Monday, December 19, 2011
No Place Like Home
Sandtown Habitat for Humanity celebrates the completion of their 300th rowhouse
Posted by Anissa Elmerraji on Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 4:00 AM
At a dedication ceremony last week attended by droves of supporters, friends, and volunteers, Inger Walker was handed the keys to her very first home. While the day was understandably memorable for the first-time homeowner, it was equally special for the housing organization that made it all possible: Sandtown Habitat for Humanity. Walker’s home marked the 300th completed since the organization set out on a mission twenty-two years ago to rehabilitate vacant rowhouses in the neighborhood (see “Sandtown Green,” Apr. ’11 Urbanite)
“It was an incredible milestone,” says Michael Barb, co-executive director of Sandtown Habitat along with LaVerne Stokes. The year-long construction of Walker’s three-story brick rowhouse was co-sponsored by MECU, a nonprofit financial cooperative, and T. Rowe Price, the investment management company, according to a Sandtown Habitat press release. Both James A.C. Kennedy (CEO and President of T. Rowe Price) and Bert Hash Jr. (CEO of MECU) were in attendance at the dedication.
Before rehabilitation, Walker’s Mount Street rowhouse was an uninhabitable structure, plagued by water damage and left abandoned to decay. “It was just a wreck of a place,” says Barb, who explains that the home had to be completely gutted and rebuilt from scratch. Now, the home that Walker and her son, Robert, have moved into is essentially brand new.
A nonprofit, ecumenical Christian housing organization, Sandtown Habitat for Humanity relies on support from volunteers and donations from local businesses to support the $100,000-per-home price tag (the project was the tenth for T.Rowe Price and the seventh for MECU, both longstanding partners with Sandtown Habitat). After the homes are completed, they are sold at cost with no-interest mortgages. The only catch, according to the organization’s website, is that prospective homeowners must invest at least 330 hours of “sweat equity” in their own or other local homes.
With three hundred homes now under its belt, Sandtown Habitat only has fifty to seventy-five more homes to complete before reaching its original goal of rehabilitating all the vacant homes within a fifteen-block area of the Sandtown community. Nevertheless, Barb insists that the group has no intention of stopping once the goal is reached, which, he predicts, will be in another five years.
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