So here's a dumb question

I'm running Apache 2 on RH9 small image. I'm trying to set up virtualhosts. I get "Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server." It's a permissions issue. I've the vhosts set up in /home – I used useradd on the command line to create the directories after I created directories "www" and "logs" in /etc/skel.

DocumentRoot for this virtualhost is /home/schof/www. /home/schof/* is set to owner:group schof:schof. Everyone can read. (chmod -R a+r /home/schof/www). If I "chown -R apache:apache /home/schof/www" everything works fine. But what about the operator of a virtualhost trying to FTP in? Shouldn't it work with owner and group schof if read access is given to everyone?

Thanks!