliable. Go figure.
As for Malkin, she’s useless on all levels and too easy to mock.
Brick Oven Bill
European-Americans with liberal arts degrees tend to be very arrogant. They see Mexicans laying sewer pipe and assume that they could do it too, with no ‘time in the trench’. This is false. Modern sewer systems have very shallow slopes and even the bow in a single stick can cause ponding that fails the current anal-retentive acceptance criteria, that the lawyers love. The bow needs to be placed to the side.
Hydraulically, the only thing that really matters is the drop in invert elevation between manholes. But it is fun to watch the system fight itself. This is one more reason why I have a large garden.
J.D. Rhoades
Sorry your experience has been so uniformly negative. I’ve met my share of hateful fake Christians, to be sure, but I’ve also worked on Habitat houses and at food banks and the like and a good portion of the volunteers I’ve worked with have been from churches.
Oh, and as for HfH: the people who are slated to be living in the house put their share of the work in as well. It’s a requirement.
And the supervisors were all either current or retired building industry pros, who watched us newbies like hawks to make sure we were doing it right.
The Other Steve
Hmm, the company I used to work for did a lot of work with Habitat, building at least two houses a year.
Of the people who volunteered, half had construction industry experience. My friend was the Habitat lead, and in his youthful days he had worked as a site foreman for one of the nation’s larger builders.
Even so, on site they had people who knew what they were doing.
Most of what the unskilled volunteers did was grunt work. The skilled people did most of the measuring, cutting, what have you.
passerby
Atty. April Charney appears to be a foreclosure fighter for the poor.
Doesn’t appear that she’s attacking Habitat for Humanity directly. Looks like HfH just happens to have gotten caught in the cross fire during a fight for consumer rights. The mysterious rash looks to be an act of desperation but is the go to weapon when railing against a well oiled, big moneyed bank or government institution.
Malkin has always struck me as being one of the most vile and hateful voices in the divide and conquer propaganda machine. She enables so many small people to get their freak on. Ignore her.
gogiggs
If it was just slightly less unwieldy, "Michelle Malkin calling someone a professional grievance-monger" would be a good candidate to replace "pot calling the kettle black", which, one must admit, is a bit outdated.
It looks like I need practice at the game, though. I actually didn’t guess "both", I guessed Jimmy Carter.
Just more evidence, though none was really needed, that those calling themselves conservatives have long since given up on any actually beliefs or philosophy and are now animated/united pretty much solely by their shared hatred for anything they perceive as liberal.
dr. luba
@sgwhiteinfla:
Re: "conservatives give more to charity"
It depends on how you define charity, I suppose, If you include religious organizations, including one’s own church, then, yes, the right tends to give more. But if you remove the local church out of the mix, and only consider charity as giving to other people, particularly people you don’t know, this no longer holds true.
Or so I seem to remember.
josephdietrich
Having lived for a short time in Florida, I can confirm that the entire state is known for cockroaches, mildew, and mysterious skin rashes. I mean, seriously, this sounds like more of a problem of poor maintenance rather than poor workmanship. There is not enough detail in the story to really know, of course.
bago
But I thought those European-Americans with degrees were obviously persons of quality, like the kind that use reason when making judgments that were soon spoiled when we started letting women and minorities into the voting system?
I haz a wtf.
just me
The Big Dig wasn’t done with Habitat volunteers.
Construction anywhere can have problems. I agree that there seems to be some missing pieces from the story.
Brick Oven Bill
No bago; the Founder’s voting criteria was not based on education, it was based upon productivity and taxation. People confuse education with achievement.
Some hard working illegal Mexicans I worked alongside took in $50k/year cash. This is more than most junior lawyers. This is because they were productive.
The Other Steve
One more thing… Habitat is actually a charity loved by conservatives too. A lot of church groups work with them.
So I don’t understand this liberal activist crack.
DougJ
There is an angle MM missed here: the impact of HfH on the subprime crisis. Think about it — all those houses being given away for free to lazy ingrates. No wonder the housing market collapsed! Did any of these homeowners get Fannie and Freddie loans to buy their free houses with? If they’d had to buy their houses through the free market, they wouldn’t be in this trouble.
And where does Barney Frank fit into all of this?
Face
Malkin is a nice person.
Ecks
@Zuzu’s Petals: writes:
As someone who spends many a weekends holding a habitat hammer, you are right and right there.
