Mother of three: This is more than turning a page — it’s a whole new book

INDIANAPOLIS — The ongoing resurrection of the Haughville neighborhood on the west side of this Midwest metropolis — which continues this Friday when a new home is dedicated for Katy Arnold and her three children — is a recurring theme in areas where The Fuller Center for Housing has worked since its founding nearly 20 years ago.

In fact, the very first Fuller Center homes in the United States were built in the Allendale neighborhood of Shreveport to help with an influx of Hurricane Katrina refugees. It was an area so ridden with vacant housing, drugs and crime that some local law enforcement officials advised Fuller Center founder Millard Fuller not to work there because they considered it too dangerous, and others in Shreveport deemed Allendale beyond hope.

Of course, in true Millard Fuller fashion, he saw that as more of an invitation than as a warning. His deep Christian faith led him to assert that no person and no community. He — and The Fuller Center — set out to prove that.

Again and again.

Today, four dozen Fuller homes later, Allendale is a resurrected neighborhood of choice. Major crime dropped more than 80 percent in just a few years after The Fuller Center began building there in 2006.

The same happened in Louisville, where The Fuller Center began building new homes and renovating vacant properties, starting with what the city said at the time was the worst area within the bad neighborhood — Boston Court. Today, the Shawnee neighborhood is full of working families and happy children, and the crime rate has plummeted.

The 2010 Millard Fuller Legacy Build in Indianapolis sparked a complete transformation of the troubled Fountain Square neighborhood with 10 new home builds and more than a dozen rehab and repair projects. Today, the neighborhood is thriving, and nearby home values are rising.

This Friday, The Fuller Center for Housing of Central Indiana will dedicate its fifth home in the Haughville neighborhood with plans to build more. It’s an area on the upswing that Katy Arnold is proud to call home and a place where she believes her children will thrive.

“It’s getting better each year,” Arnold said during an interview at The Hawthorne Center, where she and colleagues work to help families connect with various social and government services. “It’s very diverse. It’s a really good community around here, and we look out for each other.”

One of her colleagues at Hawthorne is Holly Stultz, a mother of two who will be Arnold’s next-door neighbor in a Fuller Center home that was built last year. (See Holly’s story here.)

“It’s another way to bond,” Arnold said of living next door to Stultz and the Fuller families still to come on nearby lots. “We’ll be our own little Fuller clique.”

With three children — a 15-year-old and 5-year-old twins — Arnold said this home represents far more than just a new beginning for her and her family.

“I think ‘appreciate’ is an understatement,” she said. “It’s more than that. It’s like a new beginning and a start-over for me. Instead of turning the next page, I’m closing a book and starting a new one. That house is going to be mine, and that’s very good to say. I guess appreciative is the word, but it’s more than that.

“It literally means the world,” she added. “It’s extremely stressful to find a place to live. It was six or seven months of getting denied left and right. It’s truly a struggle finding a place to stay. This really is a blessing to be a part of. I’m seriously still in shock. I’m so in shock. I’m blessed and shocked at the same time. I’ve never had this feeling, and it’s kind of weird.”

With major sponsors D.R. Horton, Rolls Royce and Chapel Rock Christian Church providing financial, volunteer and other support — along with countless other organizations, companies and individuals — the house quickly came during the month of September, starting with a September 7 wall assembly in Chapel Rock’s parking lot. In fact, the home’s dedication ceremony had been scheduled for September 27 before wind and rain from the remnants of Helene forced a postponement to this Friday.

“In two and a half weeks, this is what we have right here” Fuller Center of Central Indiana construction manager Bill Roberts said a day before the scheduled dedication. “It takes a massive amount of volunteers. (Without the volunteers and D.R. Horton, Rolls Royce and Chapel Rock), it would turn a three-week build into a three-month build.”

“I think it’s the best build we’ve done,” Fuller Center of Central Indiana’s Merrill Matlock added while noting that the corporate support helped make keep building costs down. That, in turn, makes the home even more affordable for Arnold, even as she repays the costs of construction on terms she can afford, over time, with zero-percent interest into a fund to help others in the local community get the same hand-up into a decent home.

“It helps us keep that payment down,” Matlock said. “In the Indianapolis area, a young lady like this would pay $1,200 for a two-bedroom apartment. She’ll be in here for about $500 a month — principal, insurance and taxes.”

“This house is going to be built with the lowest expense we’ve ever built a Fuller home,” added Executive Director Ron Fisher, who has a unique perspective on the resurrection of the Haughville neighborhood because he grew up just a couple of block from the build site. 

“It was working-class families,” Fisher recalled. “My dad would walk this railroad (now converted into a bike trail just yards away from the Arnold home) back and forth to work every day in the ’40s and ’50s. He worked at Rolls Royce for 35 years until he retired in 1966. He saved every nickel. He taught me how to work. Dad was very stringent on my brother and I that we serve others because Dad was big on serving, too. There’s a lot of strength in this neighborhood.”

No one, though, is feeling that resurgence of strength and hope more than Katy Arnold is.

“Watching it from day one to now has certainly been a true blessing,” said the 36-year-old, who readily admits to more than a few joyous tears through the process, especially when she read inscriptions penned by volunteers upon the boards inside her home and when sod was laid, making the house truly look more like a home. “It touched my soul. It’s an amazing experience to be a part of.”