Golden Habitat Local Housing Chapter Celebrates Its 10th Year, 50th Home

When Dia Hadley began volunteering with Spokane’s Habitat for Humanity, her favorite task was roofing.

“It’s like a craft,” she explains. “You can see patterns developing. You can see progress. It’s real clear when you’re doing it right.”

Now, five years after being named executive director of the local Habitat for Humanity chapter, Hadley sees patterns emerging in the group’s effort to create simple, decent, affordable housing for Spokane’s poor.

Thanks to the four dozen local homes that Habitat for Humanity volunteers have built or rehabilitated since the chapter coalesced in 1987, “we’re seeing families who are becoming more stable,” Hadley says.

More than 200 people are living in those homes, paying off interest-free mortgages as low as $150 a month.

And for the first time, those payments have provided enough money to build another home - Habitat-Spokane’s 50th - at 1707 E. DeSmet.

To celebrate the near-completion of that residence, along with the local chapter’s 10th anniversary and the holidays, Habitat for Humanity will hold an open house at the DeSmet residence from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday.

Habitat staff, volunteers and the home’s future owner, Denise Otradovec, will give tours of the three-bedroom duplex during the celebration.

Hadley estimates Otradovec, a single mother of two, has contributed more that 700 hours of “sweat equity” to this and other Habitat projects.

Once applicants are selected, Hadley says, they must log at least 100 volunteer hours to demonstrate their commitment to home ownership.

They also are required to devote 100 hours to their own home and another 300 hours elsewhere.

Volunteerism is the key to the international Christian ministry’s success, which can be measured in part by the 60,000 homes built worldwide since Millard Fuller founded his “theology of the hammer” in 1976.

Habitat for Humanity homes built in Spokane typically cost about $45,000 but are appraised at about $70,000. The difference is the value of volunteer labor.

Earlier this week, retired Shaw Middle School social studies teacher Mike Shanks helped others assemble new cabinets for Otradovec’s kitchen.

“We used to use rehabbed cabinets that came out of other buildings,” said Shanks, “but they were pretty hard to get together right. Prefab ones are so much better.”

That lesson and its implications aren’t lost on Hadley.

“The first house we did was a rehab,” she says, “and we’ve done 10 all together. But they’re becoming the exception. They don’t save us much money, they’re more work for the volunteers and they’re not as energy-efficient as new homes.”

This year, local Habitat for Humanity volunteers will complete eight houses. Hadley hopes eventually to average 20 per year.

“But even then,” she admits, “we’ll still be just a drop in the bucket.”

That’s because the gap between local incomes and housing costs is growing.

One study estimates 20,000 Spokane County families spend more than the “affordable” 33 percent of their income on housing. And with the median price of a Spokane home having risen 83 percent since 1990 - to $101,500 - fewer families have the resources to buy a house.

“We need money, we need land and we need people,” says Hadley. “The more we have of each of these things, the more homes Habitat can build.”

In the meantime, she says, Habitat for Humanity will continue trying to raise community awareness of the need for affordable housing and will keep pounding away at the problem, one nail at a time.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos

MEMO: Open house For more information about Friday’s open house and other Habitat projects, call 534-2552.