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Habitat for Humanity houses -- 8 years old and alive with "cockroaches, mildew and mysterious skin rashes."

Jimmy Carter was one of the 10,000 volunteers who built the Fairway Oaks housing development in 17 days. Now, there's a lawsuit, but it doesn't seem to be based on the shoddy workmanship of amateurs. It seems to be mainly about the site ? a garbage dump:

One man pulled up his floorboards to find rubbish 5ft deep under his kitchen. Other complaints include cracking walls and rotting door frames that let in rats and ants.

Habitat must have a system that limits and supervises all those volunteers. It's too easy to laugh at the do-gooders. Even when you use professional builders, you can have problems like rotting door wood, especially in a wet climate. You have to take care of your house, and even when you try, you do periodically find things that have gone bad, and it's your responsibility to make repairs. But once you decide to sue about one thing ? here, the site ? the lawsuit becomes a grab bag of all your complaints.

Which side should Michelle Malkin be on?

All Jimmy Carter-bashing and schadenfreude aside, do the residents have a bona fide case or are these professional moochers trying to pin blame on others for their own lack of personal responsibility?...

I?ve watched enough of these ?environmental justice? activists to know that they coach their clients to complain about vague ailments (?mysterious skin rashes?) that have no relation in reality to the environmental conditions they claim are the cause. These professional grievance-mongers have blocked countless private redevelopment and remediation projects ? and milked tens of millions in settlements ? based on bogus scientific and medical claims....

The Left has stoked both eco-zealotry and the entitlement culture with impunity. Perhaps they?ll feel a little less inclined to feed those beasts after getting bitten squarely in the ass.

Full post as published by Althouse on January 04, 2009 (boomark / email).