Reservation Housing Project Fosters Pride of Ownership

Cheryl Morgaridge has set some firm rules at home: no playing football or basketball inside the house and no nails in the walls to hang pictures.

That’s because Morgaridge, who once relied on the government for housing, now owns her own home. Taped-up posters adorn the four-bedroom house, and her four children play hockey in the basement.

Morgaridge and about two dozen other families on the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation have a former president to thank for their new homes.

More than six years after Jimmy Carter and 1,500 other volunteers built 30 houses in a week on the reservation, 24 of the original homeowners remain.

“One thing is that if something happens to me, the kids will have a place,” Morgaridge said in a recent interview. “It gave us a home for us to take care of.”

It was the first Habitat for Humanity project on an American Indian reservation, where roughly eight of 10 people don’t have a job and government housing is the main alternative.

“I think, given the economic situations that take place not only on Eagle Butte but on all Native American reservations, we’ve been very successful in keeping Habitat homeowners in their homes,” said Michael Willard, director of program enhancement at Habitat headquarters in Georgia.

Before Morgaridge moved into her Habitat house, which she and Carter helped build, her rent for government-owned housing was $400 a month. Now her 20-year mortgage is $170 a month.

And the home is better insulated and has a gas furnace instead of electric heat, so it’s a lot cheaper to take the chill out of South Dakota winters.

The foreclosure of six of the original 30 loans works out to a default rate of 20%, compared to the 1% average for Habitat homes in general and most commercial banks.

New Homes Offered Some a New Start

Morgaridge did fall behind on payments during her divorce, but she has since caught up and stayed current. With help during such times, most people stay in their homes, said Kay Bourland, director of the Eagle Butte Habitat chapter.

But not always.

“It’s the hardest part of the job, the foreclosure procedure. But Habitat’s motto is ‘We are a hand up, not a handout.’ Not everyone is cut out to be a homeowner,” she said.

For some, the new homes offered a new start. “I can think of one family that [was] living in a tent,” Bourland said. Now, she said, they are doing well in their new home. “I’ve seen them do a 180-degree turnaround from where they were,” she said.

Bourland’s husband and the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe’s chairman, Gregg Bourland, said the Habitat homes have been a good addition to the reservation.

The new homeowners care for their property and each other, he said. Habitat owners have a sense of pride because they invest in a down payment and donate several hundred hours toward building their homes.

“Government programs don’t have any equity or down payment,” Gregg Bourland said. “There’s no sense of ownership. They treat it like rental property.”

Besides the original 30 houses, the local Habitat chapter has built another four homes and is finishing remodeling 10 others donated by the tribe. The goal is to build one house a year using primarily volunteers from around the country. Still, that may not be enough on a reservation where 60% of the 1,528 tribal families are homeless or living in overcrowded conditions.

The tribal housing director, Wayne Ducheneaux, said he was skeptical at first about Habitat’s construction methods but has changed his mind. Now he’d like more homes. Some 250 families are on the waiting list.

“We’ve got severe overcrowding out here. Sometimes we’ve got 20, 30 people in a house,” Ducheneaux said.