Zifnab25
It’s hard to say from the article alone whether this is a problem of shoddy construction or neglegant home owners. But one thing can be said with certainty. The best way to address either problem is to sit in front of your computer typing angry aimless screeds against everyone you don’t like. Thank goodness for stalkin malkin and the brave 101st keyboard commandos who have bravely winged in on their flying monkeys and shitbombed everything in sight.
Surabaya Stew
Actually TheHatOnMyCat at #13, it all depends on the type of garbage. All construction sites produce waste that cannot be recycled or easily disposed of, such as sheetrock, pressure treated lumber, concrete block, etc. (These materials will never compost in our lifetimes!) Perhaps this is what is being referred to in the linked story. But then again, as you said it best:
Precisely!
R-Jud
@Brick Oven Bill:
I agree that people do conflate education and achievement– especially nowadays, when even many graduate degrees are basically consumer goods– but you’re off a little: the Founders’ voting criteria was based upon property ownership, not productivity. You know of course that these are very different things. If we were to extend their criteria to the current time, Paris Hilton’s little brother would have the vote (once he was of age) while you, most likely, would not.
TheHatOnMyCat
True enough, but in every housing development I have ever seen, this stuff is plowed under and any dig on the property later will unearth this stuff. I can dig up construction debris from 1953 right out here in the back yard.
What seems relevant to this story is that nothing in the story points to anything unusual in this housing tract that would merit attention. I can’t figure out what the story is really about. It has the look and feel of a hit piece on poor people, but again …. not enough info in the story to know one way or the other.
But no matter how you slice it, there’s nothing to see here, time to move along. Don’t you think?
JR
Brick something wrote: "European-Americans with liberal arts degrees tend to be very arrogant.
Oh? Well, stupid fucks with their heads in their asses tend to be Conservative–AND they manage the arrogant part too. And they idiotically think that Americans were deposited here by God, rather than immigrating from Europe and killing the natives. Don’t bother telling me you’re from Asia or whatever, Brick, I honestly don’t think I could care less. Who cares if you were hatched by the sun.
I am trying to be Christian, I am, but I have the problem of hating Cons. I hate too much, I hate this BrickHead for example, and yet I must love them because they make themselves my enemies. So I’m not so good of Christian, but I’m trying. These Con artists are the tempters: they tempt you with hatred.
So, I love you Brickass and Mauldin. In a generic and not very good way, but I am trying. I do wish something would happen to make you human, though. I do wish that.
Brick Oven Bill
Voting criteria were left to the states.
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress…
…and the criteria, as I understand them, were taxation, or property ownership, or a combination of the two.
John Adam’s other son died a poor drunk. There is a lot of truth to those Chinese proverbs, despite the Kennedys. And the Kennedys are outnumbered by those of us suckers who actually pay income and property taxes.
I’d support a system that drew the political empowerment line to include truck drivers. I have never met an unpatriotic truck driver.
The way I figure, this would include a minimum federal tax of around $3,000. Any political system that empowers everybody is temporary as it simply goes broke. This is right out of Plato Book 8 Republic.
Guy Amazing
After all, Jimmy Carter is history’s greatest monster, so I guess this isn’t surprising.
El Cid
The real crime here is that no conservative is willing to do what’s needed to be done, and that’s to establish a Habitat for IN-Humanity, which brings together charity-funded volunteers who are willing to go insult and jeer poor people around the country who either don’t have homes or have homes we think are inferior.
Jon H
" If you bury garbage for eight years, you get compost."
Mattresses and box springs and TV sets and old furniture don’t compost particularly well.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Christ, she’s like a dog watching two squirrels. Unable to decide which one to chase she’s reduced to a spastic barking that will go on long after the squirrels are gone.
Zuzu's Petals
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
So full of win.
South of I-10
You are going to have mold, mildew, cockroaches and probably termites anywhere in the south unless you are actively trying to eliminate the problem. It is too damn hot and humid all the time. I read some of the local Jacksonville articles dating back a couple of years and the houses are settling, causing foundations to crack and all the related problems that go along with settling. There were also 50 reported infestation problems. The homeowners are saying the homes were poorly built. Anyway, there is some interesting reading here. I hope this works, it is a link to all of the articles in the Florida Times-Union.
Janet Strange
@Xecklothxayyquou Gilchrist:
It’s easy – their only purpose in life is hating liberals. So they must rant endlessly that liberal = bad. Or bad = liberal.
