Simar Kohli, co-founder and director of Indian startup EcoSTP, urges women entrepreneurs to be fearless as they promote their work in the shelter space. Kohli’s company, which developed a technology to treat sewage water using the principles of biomimicry, participated in a ShelterTech accelerator.
Christopher shares the impact his Habitat home has made on his life, and how he hopes to help others and inspire them to reach out and accept the support of those around them too.
Christopher has been in his home for two years now, but some days he still has to pinch himself to confirm it’s real. “I couldn’t believe it at first,” he says, recalling that celebratory phone call from Habitat Central Arizona letting him know that he and his now 13-year-old son, Matthew, had been accepted.
“I didn’t believe it even when I was going through the process and working on my house.”
After years of substance abuse, the 59-year-old former cabinet maker found healing and sobriety in his faith several years ago. Still, he found it hard to reconcile his past life with his new one — to think he was someone deserving of help, of good things. “Going through my addiction, I didn’t make good choices,” says Christopher.
“After surrendering my life and getting sober, things were happening. I was being blessed. But it was hard to accept, to feel worthy because of my past mistakes.” Acceptance into what he calls his “Habitat family” — the staff, volunteers and fellow homeowners who he continues to keep in touch with — was a big step in Christopher accepting his whole story and his whole self. “It makes me cry because having this chance, when a lot of times you don’t get one, and then going for it — it made all the difference,” he says. “It wasn’t easy, but I followed the path the Lord laid out for me and I have a home now.”
The home, in turn, has given Christopher the financial stability to pursue his calling. He graduated with his degree in addictions counseling in May and has begun exploring opportunities to offer remote counseling during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The goal is to just help people like I was any way I can,” he says.
That goal extends beyond his professional life. Recently, with new safety guidelines in place, Habitat Central Arizona restarted home construction. Christopher was eager to resume his volunteer duties as a construction team leader to help others reach both homeownership and their potential. “I love to serve, especially within Habitat and to their future homeowners, because of what they did for me,” he says.
By continuing to share his story with everyone he meets, Christopher says he hopes it will inspire others to not only reach out, but to accept the support of those around them. “A lot of people condemn themselves before they even get started. I was that type of person, too,” he says. “But when I changed my attitude, turned my negativity into positivity, when I persevered and kept going — well, I never thought I would have this home, this path, and now I do.
“Habitat for Humanity helped me do everything, they encouraged me when I thought about giving up,” he says. “They changed my life.”
While Habitat’s work might look a little different in each of the 70 countries where we have a presence — based on local needs, styles, climate and materials — the elements that make a home “decent” are universal.
Everything Habitat for Humanity does is guided by our vision of a world where everyone has a decent place to live. Globally, Habitat for Humanity helps families build or improve a decent, affordable place that they can call home. While our work might look a little different in each of the 70 countries where we have a presence — based on local needs, styles, climate and materials — the elements that make a home “decent” are universal.
An affordable home means a family can cover housing costs and still have ample budget for life’s other
necessities: food, health care, transportation, education. As rents and mortgages in the U.S. grow faster than wages, the number of families becoming cost burdened by their housing — meaning they spend more than that 30% — is growing. Too many of our neighbors work hard and still come up short, not because of their own efforts but because of systemic issues and an inequitable economy. Too many essential workers find themselves priced out of the areas where they work. Too many families are denied the personal and economic stability that safe, decent and affordable housing provides. That’s why Habitat builds, helps revitalize communities and advocates.
Around the world, Habitat also works to direct investment capital to the housing sector. We want to ensure that housing microfinance is available to more families, that there is an adequate supply of housing products and related services in the market, and we want to facilitate investment in innovative solutions. What that means is that we partner to make affordable construction materials and services like contractors more widely available and that we work to increase access to the small loans that will allow families to incrementally improve their shelter.
By working to increase housing affordability wherever Habitat has a presence, we help families secure a foundation from which to grow and thrive. And we help reinforce the economic and social fabric that binds us all.
Where we live shapes our lives. Just as a high-quality home can keep us well, a poor-quality home can make us sick. Water leaks and pests can trigger asthma. Overcrowding more easily spreads contagious diseases. Unfortunately, as housing costs continue to rise, more and more families are forced to sacrifice the quality of their home for one they can afford. And as a result, their health suffers.
