Everyone needs a home. On two streets off busy Storer Avenue in the Stockyards neighborhood, volunteers with the Habitat for Humanity of Greater Cleveland have rehabbed three houses that will soon be homes for families in need. On West 52nd Street, another dwelling was renovated in honor of Pope Francis, made possible by a $60,000 grant from an anonymous donor. Two more houses on West 50th Street have also been rehabilitated. And on the East Side, the organization worked with the Famicos Foundation in the North Circle-South Glenville neighborhood to rehab four houses.
Why? The Cleveland Habitat selected Stockyards and North Circle-South Glenville neighborhoods for its 2015 Neighborhood Revitalization Program.
At the regional level, the Greater Cleveland Habitat for Humanity chapter renovated 19 houses this year — a record in its 25-year history — and its 2016 goal is to increase that number to 25 to 30 houses. They also helped approximately 35 homeowners who needed assistance with repairs.
John Habat, president and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Habitat for Humanity, is proud that the organization has increased the number of houses available to families who qualify for them. All of the houses were repaired and renovated by a dedicated group of 2,600 volunteers who spent 72,000 hours this past year on the 19 houses.
“We have volunteers who have been volunteering for 20 years,” Habat says. “It’s really a community of volunteers.”
Providing affordable housing to those in need and supporting vibrant communities in underserved areas is, in fact, the primary goal of Habitat for Humanity, an international organization founded in 1976 in Americus, Georgia. Overall, the organization has built, renovated or repaired more than a million safe, affordable houses sheltering more than 6.8 million people worldwide.
Yet acquiring these houses takes time. “Even though there are all these vacant houses in the area, it may take two or three years to purchase a house,” Habat says. “What often happens in the period of time is the house deteriorates, and if it deteriorates too much you can’t salvage it.”
Since 2002, the Greater Cleveland Habitat for Humanity has also opened two ReStores facilities, which sell recycled construction material (even commercially recycled paint), furniture and fixtures that are donated to the organization. The West Side ReStore, located at 2110 W. 110th Street, is a 40,000-square-foot building, and the East Side ReStore, located at 4601 Northfield Road, is a 20,000 square-foot facility.
“The ReStore is a secondary mission for us,” Habat says. “Our primary mission is affordable home ownership, but the ReStore helps people remodel their homes affordably. It also generates net revenue. In 2015, it generated almost $700,000 to support our program, so it’s a very important source of income for us.”
Habat has lead the organization for the past four years and has seen it evolve into a vitally important resource in the effort to help revitalize Cleveland’s neighborhoods and turn them into safer, more vibrant places to live.
“Nothing changes a family’s stability and trajectory as much as stable, secure housing,” Habat explains. “When you start looking at the volume of houses we’re renovating, we’re a major player in this city in terms of affordable home ownership.
“The old model of building a new house on a free piece of land through the city’s Land Bank isn’t going to work anymore,” he adds. “Our new model of renovating existing houses has resulted in doing more houses per year.”
The approach clearly works.
“Most people don’t realize that Habitat for Humanity is the fastest-growing volunteer movement ever, in the history of civilization,” Habat points out. “In the 40 years that the organization has been in existence, over 100 million people around the world have volunteered on a Habitat for Humanity housing project.”
The Greater Cleveland Habitat for Humanity’s goal for the next two years is to help 100 families afford housing. “We’ve moved from building houses to building communities,” Habat says.