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Free
Houses- Well, Not Exactly
As painful as it was to drag my very exhausted body out of bed in the wee
hours of the morning, I still felt a slight exhilaration humming just below
the surface of my skin. This is because I know that I am about to
embark on a new adventure, something I would likely have never had the time
or courage to do on my own. This is the day that we traveled to Villas
Esperanza in South Phoenix to help build a Habitat for Humanity house.
It was an especially cold morning, cold enough to need three layers of clothing
and still be miserably chilled. The sun rose higher and higher in the
sky as we approached the development as my excitement rose along with
it.
When we got to the work site, I was quickly taught that there would be no
mistakes allowed. Although these houses are built specifically for
low-income families, they still must be able to be habitable by humans.
As I would later learn from spokeswomen for the local chapter of Habitat,
these house are definitely not built to be given away as I always had
understood it to be.
As we hammered and sawed the morning away I kept wondering and asking various
people around the construction site how these houses were divvied out to the
families who would eventually come to call them home someday. I never
got an answer other than, “Just wait, you will find out later.”
When later came, I was quite surprised to learn that the families who would
live in these developments had to go through many twists and turns and
requirements to live there. One of the requirements is the ability to
pay and probably one of the most crucial requirements was that the gross
household income must be between 30% and 65% of the median income for the
Phoenix area for the past two years. They must also have a two-year
history of stable income and employment and an acceptable history of credit
and paying bills on time. Out of all of the requirements (there are
many more) the most surprising one for me to learn about was that the
families who move into these houses must be willing to partner with Habitat
for Humanity for at least four hundred hours of volunteer time. This
does not mean passing out flyers or sitting on the phone for that time.
It means that they must WORK and sweat for those four hundred hours to help
another low-income family realize their dream of owning their own home
too. They must do things such as trussing a roof, painting, putting up
drywall, gardening, etc.
Our Habitat for Humanity developments in South Phoenix are quite
unique. Although there are homes built in eighty-nine countries, they
only go up one at a time in different neighborhoods. Here in Phoenix we
have one full-scale development devoted strictly to Habitat and one more
nearly finished. This is something that has never been done
before. Our speakers gave us some background information on why this
opportunity to build on such a large scale. Missy, Noelle, and Debra
informed our class that it began with a philanthropist by the name of Jerry Bisro.
In 1992 he made it possible to create an entire community of Habitat houses
by purchasing a large plot of land that slipped through the fingers of
another developer. Now that this idea has been proven to work, there
are other areas of the nation that are starting to follow this plan that was
first tested out on South Phoenix. They have found that it is an asset
to the community at large rather than a hindrance, which was the original
argument against it. I am proud to say that Arizona was brave enough to
give it a chance, to become a trendsetter, so to speak. I am thankful
for our speakers representing Habitat for Humanity locally for donating time
out of their busy schedules to come and educate us on this great cause.
I do hope in the future I may have the chance to give more of my time to help
a family build a dream.
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