In addition to building new homes that are durable and healthy, Habitat also completes home repairs to improve and preserve existing housing stock. Incremental changes to existing structures — like repairing leaking roofs in the U.S. or replacing dirt floors with concrete ones or installing latrines and access to clean water where families previously had none around the world — can help immediately alleviate the physical threats posed and mental stress caused by living in poor conditions.
By helping more families build or improve the places they call home, we also can build healthier, equitable and resilient communities for generations to come.
The foundation of a decent home is the land it sits on. Yet more than 70% of the world’s population lacks the formal documentation for their land that would protect them against eviction. In many countries, women are especially prone to displacement, particularly after a male head of household dies, due to gender-biased laws that prevent them from owning property.
Guiding and empowering individuals in the legal process to secure permanent land tenure, whereby they have right to occupy their land through titles, and to write wills of their own to maintain that security for their family after they pass on, results in long-lasting stability and freedom. Once these rights are secured, families are more able to invest in their homes and their businesses, improving their standard of living.
Everyone should be able to live safely and independently in their homes, regardless of income or mobility. But for many older adults and individuals with disabilities, that isn’t the case.
In the U.S., more than 44% of households need some sort of accessibility feature like grab bars, no-step entrances or widened hallways. Yet fewer than 4% of residential units contain such features for people with even moderate mobility disabilities; only 1% have adequate features for people with more severe disabilities.
For many, maintaining their home can be just as difficult as navigating it. Habitat’s Aging in Place program helps residents address both by offering assistance with necessary upkeep like painting, cleaning gutters and repairing porches, as well as more person-specific modifications like building a
wheelchair ramp or installing handrails. Building or repairing and adapting a home to fit the needs of its residents is integral to helping them improve their quality of life and providing the sense of comfort only home can provide.
Home should be a refuge against the threats of the outside world, whether that’s protection during a storm or shelter during a pandemic. It is absolutely essential to welfare and well-being. But for too many, home has become a place to escape from — not to. Exposed wires, doors that don’t lock, railings that aren’t high enough.
In addition to these kinds of everyday disasters, we know that those already struggling are the ones usually hit hardest when natural disasters strike. Every person deserves the protection that a safe and durable home provides, and so we work with families to help them repair and improve their existing homes and to prepare for and recover from life’s unexpected storms.
After losing their Colorado home to the 2012 High Park fire, Candace and her family received a call from Fort Collins Habitat and learned their community would be helping the family come home.
It started with a single column of smoke. The stream of gray connected the floor of Rist Canyon with the wide Colorado sky. Three weeks later, the 2012 High Park fire finally extinguished after burning more than 87,000 acres of land, destroying more than 250 homes and claiming one life.
By the time Candace was allowed to return to her neighborhood, there was nothing left to salvage. Heaps of ash and bent metal marked where her house once stood. In the months that followed, Candace, her three children Chase, Jackson and Adele and their dog, Cooper, jumped from place to place, couch to couch. While the insurance process dragged on, Candace, a preschool teacher, continued to make mortgage payments on a home that didn’t exist. “We were going to have to walk away from everything — from this place that we loved, our life here,” she says.
Then, on Mother’s Day 2013, almost a year after losing everything, Candace received a call from Fort Collins Habitat. She learned that she would be going home again — her community would be helping her build a new house on her land in the canyon. “It was the best Mother’s Day gift I could ever get because it was the best gift I could give my kids,” Candace says.
As construction began, crews of volunteers as well as friends and family joined Candace as she invested hundreds of sweat equity hours into the work. She was eager because, despite all that was lost in the fire, Candace felt like she was gaining so much more. An affordable mortgage that she would no longer struggle to cover. A newfound appreciation among her family for life and for each other. A community that caught her when she felt like her family was falling. The foundation of a stable and safe home to lift them back up as they started anew.
“They built more than our home,” Candace says, sitting in the living room of her now-finished Habitat home. “They helped us rebuild our lives.”
