Most people in the Wellborn Manor area who live in homes not built by Habitat for Humanity are tired of the traffic from this week’s Jimmy Carter Work Project.
Buck and Joyce Greenwood, however, observe it like a parade.
“I’ve never in my life seen anything like it,” said Greenwood, who arrived in the area in 1936, before electricity. He sat on his Front Street porch Wednesday, reading about the project in the newspaper while his wife at his side fanned herself with the coupon pages. “I never knew they had so many school buses.”
Residents on Parkwood Drive, Front Street and Wildman Road have seen the activity coming for more than a year. By Friday, they will have about 90 new neighbors in 35 new houses.
It has always been a quiet area — just outside Anniston’s city limits. This week, 2,800 volunteers are marching around carrying hammers.
But only a few residents have any complaint, other than about the convoys of trucks and school buses filing past carrying supplies and volunteers to the build site.
They know the traffic will taper off over the weekend, when the former president and his legions of volunteers leave.
“It’s gonna be a beautiful community,” Mrs. Greenwood said.
Only one of the few neighbors who voice opposition to Habitat goals was willing to give his name.
“What in the world is going on over there?” said Charles Body, who lives on Parkwood, a few blocks from the Habitat neighborhood.
About a dozen Habitat homes have gone up in the past year. Two homeowners have built privacy fences, and one has an above-ground swimming pool. Body doesn’t understand how a low-income person, the kind Habitat helps, could afford such improvements.
“I mean, I can’t qualify,” said Body, 59, whose mother raised him on welfare checks. “I would like to know how she (the homeowner with the pool) qualified.
“How is that charity?”
Another man said the same thing about the fences. “I couldn’t even do that, and I’m 65 and I’ve worked my whole life,” he said. “It (Habitat) is supposed to be for the needy people.”
Dana van Ekris, Habitat’s executive director for Calhoun County, said the nonprofit organization encourages homeowners to improve their property. Of the two privacy fences in the neighborhood, one was built a few boards at a time — from paycheck to paycheck — and the other had her fence and pool built with money she received in a disability lawsuit, nine months after moving into her house.
At least one person has left the area because his house backed up to the Habitat site. He listed his Wildman Road home for $70,000, but he was in such a hurry to leave he sold it to Dan Jeswald for $44,000.
“I got a hell of deal,” said Jeswald, 56, a Vietnam veteran on disability.
He had an incident with Habitat on Monday that still burns him. People visiting the site started parking in his yard without asking.
“I’m trying to get grass to grow,” he said. “I think it’s extremely discourteous.”
He hung “No Parking” signs on a string by the road. Aside from that annoyance, however, he welcomes the project.
“I think it will improve the neighborhood,” he said.
His wife, Pauline Jeswald, has friends who live in Habitat houses. She hopes the old-timers in her neighborhood will not be nasty to the new homeowners because they have different skin colors. The Wellborn Manor breeze ruffles more than one confederate battle flag.
“This place is a redneck ranchero,” she said.
Many in the neighborhood are quite supportive of the Carter project.
“I think it’s fantastic,” said Thomas Murray, whose mobile home and more than 20 automobiles border the site. He has been shining a 500-watt floodlight in that direction every night to make the security officers’ job easier.
Perry Jones, a traveling evangelist who wears a John Deere hat, said the influx of good, decent people would strengthen the character of the area. He once had a wheelbarrow stolen, so he put up a fence and got two small, but quite vocal, dogs.
Sooner or later, he said, “We might have a nice little church over here in this community. You never can tell.”
