Home Free : After Many Delays, 19 Families Begin Building Own Houses
For nearly 20 years, Margarita and Sam Revelas have lived in a small, rented clapboard house on the east side of Wilmington, a neighborhood that is dotted with oil wells and sliced by the tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad.
It is a neighborhood where many people find home ownership out of reach. And the Revelases, with five children, never expected to be an exception. “With these prices,” asked Sam Revelas, “who’s going to afford to buy a home?”
But the couple will soon take the home ownership plunge, as part of an unusual do-it-yourself project that will improve the lot of 19 families in east Wilmington, as well as the neighborhood itself.
The project began more than two years ago, when the Revelases joined a group of Wilmington residents who pooled their money--$15,000 apiece, much of it borrowed--to get into the house-building business.
Proving a Point
In addition to helping themselves, they wanted to show bankers, developers and city officials that there is a market for single-family homes in Wilmington--even in east Wilmington, where junkyards, abandoned cars and gang graffiti are an integral part of the urban landscape.
With experience in neither real estate investment nor development, they formed a limited partnership, and used the more than $250,000 they had raised for a down payment on three acres of land at L Street and McFarland Avenue, on which they proposed to build single-family homes. As blue-collar workers, many with experience in construction, they planned to cut costs by doing some of the work themselves.
They named it Home Owners Partnership.
Until recently, others called it folly.
But now, after numerous delays and pitfalls, Home Owners Partnership is beginning construction on its 19-home project, the largest single-family home development in Wilmington in recent years. The group has blueprints, a general contractor and financing--a $2.2 million construction loan from the Bank of San Pedro. The sewer line was laid last week, and general partner Peter Mendoza says workers will soon begin pouring the foundation for the homes.
From his back yard, Sam Revelas can look across the railroad tracks and watch the work progress. In a recent interview, he searched for words to convey a very simple desire: to own property.
“It’s something that you have here, inside,” he said, tapping his chest with his fist. “This is one of the goals in life, to be able to own a home, to have something that we always wanted to have, a place where our children can grow up and say, ‘This is my house.’ ”
Technically, the development, which Mendoza hopes will be completed by Christmas, is a condominium project. That designation was necessary because the group could not meet the lot-size requirements for single-family housing. The city zoning code, however, allows construction of unattached homes on land designated for higher density condominium development.
Mendoza says the zoning gives the group an added benefit: a condominium association, through which residents can control the upkeep of the development.
Stucco, Tile-Roofed Homes
For his full-time work on the project, Mendoza will earn 10% of the difference between the cost of building each home and its appraised value. He said most of the homes will cost about $120,000 to build and will likely be valued at about $160,000, which means he would earn about $4,000 per home. The majority of the stucco, tile-roofed houses will be one story, although a handful of investors later added $10,000 to their initial $15,000 to get two-story homes.
Not all of the investors are first-time buyers, and not all will live there. Some, like Olivia Fernandez, say they see the project as a solid investment, as well as a way to improve their community.
“It was a chance to prove that single-family housing is still desired by people in the community, as opposed to apartments,” said Fernandez, a teacher who withdrew her pension money to invest in the project. “And secondly . . . I see this as my retirement. It’s a long-range investment.”
Home Owners Partnership is an outgrowth of two important movements in Wilmington: the slow-growth movement, and a trend toward neighborhood empowerment.
That trend began in 1985, with the establishment of Wilmington Home Owners. Residents, seeing that their community was overrun with apartment developments as well as pollution, truck traffic and industrial blight created by the nearby Port of Los Angeles, banded together to challenge city officials.
The organization’s first major victory came in March, 1986, when it was instrumental in persuading harbor-area Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores to push for a one-year moratorium on high-density apartment construction in Wilmington. That moratorium, which will come before the City Council Tuesday for its third extension, is still in effect.
Eight months after the moratorium was enacted, the Wilmington Home Owners were battling the then-owners of the property at L Street and McFarland Avenue, who wanted the city to rezone the three-acre parcel for manufacturing. John Belsher, the lawyer representing the family who owned the land, proposed that his clients sell their land “to the neighborhood.” Of that marriage, Home Owners Partnership was born, with Mendoza--who has been president of the Wilmington Home Owners since the group’s inception--at the helm.
There were dozens of obstacles to overcome.
Among them were problems with Exxon Corp., which owned two oil wells on the property and eventually agreed to cap one; with the title search, which was complicated because of oil rights; with the city building and zoning code; and with the bank, which based its financing on the partnership redesigning the project with smaller houses.
As delays mounted, some investors also grew frustrated. They watched home prices shoot up all around them. Some dropped out.
“It was always waiting, waiting, thinking we could buy that house right now instead of being in this project,” said Eliseo Sanchez. He and his wife, Ana, stuck with the project, despite criticism from friends and relatives who “thought we were just throwing our money away.”
Those involved agree that it was the people who didn’t have a choice, people like Sam and Margarita Revelas, who could not afford to buy a house any other way, who kept the faith--and kept the others involved. Revelas said he never had a doubt about the project--even when a potential buyer offered the group more than $1 million for the land they had paid $600,000 for a year earlier.
“It’s something I believed in since the beginning,” he said. “I was one of the many that says, ‘No thank you, you can keep your money. We want to see this thing through.’ ”
