WAMC'S Falling into Place - Habitat Capital District
In the middle of one of the largest housing crises in over a century, the coronavirus pandemic has further threatened the housing stability and affordability for even more of our neighbors. Head over to WAMC to learn more all the ways we are responding to urgent and long-term housing needs — both preexisting and emerging — through the Essential Housing Response Fund.
Transcript:
0:02
Joe Donahue: On this Tuesday morning our Falling into Place series spotlights the important work of and fosters collaboration between not for profit organizations in our communities, allowing yes, us all to fall into place. Falling into Place is supported by the Seymour Fox Memorial Foundation, providing a helping hand to turn inspiration into accomplishment. See more possibilities. See more promise. See more progress.
This week we focus on the Habitat for Humanity Capital District and Christine Schudde joins us this morning. Christine is the Executive Director. Christine, good morning, thank you very much for being with us. Very nice to have you on the program.
Habitat for Humanity in the Capital District serves Albany, Rensselaer and Saratoga counties. Give us a sense of what, will you give us a sense of what your mission is and then what the last couple of months have been in trying to achieve that mission?
1:05
Christine Schudde: Sure. Habitat’s mission is to build new homes and we also rehabilitate vacant buildings. And we do that so we can sell them affordably to first time homebuyers. So we're really looking to use homeownership as a tool to build strength and stability.
JD: So when you look at that, the mission, how has it been impacted by the, by coronavirus and the really the shutting down of so much of our society?
CS: This pandemic really hit exactly at the time that our community and communities around the country are experiencing the worst housing crisis that we've seen over a century. So we've been told, you know all of us have been told stay home, right? That's been the national prescription for staying safe and staying healthy. And at Habitat we know that so many of our neighbors don't have that option. So many of our neighbors have homes that are overcrowded, where they can't, socially, you know, keep social distance between each other, they're unsafe or they're unaffordable.
And you know, we've also seen that our housing system just doesn't work. So within one month of a lockdown and with the massive job loss that has happened, our entire housing system is threatening to collapse because families can't make rent and they can't pay their mortgage. And so we know at Habitat, so many families don't have that stability that a home can bring, which is why it's critical that we continue our mission and we can continue to build homes and serve families in the Capital District.
JD: So you’ve built 139 homes?
CS: We have. Yeah we’ve built 139 homes and we’ve been around for just over 30 years in the Capital District. So Habitat for Humanity is a global housing nonprofit, but each of the affiliates are independently run and operated so we serve, like you said, Albany, Rensselaer and southern Saratoga counties. And because of that, 139 families – many of whom I should mention are essential workers, so they're working in retail or healthcare and public safety, essential manufacturing – 139 of those homeowners have had a safe place in which to shelter, but we know that there are thousands more that haven't. We’ve been grateful, Governor Cuomo did classify affordable housing construction as essential. So even throughout the shutdown., while our administrative office and our retail store have been closed, our construction sites have been open. So we've been building a little bit slower, you know, trying to follow all the CDC recommendations for safety and for health. We're using fewer subcontractors, we're just trying to make sure that everyone stays safe, but we have been building these past few months, which has been really important to us. We have eight houses that are under construction, which means that there are eight families who are waiting to move in, so we can't let up, even for a minute.
3:52
JD: One of the things that you make known which I think is really interesting, in a typical year you try to build eight to 10 houses a year, but this is an expensive, this is expensive work this house a new house can cost $240,000.
4:07
CS: It's really expensive. Yeah and I think, you know, I think for many years Habitat, certainly this Habitat, we weren't really clear, with all of our supporters about just how expensive it is to do what we do. So of course we use volunteers, you know, when there isn’t a pandemic we have volunteers on our construction site. And that helps move us along, but we're still building homes and so like you said, it's, you know, on average it's $240,000 just to build a single house.
When you look at our sales price, we've also sort of realized that we don't build affordable homes, we make our homes affordable. We build homes that cost, you know, close to $250,000, and then we use grants and donations and volunteerism to drive that cost down so that we can sell it at an affordable price to a local family. Around here an affordable price tends to be about $130,000, so there's a huge gap for every single house that we build. And we're doing that 8 to 10 times, you know, every single year. But when you look at the homes that we build, they are, they're beautiful, if I can say that, they’re simple homes, they're energy efficient, they're safe. They're designed to be easy to maintain, and they're designed to be affordable in the long run too. So, Habitat homeowners are purchasing – and I just want to emphasize that we don't give away homes, they are purchasing a home with an affordable ,responsible mortgage – and their homes that, for the most part, our families stay in throughout their lifetimes and have passed on to generations as well.
