Habitat World Online

The Xiong and Ross families have Habitat houses in Dane County Habitat’s Twin Oaks subdivision in Madison, Wis.

At Land's End (continued)

ANTICIPATING THE FUTURE

Collier County, Fla., home of one of Habitat for Humanity’s oldest affiliates, is a particularly interesting place to look for land for affordable housing. It is the largest county in Florida — larger in square miles than the state of Rhode Island — but some 80 percent of the land is set aside for federal and local wildlife preserves. Parts of Naples, a wealthy community on the Gulf coast of Collier County, contrast sharply with both the interior of the county, where migrant farm workers pick seasonal produce, and the service economy that helps support the high-end development. According to the affiliate’s fall 2007 newsletter, the median home price at the height of the recent housing boom hovered around $500,000, and there was nothing available for less than $200,000, not even a small condo or mobile home.

The foresight of Habitat Collier County’s board of directors in taking the affiliate from house-builder to subdivision developer has been proven in the years since its original large land purchases. Collier County builds about 120 houses per year and has enough land in its current two locations for about 1,500 houses. Three other projects are in the design/approval stages and could yield 850 houses. However, the search for land never ends.

"We’ve gone out and identified parcels that we like and contacted property owners,” says director of land development and construction Kouloheras. “We’ve had real estate agents contact us, and we have board members that know a little about the business talk to their friends who say, ‘Hey, there’s some out here.’ There has been someone doing my job essentially full-time for the past five or six years.”

The mixed-income development features Habitat houses sprinkled throughout the subdivision, with remaining lots owned by individuals, for-profit builders and other nonprofit organizations.

In 2006, the affiliate began building duplexes and anticipates learning to build four-plexes in a long-term project currently in the planning stages. The driving motivation for building attached units is cost. On the land and construction side, a 204-house neighborhood in Naples that will be completed in 2009 will have cost $27 million total, with a third of that paying for raw land and infrastructure. However, it’s not just land and construction costs that are an issue. Impact fees can cost as much as $33,000 in Naples for a single-family house on a normal lot, Kouloheras says. The fees for affordable housing used to be waived, but they now are deferred and tacked onto the property as a lien to be paid back, with interest, when the house is sold. Eventually, the affiliate expects to have to pay $25,000 per unit of a Habitat duplex in impact fees.

But despite the cost challenges of land and fees, there are some factors working in Habitat’s favor, Kouloheras says, and with the goal of building 1,000 houses in the next seven years, the affiliate clearly is making progress. “We have a year-round build schedule, some property available to buy, an enormous retirement demographic for labor, and we have to have more millionaires and billionaires than I would suspect any other city in the country outside New York or San Francisco,” Kouloheras says.

FINDING A NICHE

Not all Habitat affiliates have found large-scale community building to be the best response to high land costs. Blue Spruce Habitat for Humanity works in Evergreen, Colo., an unincorporated area within commuting distance of Denver, where land only comes in “up or down,” says operations director Phil Miller.

Two factors are prominent in the affiliate’s ability to continue to build in an area in which one-acre lots can cost upwards of $150,000 each, and both involve a willingness to go where other builders can’t. By taking advantage of its nonprofit status to access county grants, the affiliate has been able to pursue construction opportunities that would be unprofitable for other builders. “We might spend $60,000 putting in a driveway” due to the geography of a lot, Miller says. “We get grants from the county that make that affordable, but for-profit builders can’t do that and make any money.”

Also, “there’s a big difference in Colorado with where the sun shines,” he continues. “If you’re on the north slope of a mountain, you might not get any sunshine. It’s less desirable to build there for for-profit builders, but it might make an opportunity for us to buy the property.”

As in Collier County and numerous other locations throughout the United States, Blue Spruce Habitat also builds duplexes whenever the lot’s geography and zoning requirements allow it. A larger parcel of land recently purchased by the affiliate will enable it to build seven duplexes, and the board has expanded the organization’s service area to include areas further from Denver, where land is cheaper and a little flatter. Still, it’s an uphill battle to make much progress in housing the estimated 900 local families who need help.

In locations as diverse as Madison, south Florida and the Denver area, dedicated Habitat staff and volunteers are finding innovative ways to keep the walls going up. They are not the only ones. Land acquisition continues to challenge Habitat affiliates across the United States and national organizations around the world. But headway continues to be made, through a combination of doing the homework and looking on the bright side.

“We’re blessed that we’re located where we’re located,” says Collier County’s Kouloheras. “This is the only job I’ll ever have where my sole goal is to put myself out of a job.”