They go both ways on this: If it’s bad, then it’s liberal. So Fred Phelps is a liberal. Treason, liberal. Troop-hating, liberal. Anything a rational, decent person would think is immoral, stupid, or just plain evil = liberal. Or, from the other direction – if liberals like it, support it, etc, then it’s bad. S-CHIP, Habitat, protecting our environment, science. Bad.
Surabaya Stew
Thanks for replying to my comment, TheHatOnMyCat (#36). Without further information, I must agree that this "story" is probably much ado over nothing. If I had to guess, 1 house out of 20 MAYBE had an actual construction deficit, but that wouldn’t stop the other 19 owners from trying to get in on the action! Deferred maintenance is probably the cause of 90% of the problems here, due to the fact that these are mostly first time home owners with little experience in being responsible for a house. Were it a project build by a local church rather than by a big name charity, the story would have never taken off.
As an architect, I concur that construction debris can linger for ages; I personally have found newspapers from as early as 1860 hiding behind walls! When I was doing high-end residential work, all our clients paid for the expensive dumping cost associated with properly removing construction debris, but its easy to imagine that middle-income housing developers (and buyers) find that proper waste disposal is a luxury they can do without. A shame though, because this needlessly pollutes the earth.
BTW, isn’t it funny though how Malkin usually trashes trial lawyers as being agents of Democrats and Socialists, but since this time a "Liberal" is being sued, she’s beside herself with glee at the lawyers clogging up the court system? What a pathetic loser she is!
Interrobang
I’ve been seriously skeptical of Habitat since I found out it’s an explicitly Christian charity. In my experience, scratch a Christian, especially one who’s trying to do "good works" in public, find a scam artist. I think that’s as true for someone like Kent Hovind (professional creationist, went to jail for tax evasion because according to him, Caesar doesn’t get a cut on the Lord’s work, which translates roughly as "any business Kent Hovind is running") to the health fraudsters who operate MannaRelief Ministries, to the church ladies who run the local food banks and skim all the good stuff for themselves. Why not? They’re not perfect, just forgiven, after all.
Frankly, I wonder what pies Jimmy Carter’s got his fingers in, too.
Face
Michelle Malkin is a cogent, pensive, accurate news disseminator.
Hawise
Face- stop it, you’re killing me here. Malkin is probably a very good dinner guest but otherwise she is a blight on the intellectual face of America.
bago
People confuse education with achievement.
I see. So doing things like earning a degree of excellence in a field isn’t an achievement, but having a parcel of land in your daddy’s will is the key to reason. Gotcha.
Nope. Still haz a wtf.
Brick Oven Bill
Excellence requires standards, which have been sacrificed in the liberal arts schools since the 1960s. A solid technical degree, on the other hand, will typically provide its holder with the income to purchase property.
The reason student loans are drying up is because colleges have largely stopped adding value. Everything usually boils down to economics.
bago
* the Trivium
1. grammar
2. rhetoric
3. logic
* the Quadrivium
4. geometry
5. arithmetic
6. music
7. astronomy
Oh, I never knew the seven liberal arts had declining standards. Unless you count yourself as a failure of the third part of the trivium, at which point I accede.
Nellcote
The article reads like something from the NYPost. Oh wait, the TimesUK is a Murdoch paper. Just a coincindence I’m sure.
Brick Oven Bill
You didn’t cut and paste the entire Wikipedia definition, bago. If you would have continued to cut and paste from Wikipedia, you would have included this:
"In modern colleges and universities, the liberal arts include the study of art, literature, languages, philosophy, politics, history, mathematics, and science."
Those topics are hard to truthfully discuss by a staff that believes that the human mind has not evolved in the last 30,000 years. So the distortion begins, and the eye that alters, alters all*.
Then standards for truth falter, and then there is the fear of offense. Next comes the entitlement of self-esteem. And then, all of a sudden, banks won’t loan people money to attend these classes because they won’t have marketable skills, and can’t even grasp the concept of critical thinking.
*William Blake, pretty good for an engineer, eh?
Original Lee
@TOS:
I agree about the quality of the Habitat volunteers. My dad not only worked construction but also helped the local vocational school build a house every year for many years, and he has volunteered for Habitat for over 10 years. He is currently on the Elf crew and specializes in doors (i.e., puts the hinges on and hangs the door and then installs the doorknobs).
