The house that business built.

• Author: West, Gail
• Position: Includes related article on house building by volunteers

For more than 20 years, Mother "Alice" Lawrence has poured love into Anchorage's Mountain View Community and the surrounding area. She clothes the poor. She feeds the hungry. She stands up to drug dealers and gang leaders. She's even been known to give free haircuts. This year, the community gave back.

"Field of Dreams" had it right-build it and they will come. Of the loosely knit group that formed the base for the volunteer effort to build the new Mother Lawrence house in Anchorage, I was the unbeliever. Perhaps I should say I needed to be shown that a house could indeed be built when we had no money, no formal organization, and no leader.

The group knew that Mother Alice Lawrence and her husband Jacob had been feeding and clothing the poor from their house in Mountain View for more than 20 years. We also knew that years of abuse had taken its toll on the nearly 40-year-old home. Alice had knocked out bearing walls to provide more space for her mission, and called upon her overtaxed electrical wiring to support multiple freezers. The roof sagged, and the porch had separated from the house.

Then at a 1996 Alaska Black Caucus conference, Mother Lawrence told an employee of First National Bank that she needed a new house, and that she had been guided to speak to him about it. That launched the snowball.

An ad hoc group began to form. Tim Sullivan, executive director of Alaska Craftsman Home Program; Bill Green, a representative from Parkside Church in east Anchorage; Catherine Ranger, a volunteer who had gained experience in home building with Habitat for Humanity; Robin Ward, a representative from the Anchorage Homebuilders Assn.; and Lance Newman and I, from First National, began meeting regularly in late '96 to try to figure out how to build Alice her house.

A design was among the first things we needed. For that, we called the Alaska Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and talked to its president, Sam Combs. Combs owned Karluk Design and had a history of taking on volunteer projects.

"We like to do projects for the community," Combs said, "so I talked with my partner and we took it on." Combs began to attend the meetings.

Combs drew a set of blueprints for the new house, designing around the in-place basement and providing the Mountain View neighborhood with an improved streetscape. The design provided safe, private living quarters, as well as open space for food and clothing distribution. It had additional laundry and shower...