Seven-year-old Isabel and her family live in a Habitat house in Austin's Heritage Village.

Mixing It Up
Habitat houses blend into neighborhoods across the country.

by Leigh Powell

Slide Show

Imagine a peaceful neighborhood, full of attractive houses with well-manicured lawns. Children ride their bicycles down the street. Residents--some Habitat families, some not - sit on their front porches and wave as neighbors return home from work. The homeowners' association is in the process of planning the next neighborhood get-together. These neighborhoods exist: Heritage Village in Austin, Texas, is one of many more like it around the country.

Heritage Village is a mixed-income neighborhood of 55 homes--the result of a partnership between Austin Habitat for Humanity, a for-profit developer and several other organizations in the Austin area. Habitat houses in the neighborhood--16 of them total--sold for about $55,000 each; the houses with traditional mortgages sold for as much as $100,000 or more.

Richard Huffman, of Huffman Homes Inc., was the developer of Heritage Village. "Affordable housing options are a need," Huffman explains. "Over maybe a dozen years, [Austin]'s become the least affordable city in the Southwest."

	Heritage Village developer Richard Huffman.

With the cost of lots in even outlying areas like east Austin jumping from $3,000 to $30,000, Huffman says nonprofits had come to his company for help in acquiring affordable land and preparing it for development. A group of them, including Austin HFH, got together and jumped into the creation of Heritage Village.

Originally, Austin HFH was scheduled to build only four or six houses in the neighborhood, says Michael Willard, executive director of the affiliate. After the affiliate proved it could adapt its simple, decent Habitat house design into something attractive and compatible with the neighborhood, more lots were made available. "We had to be flexible," Willard explains.

Though Willard says the affiliate still builds from only a handful of different house plans, the small details added and changed on the Habitat houses in Heritage Village make them look anything but "cookie-cutter." "We were able to build an affordable product that's attractive," Willard says.

Brian Miller, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Dane County in Madison, Wis., agrees with Willard about the need for flexibility when approaching a mixed-income neighborhood project. "We had to give a little bit; we had to hold the line a little bit," he explains when describing the Twin Oaks neighborhood. The lots on which the Habitat houses stand in Twin Oaks are larger than average, and the affiliate adapted its house plans to include basements there.

HFH of Dane County still is building in Twin Oaks. Approximately half of the affiliate's 50 lots are built-out. The 42 other single-family lots, which were sold to private builders, are built-out and, for the most part, sold. A planned condominium in the neighborhood is yet to begin.

Miller calls the affiliate's decision to purchase the Twin Oaks land "visionary." HFH of Dane County's board of directors purchased one of the last 40-acre tracts of land available in the city for $1.1 million in 2002, and Habitat served as the developer of that land--arranging for the zoning, streets, sewer system and all other infrastructure.

"We'd never done anything that ambitious," Miller concedes, "but it was a great move." The lots the affiliate sold helped cross-subsidize the lots it kept and also helped pay for the development costs. Miller also admits having an experienced for-profit developer on the affiliate's board of directors was helpful: "He contributed his pro bono expertise, and we also had a pro bono attorney, and we were able to get good engineers and architects at reduced fees."

But after all of the business matters are settled and the houses built, does a mixed-income neighborhood really "work" in practice?

It does for Arista Blouin. Blouin and her husband, both Austin firefighters, purchased one of the market-rate homes in Heritage Village just over two years ago; they were one of the first families to move into the neighborhood.

For Peter Hahn, owner of one of Heritage Village's traditional mortgage houses, the presence of Habitat families was one of the most positive things about the neighborhood.

"We were looking for a good neighborhood, and a place we could afford," Blouin explains. "Also, it was important for us to have a diverse community to raise our 9-year-old son."

Heritage Village is not only a mixed-income neighborhood; it also is a mixed-race neighborhood: one-third white, one-third black, one-third Hispanic. This was a selling point for Blouin's family. She says, "Being diverse - how important is that? Being exposed to other cultures and different things, people, ideas."

Just around the corner from Blouin's house is the Aguilars' house. David and Rebecca Aguilar are one of Heritage Village's Habitat families; they and their three children have lived in the neighborhood since December 2004.

The Aguilars have nothing but positive things to say about Heritage Village. While they were contributing their sweat-equity hours, they worked on Habitat houses in other parts of the city, but Rebecca "really liked this lot."

David's priority was having a better place for their children to grow up; their old apartment complex was an environment filled with "drug dealers, broken windows, constant theft, alcohol abuse," he says. In contrast, he describes the new neighborhood as being friendly, safe and quiet. "Well, quiet till our family goes outside to play!" he jokes, pointing to his sons, ages 7 and 11.

Children playing outside--and a safe environment--was a selling point for many. However, for Peter Hahn, who is retired and has no children, there was a different selling point: the Habitat families.

Hahn had been involved with Habitat for Humanity before he bought his market-rate home in Heritage Village. "I knew what [Habitat families] were like. I knew that they would bring a nucleus of energy to this community."

Any neighbors who had doubts about Habitat homeowners' pride in their homes have certainly had their fears allayed in Heritage Village, where many of the lawns are photo-worthy. And any neighbors who had concerns about whether or not different income levels, different races, Habitat and non-Habitat could "mesh"--those fears have been allayed as well.

Habitat homeowner Willie Mae Sawyers sums it up: "Everyone gets along with everyone else. It's simple: From the heart, we're all the same. We're all shades of the same color."

Leigh Powell is the editorial manager for Habitat for Humanity International.