Long Island Check Aids Housing Effort
Episcopal News Service. February 23, 1984 [84036]
NEW YORK (DPS, Feb. 23 ) - "How could my face be other than sad when the city...lies in ruins and its gates have been burned down... give me leave now to go... and rebuild it."
The sadness and ruin of East Brooklyn -- so like Nehemiah's Jerusalem -- is being rebuilt with the help of a $1 million interest-free loan from the Diocese of Long Island.
It all began in 1981 when East Brooklyn Churches, an ecumenical coalition in that devastated area, began looking for ways to revitalize their neighborhood. They called on the help of the community-organizing group, Industrial Areas Foundation, and rounds of meetings with local church people were held.
In the fall of 1982, a housing development project called the Nehemiah Plan was born. The organization's name grew out of the realization by the Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, a Baptist clergyman who was one of it's founders, that the problems faced in rebuilding East Brooklyn were the same as those the prophet Nehemiah, whom Youngblood's church was then studying, had faced in the rebuilding of Jerusalem.
Believing that the reason most urban renewal plans based on home ownership fail is because their size (usually about 200 homes) is too small not to be swallowed up by the surrounding blight, the Nehemiah project is planning big: a minimum of 1,000 two- and three-bedroom single-family brick homes, with a projected final total of 5,000. Each 1,000 homes covers an area of 20 blocks and brings in approximately four to five thousand people, creating a community of home-owners who bring money and stability to the area.
The project organizers convinced city fathers to donate burned-out land the city owned for the site and the state to agree to guarantee low-interest loans. This and the assembly-line techniques of modern construction have lowered costs and allowed houses which would normally sell for over $100,000 to be offered for under $40,000. With the loan program, this means that monthly carrying charges on the houses will be around $300 -- affordable to the lower middle class and some working poor.
The first 200 houses are under construction, and almost all have been sold already. Families are expected to begin moving in around April, about 20 at a time.
But all this would not be possible without seed money, and that has been provided by churches: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Episcopal. The Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, which recently presented its check for $1 million to Youngblood, hopes to raise an additional $1 million through the diocesan Venture in Mission program.
At the presentation, the Rt. Rev. Robert Witcher, Bishop of Long Island, cited the loan as evidence of his diocese's "commitment to the city and the working poor. When you look at city housing, you can write off an area or you can put in a rental project, but this plan is an opportunity for the poor to remain and own their homes." The project's housing program officer Mike Gecan summed it up: "While others talk about activism, this diocese does something about it."
As Nehemiah said: "The God of heaven will give us success. We, his servants, are going to build."