I call bullshit on the poor construction claims, as Habitat uses a set of requirements that pass muster in all 50 states, at least in part so that Habitat volunteers can go anywhere in the country and partly for administrative ease.
There is not enough detail in the story to tell what’s going on. If there is something wrong, I can think of 3 possibilities:
1. Habitat got screwed by donated materials. It’s possible that somebody was trying to dump construction materials that was treated with something no longer allowed in residential construction.
2. Habitat didn’t check the site before construction for hazardous waste plumes from neighboring sites.
3. Construction disturbed an illegal dumping site.
Otherwise, it’s just gratuitous elite-bashing.
bago
So Martinius Capella wrote this down 30k years ago? Pretty tricky distortion to write things down before writing was invented.
Now, you know the kind of people who really seem to a sense of entitlement and self-esteem? Well born white males who are such eminent founts of logic and reason, such as Kristol, Goldberg, and Bush. All of those well moneyed white men, who have given so much to our civilization.
Brick Oven Bill
I will have the last word, dammit.
passerby
@Brick Oven Bill
This observation reeks of win. The community colleges that teach practical skills, like construction, like automotive, and like, well, shop class, is where economic recovery will happen.
All the frickin MBA’s ,and the prescription-writing so-called Doctors of Medicine, and the "first,-kill-all-the" Lawyers have not contributed to the basic advancement of mankind (much less to the advancement of America) through out time.
The late, great, Stephen J. Gould commented that if you want to improve the "educational system" in America, double the salaries of teachers.
Else you’ve got capitalist American youth enrolling in those curricula which will garner money (money money money) doctors, lawyers, MBA’s.
People want to earn money. I love my plumber. I love my electrician, I love my mechanic. They make the world go ’round.
p.s.: I love my geeks. I’m a dinosaur, I NEED them.
Mike G
The case could challenge the bedrock philosophy behind Habitat for Humanity, claiming that using volunteers, rather than professional builders, is causing as many problems as it solves.
Right, because there have never been complaints of substandard houses constructed by good Republican ‘free enterprise’ (*cough* Katrina trailers). That might ‘challenge the bedrock philosophy’ of having private contractors build homes.
The houses may have been poorly contructed. Inspections should have uncovered this. If they didn’t, procedures need to be improved. But that’s not an exciting enough storyline to justify Little Lulu embarking on another hate tirade.
Kyle
Else you’ve got capitalist American youth enrolling in those curricula which will garner money (money money money) doctors, lawyers, MBA’s.
Most teachers I know are intelligent, well-balanced and thoughtful people who work much harder than they are given credit for, and put up with shitty pay, job insecurity and stifling bureaucracy (educational administrators are a different story).
Doctors have to be very book-smart, and at least have very good memories and great endurance to complete their training. But I’m not sure if there is a high correlation between the ability to get into and complete medical school and being a good doctor.
Most MBAs I have encountered are stupid, shallow, self-involved assholes, long on cunning and ruthlessness but short on brains and self-awareness, that remind me of George W Bush. Lawyers, with a handful of exceptions, are similar, with slightly more intelligence.
I have more respect for a really good mechanic or building tradesman than I do for MBAs or lawyers.
LanceThruster
Were the permits pulled correctly and inspected by the proper authorities?
CACDLAW
I am a construction defect defense lawyer in California. I assure you, "professionals" build shitty houses too.
pharniel
I recall from Hurricane Andrew that after the storm that the Habitat for humanity houses were the only ones in large swaths of land with roofing because they actually followed building codes and used the correct roof cleets and nails (tornado cleats or the like).
but that was, what, 17? 18? years ago so my mind may be a bit off, or construction standards for HfH may have declined, but i doubt it. Since the person who’s going to live there is working on it you can see the effects of ownership.
Randy Paul
But, and the question must be asked, what type of countertops were installed in these houses?
No doubt they were granite and you know how those liberals love granite. It was probably the cheaper kind that has uranium and radon trace in it. /snark>
jerry
A local HFH was a client of mine once upon a time. My firm did that and a few other non-profits on a below-market rate basis.
Anyway, the HFH was renting space in a conservative Catholic church parish office. The volunteer who ran the HFH on a day-to-day basis was a retired accountant, and a member of Chicagoland’s biggest conservative megachurch (Willow Creek).
Nothing about that place felt like it was the darling of liberal activists. It actually made me not want to donate time or money to HFH.