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| Charity: Siding goes up on Edward Parker's custom-designed and free home in East Biloxi, Miss. Giving people homes as gifts
is a rising phenomenon across the US. Kristen Zeiber/Gulf Coast Community Design Studio |
The helping hand these days often holds a new house
House-gifting has become a major philanthropic trend in the US, in part fueled by reality TV shows.
from the January 28, 2008 edition
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Swinging perhaps the biggest hammer is the show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," which recently aired its 100th episode. It was scheduled to feature the Herods Jan. 27. The show, led by a lanky carpenter named Ty Pennington, weaves real-life fairy tales from personal tragedies, ending in emotional meltdowns when the order to "Move that bus!" reveals that a leaky ranch has been replaced by a sprawling hacienda.
"We are returning to a time where communities take care of themselves," says Denise Cramsey, executive producer of the show, in an on-location phone call from New Mexico.
Some housing experts see it as entirely appropriate for private and charity groups to step onto the scaffolding, since the benefits – whether from promotion for corporations or quality of life for families – tend to be generally mutual. "No one is really getting hurt here," says Stephen Peca, a real estate professor at New York University.
Not everyone agrees. Some critics aren't happy with personal tragedies being sold as utopian fairy tales to consumers. And sometimes even the most well-intentioned plans go awry.
Recently, a family in Biloxi had to turn down a new house because they couldn't pay insurance rates that had gone up by 300 percent. For others, a spiffier place can also mean more complicated upkeep. And some observers note a peculiar phenomenon: Few of the house recipients in Biloxi, for example, are doing much to help their neighbors once the keys are handed over.
Some also point out that house-gifting falls far short as a tactic to significantly reduce housing anxieties in the US. "For every one family that needs a house that gets one, there are hundreds of thousands that could use a house that don't get one," says Robert Thompson, a pop-culture professor at Syracuse University in New York.
The depth of the need is often what sparks house-building projects, says Professor Heller at Old Dominion. Take the Cranes in Snellville, who had no resources to modify their old home for a wheelchair. And by the end of the flooding, the Herods in Goffstown still had to pay on a $130,000 mortgage note, even though they had no house and had received only $3,000 in insurance compensation.
For volunteers, the ultimate appeal may be less about building and more about how giving changes their own lives.
"There are so many benefits that you forget that someone actually gets in a house," says Paula Young, director of No Place Like Home in Rochester, N.H. The organization is using high school vo-tech students to build nine free homes in New Hampshire and Louisiana.
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