Musicians with bad debts wonder if they can get some assistance paying off their bills so that they can become eligible for a house. What, they ask, about the $1.2 million raised for the project from benefit concerts and recordings such as Hurricane Relief: Come Together Now and Our New Orleans: A Benefit for the Gulf Coast? Or the $1.5 million matching grant from the Dave Matthews Band?

That money is already earmarked for housing, to keep the price of the houses low, says Habitat head Jim Pate. But he knows that the application process can be daunting for first-time homebuyers. After all, Habitat has worked with low-income homebuyers in New Orleans for nearly 23 years and they know that most people find the process complex. "Our families are low-income, not low IQ," says Pate. "Everyone needs to be walked through this process."

Chuck Badie's tattooed arm is proof of the three years he spent in the Pacific during World War II, on the U.S.S. Delaware. After returning home, he attended the Gruenwald Music School on the G.I. Bill, then waited lunchtime tables and played music in the city's finest clubs for $15 a night, then the union-scale wage for black musicians.

In 1953, Badie moved his family into a seven-room house in the Lower Ninth Ward, at Charbonnet and Johnson. By 1977, he'd paid off the mortgage. And it was plush, he says, with a sofa where he often sat to read and a matching sofa chair that he'd only sat on two or three times. Then there were the photographs covering the walls. The 8x10 of his father, Peter Badie, Sr., who played alto sax with Percy Humphrey. And photos of himself and his bass, traveling the world. The one taken in Brussels, Belgium, with Lionel Hampton, whose orchestra he played in for four years. Other shots in other cities with Dizzy Gillespie, Sam Cooke, Roy "Good Rockin'" Brown, Louis Jordan, Dave Bartholomew, and fellow AFO executive Harold Battiste. "To me, they're pictures I know I'll never see again. They're gone—everything's gone in that house," says Badie.

A house, he says, is more than just a place to live. When a man owns a house, he puts his heart and soul into it, he says. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy was tough; his house took on eight feet of water. But he dug in and worked and was back there in two months.

This time, he knew he'd never walk inside again. "When I saw the house, I knew it was destroyed," he says. As he stood there, looking at his house for the first time, a network news crew approached. They wanted to interview him. "I told them, 'This is what I just lost; I can't talk about it.' It was like I had just lost a loved one and someone comes up and asks me how do I feel.'"

Badie knows that his fellow jazz musicians, especially the younger ones, dream of owning homes of their own. But they're having trouble getting into the Musicians' Village, he says. "A musician saw me in the club, asked me to put in a good word for him with Habitat for Humanity. I told him, 'Go up there all the time and hang with them. Stay in their face.' I pray for him," says Badie. "I pray for all of them."

Originally published in the July 2006 issue of offBeat magazine. Copyright © 2006 by Katy Reckdahl. Reprinted with permission.