Former President Jimmy Carter was set to attend a home-building event with Habitat for Humanity in Nashville in 2019 when he fell and hit his head at home in Georgia. He emerged from the hospital with a black eye and 14 stitches, but he refused to cancel his plans.
“I got a message from him saying, ‘I’m fine, I’m coming,’” said Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity’s chief executive. “It just fit with him so well. He came out and built every day.”
The sight of Mr. Carter, then 95, bandaged but undaunted, and his wife, Rosalynn, helping to screw together front porches that October underscored their importance as Habitat’s longtime public faces. As the group’s volunteers in chief, they deployed the prestige of the presidency to transform a small Georgia housing charity into a global builder with a $360 million annual budget.
Habitat says it has built or improved homes for roughly 62 million people. Mr. Carter, who died on Sunday, and Mrs. Carter, who died in November 2023, personally helped build or remodel 4,447 homes in 14 countries. Mr. Carter gave signed Bibles to families at the end of a home build.
Mr. Carter’s work swinging hammers and hanging drywall with the hopes of expanding homeownership and providing more affordable housing coincided with a dramatic increase in home prices. Now, that affordability crisis has left record numbers of people across the United States homeless and many struggling to afford rent or attain homeownership.
“It’s gotten worse,” said Don Kao, 73, who still lives in the one-bedroom apartment on East Sixth Street in Manhattan that Mr. Carter and Habitat helped to renovate in 1984, when the red brick building was a burned-out shell with no roof.
The Carters were so synonymous with Habitat for Humanity that people often mistakenly thought they had founded the group.
Its founders were actually Millard and Linda Fuller, a couple from Americus, Ga., about 130 miles south of Atlanta, who began the group as a way to live their Christian faith. Mr. Fuller called it “the theology of the hammer.”
After Mr. Carter lost re-election and returned to Georgia, the Fullers connected with him through his Sunday-school classes at Maranatha Baptist Church in Mr. Carter’s nearby hometown, Plains. Mr. Carter was an accomplished amateur woodworker, and he and his wife invited the Fullers to their home to discuss a potential partnership, Ms. Fuller said in an interview.
In 1984, Mr. Carter set out on his first project with Habitat: renovating a dilapidated tenement in Manhattan’s Alphabet City neighborhood. In the roughly four decades since, he and Mrs. Carter helped Habitat expand dramatically, building and remodeling tens of thousands of homes for lower-income people across the United States and 70 other countries.
“It was like a rocket taking off,” Ms. Fuller said. “We went from several hundred thousand names to several million names in our database of supporters.”
Reporters and well-wishers started gathering at the Manhattan building the Carters helped renovate, known as Mascot Flats, on Monday. Mr. Kao said a memorial was in the works.
The building still places income limits on residents, but an apartment there sold a few years ago for $350,000, about ten times the founding residents’ mortgages. Mr. Kao, who is one of about 10 original families who remain in the building, said its ethos of affordability feels increasingly out of place in a city of billionaires’ penthouses and million-dollar studios.
“Thank God I had Jimmy Carter and Habitat and my apartment,” he said.
Mr. Carter could be a hawk-eyed boss on a construction site.
David Snell’s introduction to the former president came in 2000, when he was working with Habitat on a home-building project in Tijuana, Mexico, that included roughly 2,000 volunteers, who all camped out on a hillside.
Mr. Carter strode up to him early one morning and asked who was in charge of providing the toilet paper. Mr. Snell replied that he guessed he was. “There’s not enough of it,” Mr. Carter told him and walked away.
“We had a couple of hurried trips and sent an urgent message to San Diego to get us better supplies,” said Mr. Snell, who is now president of the Fuller Center for Housing, an affordable-housing group that Millard and Linda Fuller founded after they split with Habitat for Humanity.
Habitat said the Carters would be irreplaceable, but the group has made partnerships with other celebrities, including the HGTV home-renovation show hosts Jonathan and Drew Scott and the husband-and-wife country singers Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood.
Each year, Habitat has held a Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project, a highly publicized sprint to build new homes or renovate decrepit buildings in rotating locations from South Dakota to South Africa. Habitat said it would still hold next year’s project, scheduled for October in Austin, Texas.
Mr. Reckford, Habitat’s chief executive, recalled another medical scare for Mr. Carter, in 2017, when he got dizzy on a sweltering building site in Canada. After Mr. Carter was treated for dehydration, Mr. Reckford asked the former president what he should tell the press.
Mr. Carter’s answer: I’m fine, and get back to work.
