Love Thy Neighbor : Can Habitat Home Dwellers, Encanto Residents Find a Way to Heal Wounds? Time Will Tell
Ask for the 10-cent tour of Josephine Crosby’s new house in Encanto, and the 57-year-old great-grandmother has difficulty containing her pride.
“That’s 25-cent, please,” she corrects as she shows off the tidy two-bedroom house she helped build as part of a Habitat for Humanity project in June. The kitchen is her favorite spot--she varnished the cabinets herself. But Crosby’s careful touch is evident throughout, from the freshly watered plants on the doorstep to the framed picture of she and former president Jimmy Carter, Habitat’s most famous volunteer, next to the sofa.
Already, Crosby says, she loves the quiet street that she, her two grandchildren and six other low-income families (selected by the nonprofit Habitat group) are learning to call home. But while she enjoys having a place of her own, Crosby is realistic about its limits.
“I don’t think we will ever be accepted in this neighborhood,” she said matter-of-factly one recent afternoon. “These houses sit apart from everybody--set off. I honestly don’t feel a part of this community, (but) it doesn’t matter. As long as it’s nice and clean and quiet at night, it’s all right with me.”
Given the neighborhood’s recent divisive history, Crosby’s ambivalence is not surprising. In May, a month before the seven new Habitat houses were built, about 30 long-time Encanto residents filed suit to block the project, claiming that it was environmentally insensitive and would do damage to an historic site--the old Capps estate, where one-time Mayor Edwin M. Capps had built his home in the early 1900s.
The suit eventually was dismissed on a technicality. But that did not squelch neighborhood opposition.
People such as Ardise Rawlins, chairwoman of the Encanto Community Council and a 25-year resident of the area, worried that Encanto’s country appeal would be disrupted by the closely packed Habitat project, which arranged the seven new homes around an existing older house. In June, during the weeklong construction marathon that drew 150 Habitat volunteers (including Carter and his wife Rosalynn), Rawlins and about a dozen others picketed the site.
Today, four months after the homes were built and occupied, some people who live near the 1.4-acre triangular plot at 60th Street and Merlin Drive continue to chafe.
This week, residents reported to the San Diego Historic Site Board that several of the huge, lush pine trees on the property are ailing--they say as a result of the Habitat construction. What’s more, the project appears unfinished: deep ruts are cut where the sidewalks should be and, as yet, the yards are composed only of dirt and mud. Not a blade of grass has been planted.
“Since all the attention and do-gooders and Bible thumpers have left, so it seems has the interest to finish them,” Edward and Katherine Armstrong, who live less than a block from the site, wrote recently to a local newspaper. The letter acknowledged that the Habitat tenants are required to put their own labor into the homes, an in-kind contribution called “sweat equity.”
“But couldn’t they put forth just a little more sweat into landscaping their yards? Or are they waiting for more free help to dig holes for their plants?” the Armstrongs wrote. “Oh, well, who cares? It’s just Encanto!”
Other Encanto residents echo the Armstrongs’ cynicism.
“Cemeteries, sanitation plants--anything negative that the city can dump, this is where they dump it,” said Hazel Higgins, voicing a widely held concern that the project is suffering because it is located in Southeast San Diego, whose working-class residents lack political clout. Higgins, a real estate associate who has lived in Encanto since 1961, calls the Habitat homes “a bunch of shanties. . . . As far as I’m concerned, it’s an eyesore. President Carter has gone back to the peanut plantation and that’s the way it is.”
David Snell, the executive director of the local Habitat chapter who also lives in the old Capps home in the center of the Encanto site, balks at such sentiments. While he acknowledges that the site is not yet “as pretty as it might be,” he rejects the suggestion that Habitat has been lackadaisical about applying the finishing touches because the homes happen to be in Southeast.
“These are not ramshackle homes. They’re well-built,” he said. “Time will prove we’ve really enhanced Encanto. These are great folks. Decent, upstanding people. Encanto is the beneficiary of what we’ve done.”
There are problems, he admits. Some of the pine trees have withered in part because of the project, he says, although he maintains they were already suffering from neglect before the construction began. And until the sidewalks are poured in November, any visits from the gardeners will be delayed--leaving the yards looking more like lunar landscapes than bucolic ones.
But while the Encanto project is among the most embattled ever undertaken by the Georgia-based affordable-housing organization, Snell remains optimistic that time will heal all wounds. It is more difficult, he contends, to stay angry at institutions than individuals. After months of focusing their frustration upon the Habitat organization, he says, Encanto residents now must decide whether to aim their anger at 35 human faces--Crosby and her neighbors, the Brazleys, the Godinezes, the Harveys, the Tones, the Tolberts and the Williamses--or to let it go.
Judging by the experiences of a few of the Habitat families, at least some of the tension appears to have dissipated. Annette Perry Williams, who moved with her husband Anthony and their three children into one of the houses on 60th Street, says while she mostly socializes with other newcomers, she has on occasion felt welcomed by long-time residents.
“My neighbors across the street, they’re nice,” she said. “They drive by, they wave, they come over, they talk to us. They remember years ago when they got their house; they remember how hard it is.”
Even critics like Rawlins, who compares watching the Habitat houses go up to having her heart broken, says she is not interested in holding a grudge against her new neighbors.
“If I see them, I wave,” Rawlins, who lives across Iona Drive from the houses, said. “I’ve endeavored to reach out when I can, bow my head (hello) or something. Some of them look and some of them don’t.”
She worries that because Habitat for Humanity has largely helped finance the families’ homes, those families may feel less able to demand improvements.
“I’d be on Habitat like white on rice: ‘Get over here and put down some grass. I want my house to look like something,’ ” she said. “So often when somebody gives you something on a silver platter, you’re not motivated to do anything else.”
But ultimately, she agrees with Snell that, with time, the pain will ebb and the neighborhood will heal. If nothing else, she says, if her new neighbors “stay long enough they’ll feel the same way we do. If somebody moves in and doesn’t take care of the property, they’ll know how we feel. They will.”
