By John Leland, New York Times News Service | June 17, 2007
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/ar...iced_headache/
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- When Habitat for Humanity built the Fairway Oaks development here seven years ago, Mary Zeigler thought, "This is a blessing."
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In just 17 days, an army of 10,000 volunteers, including former President Jimmy Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter, built 85 low-cost houses, one of the nonprofit group's biggest "blitz build" projects.
"I could have something to call mine," recalled Zeigler, now 63, sitting in the coolness of her house's central air conditioning. In a lifetime of work, she had never been able to afford her own home.
Seven years later, Zeigler is one of more than 50 Fairway Oaks homeowners who have problems with their houses and say they fear that the blitz construction was shoddy and that their land, adjacent to two former town dumps, is unstable or contaminated.
"My pride is gone," Zeigler said, pointing to cracks in her house's ceiling and its concrete slab foundation. "I've got a 25-year mortgage, and I've got stuff that needs to be addressed or I'm just paying my mortgage in vain, because I won't have a house in 25 years because it will be falling apart."
The Fairway Oaks owners brought their complaints to Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, and of 56 who answered a survey for Legal Aid, 41 reported cracked concrete slabs, 22 had cracked walls, and 48 said their houses were infested with insects or rodents, presumably because of the cracks. Others reported mold or mildew, nails popping out of plasterboard, and other problems.
The Habitat for Humanity local affiliate, HabiJax, maintains that the land at Fairway Oaks is stable and that most problems in the development are housekeeping issues, not structural. City inspectors this month examined six houses and found no violations.
Jacksonville, in the northeast corner of the state, is a struggling former paper-mill town with one of the nation's highest rates of home foreclosures. Rumors about contamination at the Fairway Oaks property began long before HabiJax got involved.
In the early 1990s the land held a blighted public housing complex, built on what had been used, in isolated pockets, as a dump. After complaints by residents, the Environmental Protection Agency tested the soil for contamination. The EPA concluded that the land was safe but noted that two buildings had been demolished because of soil settling, possibly caused by debris decomposing under the soil. A later soil test found elevated levels of arsenic, but the Florida Department of Health determined there was no significant health risk.
Ronnie A. Ferguson, president of the Jacksonville Housing Authority, said the two buildings had been damaged by water runoff, not because of soil instability associated with buried debris.
As the public housing complex deteriorated, the housing authority offered the land to HabiJax for one dollar. For HabiJax, the land fit their mission, said Mary Kay O'Rourke, the HabiJax president. The project would remove a public blight and replace tax-subsidized housing with homes for people who could not otherwise afford them.Continued...
Low-cost homes turn into high-priced headache
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