For a year Paulette Lindsey’s name had been on a waiting list for a Habitat for Humanity house. Lindsey, a school custodian in Slidell, La., lived with her two children in a water-damaged, single-wide mobile home that was slipping beyond repair. The median cost of a Habitat house in the United States is about $60,000 and would-be owners have to prove that they are financially able to repay the interest-free mortgage. In most cases, they also have to put in 300 to 400 hours of work during the house’s construction. Lindsey was hoping her turn at home-building would arrive soon when Hurricane Katrina hit. She and her kids, now ages 10 and 13, evacuated to Texas. When they returned, she found a tree firmly lodged against the trailer’s door and its branches sticking through the roof. “I said, ‘Lord, you’re going to have to fix this,’” she recalls.
Less than a month on the job as chief executive officer of Habitat for Humanity International, Jonathan Reckford must have been having the same thought after Katrina. He’d just been chosen to succeed the charity’s disgraced founder. He was commuting between Habitat headquarters in Americus, a small town in southwest Georgia, and his home near Minneapolis, Minn. And while the hurricane damage was being totaled, his organization was inundated with $123 million in donations—and Habitat was an organization whose reputation had been made not in disaster relief, but in finding ways to make housing affordable for low-income families.
By December 30, within months of the storm, the fix was made for Lindsey as she and her son and daughter moved into a new three-bedroom house. She was the first homeowner to benefit from Operation Home Delivery, a Habitat hurricane-recovery initiative that prefabricated house frames and shipped them to the Gulf for completion. Habitat, the ecumenical Christian nonprofit organization that is America’s 20th largest charity, plans to have 1,000 such houses finished by summer 2007.
And Reckford, MBA ’89, has settled into a job where leading an effort of this scale is only one piece of a workforce housing crisis that he, with joy and gratitude, feels called by God to address. A former executive at Disney and Best Buy, he found his way to a job where theology and strategic planning coexist. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s idea of ‘cheap grace’ really impressed me: the fruit of a transformed life is that you’re going to be out transforming the world,” he says. “The Habitat model is not just to create housing, but to educate and change the lives of everyone who gets involved.”
Reckford, veteran of many changes, is a lanky man who carries himself with the slightly hunched shoulders of a person who would sooner not be noticed. As he talks, he keeps his gangling hands tethered to each other or corralled in stationary crescents on the small polished wooden table in his office.
He grew up in bucolic Chapel Hill, N.C., where his father was a classics professor and his mother made a home for Jonathan and his four siblings while she worked as a volunteer advocate for civil rights. After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1984, Reckford took a job at Goldman-Sachs in New York. It was a new world. Walking home through Times Square, he was besieged by homeless beggars, and their presence made a deeper impression than most of what he was learning about investment banking.
Landing a Henry Luce Foundation Scholarship, which provides yearlong leadership opportunities in Asia, he went to Korea and pitched in with preparations for the 1988 Olympic Games. There he met a professor from the University of Seoul named Jim Peterson, who invited him to Bible study. “It was as if everything in my life, up to that point, suddenly made sense,” Reckford says quietly. “I had grown up Catholic and I believed there was a big God out there that I certainly believed in, but not in a way that had dramatic impact on my day-to-day life.”
Returning to the United States, he entered the Graduate School of Business. “At Stanford, the incredibly stimulating environment freed me to consider things that I might not have anywhere else,” he says. Coming from anyone else, that might sound like a commercial between Saturday afternoon college football games, but Reckford still cites guidepost comments from GSB lectures. He particularly remembers how Jim Collins, ’80, MBA ’83, who taught entrepreneurship, said that nonprofits should not try to be run like businesses because most businesses were not very well run.
Reckford went to work in strategic planning for Marriott Corp. and then Disney’s resort business. In 1990, he married Ashley Richards, whom he had known since his undergrad days. He was hired by Circuit City and then Musicland, where, as president of stores, he ran operations and made real estate decisions for 1,330 stores with $1.9 billion in sales. He stayed on when Best Buy bought Musicland.
But in 2002, feeling restless, he left that corporate life entirely. “I just really felt that the time was right to switch to something that merged my vocation and avocation,” he says. He took a mission trip with his church to India. As he tries to describe Dalits who were only allowed to clean toilets or were consigned to collecting dead bodies, he stops, wordless for a moment, and his hands spring loose from each other and fly up in a wide-open gesture of helplessness. “God just shattered my heart,” he says. “I had never experienced that raw sense of injustice in such a visceral way.”