5:34
JD: One of the things that you, you mentioned this but, so the idea is to finish the homes that you're currently working on, and then to stay around long after this crisis passes by starting to build new homes over the next year.
5:49
CS: We do, we have eight homes under construction and then we have plans to break ground on at least 10 more homes within the next year. So we have homes planned for downtown Albany, we have some homes that we're looking to build in Troy, with a few really interesting partnerships coming up. So this is, this is an ongoing process, this is sort of a long term stability investment.
So there are incredible organizations who are doing work on the ground right now for sort of an emergency response. But how Habitat looks at ourselves and our mission is that if we can continue to do the work of helping families create stability, that when the next crisis hits, whether it's – hopefully not a public health crisis, but it could be a natural disaster, economic ripples from this current crisis – when that hits, families will have that safe home of their own and they won't have to worry about missing rent payments or being foreclosed on, because they will have been prepared and responsibly sold a home that they can afford and that they can love and grow with.
6:48
JD: The idea of advocating at the local at the local level, the state level, the national level four housing affordability, what goes into that and just justice for low income households, how do you work on that as an organization?
7:03
CS: Habitat, it's only been within the last few years that Habitat for Humanity as a network has really formed a solid advocacy platform. So we've done advocacy at all those levels for many years, but we've really crystallized what it means to be a non-partisan – you know, we're sort of aggressively non-partisan in our advocacy, but what it means to help amplify the voices of the neighbors that we work with, to help lend Habitat’s reputation as an organization that's been around for over 30 years, in service of justice for lower income families. And so that means that we are working in coalition's most of the time, we're working in partnerships locally, we have a statewide Habitat support organization that helps us on state issues. And then of course nationally we have Habitat for Humanity International which is our sort of umbrella organization, and they're looking at things like, not just housing issues but things like living wage issues, things like access to land, and how we can how we can increase access to good credit opportunities for lower income households. So there's a lot of different ways that Habitat can affect policy. And what we've also realized is that we can't build our way out of this crisis. We'll keep trying. We're going to keep building every single year and we're never going to let up on that, but we know that the crisis in terms of housing is so huge that the only way we can really effect change is by advocating for different policies, both within government but also pushing the private market to do better, too. So we work with banks we work with lenders, and we try to make sure that these institutions are not just the middle and upper classes but also serving the working class and the poor.
8:48
JD: You know it's amazing when you think that you built 139 houses and a house is such a major project as you well know, but it also, as you say, it goes to show just how many other people, I mean if you were even if you tripled your capacity, you still wouldn't have enough to go around for everybody.
9:11
CS: Exactly, yeah, one in three of our Capital Districtt neighbors struggle to afford their home. And that's across renters and homeowners. And so that number is staggering, really, and like you say if we tripled, if we tenfold, built 10 times as many houses next year, we still wouldn't address the need. And also homeownership, you know, we believe in its powers of stabilizing and changing lives, but it's not the only option out there and so there has to be some really good rental reform and some good rental opportunities for families too if we expect to solve the housing crisis here locally or across the country. And it looks different in cities than it does in the country than it does in the suburbs and all of those locations have housing crisis right now.
9:56
JD: Ultimately, when you look to the community you're looking for volunteers, and you're looking for financial support, right, are those, those are the two biggies?
10:06
CS: Those are the two biggies and we are missing our volunteers. About a week before the New York State PAUSE Act went into effect we did close our construction sites to volunteers, so we had our three paid professional staff on site and few subcontractors, but we haven't seen our volunteers in months. And we're we won't reopen the sites to them until we can ensure that we can safely do that. But we miss them. We have groups of regular volunteers, both in Albany and in Troy, some of whom have been volunteering with Habitat for decades. So we have had those, those folks and we also get a lot of groups from local businesses, from churches and schools. And so without them, we're definitely slowing down on the construction site. But, like you said, we’re also always looking for financial support because what we do is so expensive, it's also so important. So we are, we're trying to pivot, like a lot of nonprofits are, into figuring out how we can keep engaging people. We also have action alerts that we send out through email, if people want to be involved with advocacy right from their own home, that's a safe option and safe way to help Habitat at this moment too.
11:17
JD: Let me give folks your web address which is www.HabitatCD.org. Christine Schudde is the executive director of Habitat for Humanity Capital District. Christine, thank you very much for sharing and best of luck with your work.
CS: Thanks so much.
JD: A great pleasure, thank you. Falling into Place is supported by the Seymour Fox Memorial Foundation, providing a helping hand to turn inspiration into accomplishments. See more possibilities, see more promise, see more progress.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai