Former President Jimmy Carter Is Still Building His Legacy, One Home At A Time

AT 93, JIMMY CARTER’S GAIT IS A LITTLE STIFF, his back a bit stooped.

- Molly Ball/Mishawaka

He doesn’t swing a hammer like he once did, preferring to work a table saw. But one week each year, the 39th President of the United States and his wife still travel somewhere in the world to build homes with their own hands for Habitat for Humanity, the global housing charity. And so, on a Thursday in late August, the Carters were on a job site in Mishawaka, Ind., wearing blue hard hats and measuring out lengths of wood for a new patio.

Home is a powerful thing to Carter, the only modern President to return there after leaving the White House. The couple still lives in the two bedroom ranch house in Plains, Ga., that they built in 1961, and their everyday lives bear little resemblance to the jet-setting and buck-raking of his post presidential peers. They still cook their own meals and attend their local Baptist church, where Carter teaches Sunday school. You’ll never find Carter giving a speech to an investment bank for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It’s a bright, crisp morning in this suburb of South Bend, where a formerly vacant lot is being transformed into 23 vinyl-sided houses. The one the Carters are working on will soon belong to Cleora Taylor, a 36-year-old single mother of four, who’ll pay it off with a no-interest mortgage. “We happen to be Christians, and this gives us a chance to put our religious beliefs into practical projects,” Carter says in his soft country drawl. “That’s a very difficult thing for wealthy people to do, like we are—to cross the great barrier between us and people who have never had a decent place to live.”