He joined the board of Chicago-based Opportunity International, a Christian organization that makes small business loans to developing-world entrepreneurs. He also sent out résumé after résumé—for two years. He met with headhunters. Few positions were offered. Nothing felt right. “I felt that I had made the wrong decision, that I had messed it all up.”
He struggled. He prayed. He worried about supporting his wife and their three children, then all under 4. His church in Edina, Minn., the 4,300-member Christ Presbyterian Church, asked him to take a newly created position, executive pastor. It needed someone who could manage the increasingly complex business side of things. For the church, it was a big deal. To Reckford’s friends, it looked like career suicide.
The salary the church paid was modest and there were few perks, but Reckford enjoyed the immediacy of the job. It was possible to see people who were helped; they were not some distant market share, a demographic on a chart; they had names and faces and he could personally observe how they were doing.
And, 18 months later, when a headhunter called to ask Reckford about the Habitat job, the opportunity seemed to fit like an expert carpenter’s joint.
At Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, director Nick Retsinas answers his phone and says, before a question about Reckford can be completed, “He’s a good man.”
The emphasis on his words is noticeably not like that of a tossed-off phrase such as “He’s a good guy.” In conversation, Retsinas, chair of Habitat’s board, plunks down facts and figures like a blackjack dealer plunking down cards, but Reckford’s name elicits a slow, sober sentence of equally weighted words: “He’s a good man.”
Retsinas would know how important it is that Habitat’s CEO be beyond reproach. In 2004, a female staffer accused Habitat’s founder and longtime president Millard Fuller of groping her. Similar allegations had arisen in the past. (The media coverage of the scandal included dredging up a 1990 letter of support to Fuller from his close friend and Habitat’s most famous volunteer, former President Jimmy Carter.) In the controversy, Fuller—a man much honored for creating a model charity that energized volunteers and donors—was forced out. He and his wife, Habitat co-founder Linda Fuller, have since started another housing ministry in Americus.
The contretemps hit just as Habitat was gearing up to rebuild homes that had been destroyed when the December 2004 tsunami swept the coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, killing almost 230,000 and leaving millions without shelter. Habitat waded into the fray under the leadership of its board and set to work building simple one-room homes it constructs overseas at a cost of a few thousand dollars each.
Habitat’s board was in the middle of what Retsinas calls a strategic planning process when they were faced with culling through lots of CEO candidates. The board members, he says, knew they had to “get the scale”—find someone who knew how to move a large and diverse organization toward its goals. “With Jonathan, we had the perception that he had the ability to take us there,” Retsinas says.
In his tenure so far, Reckford has formed new partnerships to help Habitat. Thrivent Financial for Lutherans aims to build up to 500 homes annually in the United States by 2008, contributing an additional $1 for every $2 donated to Habitat by its 3 million members (up to $300 per member annually). A “Love Thy Neighbor” partnership with the NAACP mobilizes African-American community advocates to widen housing opportunities in challenged neighborhoods. In the NCAA ’s “Home Team” project, a “house in a box” will be framed at each of 88 championship games.
In his most controversial decision, Reckford and some Habitat staff moved to offices on Peachtree Street in Atlanta. Isolated Americus, a three-hour drive from Atlanta and its airline hub, was a tough sell in recruiting professionals needed for Habitat’s continued expansion.
Nothing has tested the organization’s scale-up as much as the natural disasters have. Reckford’s greatest challenge may be how to divvy up Habitat’s resources between relief work and housing development. “We will continue to focus on community development, but because those who have the least to begin with suffer the most in these disasters, it seems consistent with our mission to help communities rebuild after the initial relief work,” he says. “We intend to continue to respond to disasters as best we can but not at the expense of our core building programs.”
Habitat, a decentralized organization of local chapters, wasn’t really set up for massive construction projects needed in the wake of the disasters. “We are organized to build a relatively small number of houses in a huge number of locations around the world,” says Reckford. “The tsunami and the Gulf hurricane challenged us to build a large number of homes in a relatively small area, so we’ve learned a lot about scale. We have completed over 6,000 homes for families in the tsunami region while providing other forms of assistance to many more. We have some 400 homes finished or under construction in the Gulf and are on our way to 1,000 by next summer. So we are having to innovate to drive volume.”
