In 1975, I interviewed I. D. Robbins, the founder of Nehemiah
Houses, at the organization’s first project in East New York,
Brooklyn. Nehemiah, named after the Old Testament prophet who
rebuilt Jerusalem, had just delivered new homes to the
neighborhood’s working-class residents for the astonishingly low
price of $40,000. At that time, the neighborhood was a place of
“stunning devastation, glaring needs, abandonment, and rubble,”
according to local community organizer Michael Gecan, and
Nehemiah played a major role in making it a thriving community.
The organization achieved this transformation by replicating the
mass-produced building techniques of the postwar suburb,
bringing, as Robbins put it, “Levittown to the city.” The
Nehemiah formula included partnering with community-based
religious organizations as co-developers, and convincing the
city to offer free land on which to build. A continuous concrete
foundation slab would be poured, and topped by freestanding,
two-story residences. Robbins insisted on b