Habitat for Humanity building on economic opportunity

By Timothy Pratt

Monday, May 11, 2009 | 2 a.m.

While some giants of the industry are idle or going bust in the Las Vegas Valley, one homebuilder is having its best year ever.  The local branch of Habitat for Humanity is putting up 10 homes this year, the most since launching in 1991. All told, the Las Vegas nonprofit organization has built 63 houses, but its annual tally has never hit double digits.

The plan is to build an average of 15 houses a year from now on, according to Guy Amato, Las Vegas Habitat’s CEO.

He said he has been able to snatch opportunity from the economic crisis by taking advantage of falling rental and land prices. The organization is searching the valley’s emptying big-box stores for a place to open its second ReStore outlet, where donated building materials will be sold at discount prices. Revenue from another store will allow Habitat to spend more of its donations on building houses. To that end, low land prices have also allowed the organization to buy more lots.

So amid tough times, Amato said, Habitat for Humanity’s main goal, “transforming the lives of the working poor,” gets a boost.

Creating affordable housing seemingly immune from foreclosure is particularly quixotic nowadays, but not one of Habitat’s 63 houses has been lost to the banks to date.

Building about the same number in the next five years will depend in large part on taking advantage of an 11-year-old federal law: the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act. The law is meant to free up federal land at discounted prices for developers of affordable housing. But implementing it has proved more complicated than many hoped, and only one project has been completed, Nevada Housing and Neighborhood Development’s Harmon Pines, for seniors.

If buying federal Bureau of Land Management land through the law were easier, and faster, Amato thinks Habitat could eventually build up to 100 houses a year.

The CEO pulls off a complicated juggling act — low prices on land, donated materials, volunteer labor. The result is affordable mortgages. These days, some people ask him, “ ‘With houses so low, why do we need Habitat?’ But our people can’t even afford those prices,” he said.

His clients are mostly single mothers — receptionists, housekeepers, waitresses or teachers’ assistants like Soretta Dew.

The 38-year-old and her two teens will soon cross the threshold at one of four houses being built near Warm Springs Road and Tamarus Street, just south of McCarran airport.

By June 30, she hopes to finish her three-bedroom, 1,217-square-foot house. That day will close a circle started about 10 years ago, when she began working for the Clark County School District. She discovered Habitat for Humanity back then, but “wasn’t ready for the responsibility,” she said.

Participants in the program not only need to earn less than 60 percent of the area median income, or $39,240 for a family of four. They also have to be able to devote 300 hours to the project, about half in construction.

Dew spent a recent weekend laying rock paths in back of her new house. Inside, people she had never met put up doors to the bedrooms and bathrooms.

Seeing the house take shape and inching closer to her planned move-in date was “exciting ... a blessing.” She marveled at how people from Nellis Air Force Base, or from a sorority, “come out ... to help make a future for me and my kids.”

The most exciting day so far? “When we put up the frame. That was my day. Everybody came out to help.”

When June 30 comes, Dew imagines celebrating with a Hawaiian luau.

Her list of guests would include Amato, who said he realizes Habitat “is not the solution to the affordable housing crisis — or the foreclosure crisis.”

“You have to be careful about tilting at windmills,” he added.

Still, for families like the Dews, the coming years will provide a bumper crop of houses arising, unexpectedly, from those same crises.