The idea, he says, is to emerge with a lot more knowledge, and survive the distractions that disasters bring. There have been plenty of those. Habitat had built houses in Lebanon, and with each evening’s newscast in August, Reckford was aware that those homes were probably being destroyed by combat between Hezbollah and the Israeli army. Habitat will not return to Lebanon until it is considered stable again. (When Reckford talks about world events, he is utterly no-nonsense, and his manner calls to mind his grandmother, New Jersey Congresswoman Millicent Fenwick—considered the model for Lacey Davenport in Garry Trudeau’s comic strip, Doonesbury.) There is no point, he states, in rebuilding in areas that are only going to be bombed out.
Habitat is a Christian ministry, but he does not consider fundamentalist Islamic countries lost territory despite the fact that Habitat has never been allowed in Iran and has not been asked to help in Iraq. About the former, he says, “There are countries that don’t want us because of the religious affiliation or for political reasons” and regarding the latter: “We have not been welcomed there, but it is also not stable enough for us to be there.”
In contrast, he points to Egypt: “We have gone back in within the last year, for a rebuild”—Habitat will return to areas it has built to make repairs or additions—“and in this one village the family that was doing most of the work was a Christian family. So, they were working on a Muslim home and then, when it was time to rebuild the Christian family’s home, we realized that they would have to find somewhere else to live for the three months that their house would be under construction. The local imam told them they could live in the mosque. And they did.”
Over Reckford’s right shoulder, through the window that takes up most of the southern wall of his office, a swath of treetops is visible between the shining black walls of two skyscrapers. The greenery pinpoints some of the neighborhoods that Habitat rebuilt prior to the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games. From 1994 through 1996, Habitat constructed almost 200 homes in Atlanta.
Now, 10 years later, the value of property in those areas has appreciated so much that Habitat can’t afford to buy lots there—and thereby offer its helping hands to poor working families who still live in isolated rundown accommodations on gentrified blocks. In booming Atlanta neighborhoods, warehouses have sprouted rooftop gardens and sagging Craftsman bungalows have been restored to their 1930s glory; they gleam with beveled glass doors and copper flashing on the gutters. Modest Habitat homes, with their pastel clapboard siding, are not welcome among them.
The families, many of which are headed by grandparents raising their children’s children on fixed incomes, cling to their homes, which are considered blights on the neighborhoods even as their property taxes rise. They could sell their houses, of course, and move to unimproved neighborhoods. But that would mean uprooting their children from schools that finally are seeing better days because, as the neighborhoods improved, they have gained more affluent and involved parents.
Such are the ironies that affect Habitat’s core work after a decade of ballooning housing prices and the erosion of household budgets by cost increases such as the price of heating fuel. “There is a disconnect between the labor market and the housing market,” Retsinas says. “It used to be that if you had a decent job you would eventually have a decent home, but every year that becomes more unattainable for more Americans.”
The Northeast and West Coast housing markets have the most painful prices—with the San Francisco Bay Area topping the list of the most expensive markets in America. Someone working a minimum-wage job 40 hours a week cannot make enough money to pay rent and save up for a down-payment on a house.
“Our economy produces and is dependent on a large number of low-wage jobs and those jobs don’t pay enough to provide people with a decent place to live,” Retsinas says. He adds that the federal commitment to providing affordable housing has shrunk in relation to demand—and consequently, organizations like Habitat have become more important and more burdened.
Even workers with jobs in the moderate pay bracket increasingly feel the chokehold of housing costs. Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, echoes Retsinas: “We’re not even talking about low-income families on the cusp of homelessness. We are talking about teachers, policemen, firefighters and servicemen just back from overseas.”
HUD, adopting a sweat-equity premise much like Habitat’s, has launched a Self-Help Home Ownership Program (SHOP). Earlier this year, when HUD announced $24.8 million in SHOP grants, Habitat was one of four beneficiary organizations. “Habitat is an organization that we know will deliver,” Sullivan says. “Habitat walks the walk.”
Reckford, worried that “we are headed for a huge workforce housing crisis,” says Habitat will face the crisis by partnering with other nonprofits, governments and the private sector to come up with solutions. “We will also be more active as advocates for better housing policy to support working families’ ability to have decent shelter without it taking the majority of their income. It will take a massive collective effort to make a significant dent in the problem, but we’re committed to doing everything we can.”
STEPHANIE RAMAGE is news and business editor of The Sunday Paper in Atlanta.
