Habitat for humanity: Building social capital through faith based service

This essay examines citizen involvement in community housing issues through Habitat for Humanity as a faith-based expansion of social capital in urban communities. This article expands Putnam's model of social capital to include criteria,for evaluating the conditions under which social capital formation has a positive impact on the larger community. Using a representative sample of nine cities from various regions of the US, it examines the functioning of the Habitat affiliate in each of these cities and the attitudes and motivations of their most active volunteers. Habitat has emerged as a highly effective volunteer, non-profit producer of housing,for lower income persons, yet the nature of the social capital created by this organization also reflects the contradictions raised by such an undertaking in a complex urban environment characterized by deep social divisions.