Working alongside homeowners and volunteers, Habitat Philadelphia started a home repair program to complete critical repairs that help preserve affordable homeownership while improving health and safety.
A quarter of the people in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, live below the poverty line — the highest rate of any American city. Compared to other East Coast cities, however, Philadelphia boasts a high homeownership rate, even among low-income families, due to the mass production of row homes for working-class families prior to World War II.
The convergence of these two realities leaves many Philadelphians unable to afford the upkeep of their homes, and deferred maintenance often snowballs into more expensive and serious issues. Dilapidated porches lead to injuries from falls. Leaking roofs spur mold, then asthma. Broken pipes cause unsafe water or no running water at all.
In 2010, Habitat Philadelphia began a home repair program to address the growing issue. Working alongside homeowners and volunteers, they complete the critical repairs that help preserve affordable homeownership while improving health and safety. In order to apply for the program, residents must provide proof of homeownership to ensure that Habitat’s work is permitted and benefits the intended recipient. This, it turns out, is a hurdle for the more than 14,000 Philadelphians with “tangled titles.”
These residents live in homes that they cannot prove they own on paper.
“There are many reasons for tangled titles,” says KC Roney, Habitat Philadelphia’s senior director of programs. Lack of a will is the main one. “In many neighborhoods in Philadelphia, there is a lot of multigenerational homeownership. And so much of this inability to establish ownership stems from an unclear line of succession of the house between family members.”
Rachel López, associate professor of law and director of the Community Lawyering Clinic
In 2018, to help applicants navigate the legal process of untangling, Habitat Philadelphia began to refer homeowners to Drexel University’s Andy and Gwen Stern Community Lawyering Clinic. Each year, a new class of law students serves the clinic by working with and advocating for local residents on a number of legal topics, including property deeds. The law students assist residents in tracking down heirs to resolve disputes and filing petitions in court. Then they help put more permanent solutions in place.
“We assist community members with their individual cases, but we also try to identify holistic and systemic solutions that can resolve issues before they become entrenched legal problems,” says Rachel López, associate professor of law and director of the Community Lawyering Clinic. “Community legal education and will creation, in this instance, are critical to that.”
To the homeowners, the impact of the clinic’s work goes beyond a piece of paper. In addition to Habitat Philadelphia’s repair program, the home’s title also unlocks homestead exemptions on property taxes, payment assistance plans, utility relief programs and equity. “Getting the title resolved provides a clean slate. Giving homeowners broad access to resources and programs, even outside of Habitat, to help them stay in their homes, to age in place,” Roney says.
In Canaan, an informal settlement in Haiti of families displaced by the deadly 2010 earthquake, Habitat installed 200 energy-efficient streetlamps in capital-area neighborhoods and now is working to create a pool of qualified residents in each neighborhood to maintain them.
With each streetlight that went out in the Canaan community north of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Ruthiana felt less and less safe. There were simply no qualified workers in the neighborhood to repair the lamps, so the once well-lit streets became pitch dark at nightfall.
The residents of Canaan, an informal settlement of families displaced by the deadly 2010 earthquake, live in difficult conditions, often with no running water, electricity or access to basic infrastructure. The solar-powered streetlamps were originally installed through a partnership between Habitat Haiti and the national and local governments. In all, Habitat installed 200 energy-efficient streetlamps in capital-area neighborhoods and now is working to create a pool of qualified residents in each neighborhood to maintain them.
This summer, Habitat began conducting trainings in conjunction with a local partner. Ruthiana, who is studying to be a civil engineer, was among the first 19 participants. Each participant received hands-on training and a toolkit to test electrical currents; neighborhood clusters were supplied with ladders. Habitat plans to duplicate the project in Simon Pele, Port-de-Paix, Saint Louis du Nord, Gros Morne and in the Grand’ Anse area.
In Canaan, street vendors report that they now feel comfortable doing business after nightfall. Public transportation drivers, meanwhile, are able to start their shifts before dawn and continue after sunset. Children gather beneath the lights, some of them studying in their glow. “It is important for me to understand how these solar streetlights work because they help my whole neighborhood,” Ruthiana says. “If one of them breaks down, I can help my community by fixing it.”
