The Chosen Few Gaze at Beginning of a Decent Habitat

Dwayne Harvey, his wife Kelly, and four of their five children looked out over a dirt lot in Southeast San Diego Monday and saw their future.

“This is your room,” Dwayne told his three small sons, Armon, Alonzo and Aaron, as he pointed to a dusty corner marked by stakes. “This is where it’s going to be.”

Alonzo, 3, spied a port-a-potty perched temporarily on the construction site. “Is that going to be the bathroom?” he asked.

“No, baby,” his mother answered with a smile. “We’ll have our own.”

In five weeks, former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalyn, are scheduled to help the Harveys and six other families build their own homes on this tree-filled, 1.4-acre lot in the 900 block of 60th Street. The project, sponsored by the nonprofit housing builder Habitat for Humanity, has angered some Encanto residents, who have filed suit to block the project. But, on Monday, at a festive groundbreaking ceremony, the seven soon-to-be neighbors seemed unfazed by the controversy.

“This is going to be the first time I’d ever owned a home,” said Annette Perry-Williams, 24, an aircraft assembler for McDonnell Douglas, who seemed unable to stop smiling. She said Encanto is a big step up from the apartment near Market Street where she and her husband, Anthony, a welder, and their three children now live. The apartment, she said, is “not a place that I want to raise my kids. There’s a lot of car theft. A lot of drug traffic--constant, all around me.”

Standing under one of about 2 dozen Torrey pines and palms that will be maintained on the site, Perry-Williams said, “It’s real nice over here.”

That niceness is what the Encanto Community Council says it sought to preserve by suing the city of San Diego. The council alleges that the city failed to adequately assess the project’s environmental impact and that it mistakenly allowed grading to begin before the city’s Historic Site Committee ruled on the importance of the lot’s one existing house, a one-story bungalow built by turn-of-the-century San Diego Mayor Edwin M. Capps. They say the Habitat homes will transform the park-like area into a ghetto.

Habitat officials, who say they’ve never encountered such resistance in building more than 5,000 other

Habitat houses around the world, say they think the community’s fears are sparked by unfamiliarity. The Encanto project, which will be built in tandem with a 100-home Tijuana project, is the San Diego debut for Habitat, a Georgia-based group that prides itself on developing partnerships with communities and carefully screening applicants to choose good neighbors. The Carters are the group’s most prominent volunteers.

Ken Sauder, executive director of the Tijuana-San Diego Habitat for Humanity, is optimistic that the pending lawsuit will not quash Habitat’s plans. “The more the community comes to understand Habitat and what it does, the better things will be,” he said Monday, as each family said a prayer and pushed a shovel into the soil, dedicating its own home. “These are good folks, who have a positive outlook on life.”

For example, Harvey, 28, works for San Diego’s Parks and Recreation Department to feed his five children. For two years, the Harveys have lived as an extended family with Kelly Harvey’s parents and grandmother in San Diego. Being chosen from a field of 70 applicants to receive an interest-free mortgage on an Encanto home, “is a terrific blessing,” he said.

Josephine Crosby, a 57-year-old great-grandmother, said she couldn’t wait to move her grandchildren, Earl and LaShana Murphy, into the house. In the meantime, though, she has agreed that, instead of a down payment, she will contribute 500 hours of “sweat equity,” an exercise in home construction. If there is anything intimidating about the move, she said, that is it.

“We’re not carpenters any type of way,” Crosby laughed.