Home Makers : ‘Sweat Equity’ Helps Families Realize Dream

When Maricela Quintana has finished the household chores around her Santa Maria home and has put her three young children to bed, she sometimes gazes up at her cathedral ceilings.

And she thinks about hammers and nails.

“I sit and look up and I say, ‘Gosh. I was way up there? That’s high.’ It’s incredible,” said Quintana, who recalls well the days she spent on top of her house--installing the roof along with a group of other women.

“I was one of the first ones that cut plywood with the electric saw,” said Quintana. “Everybody was real quiet and I was real nervous.”

But Quintana pulled it off without a hitch, and was one step closer to building the dream house in northern Santa Barbara County that she hardly dared to hope for a few years ago.

For 10 years, Quintana and her husband, Jaime, a tractor driver, had paid $500 a month rent for a two-bedroom apartment. Today--thanks to People’s Self-Help Housing Corp. (PSHHC), a private nonprofit developer of low-cost housing--the Quintanas pay a monthly mortgage of $516 a month for their own three-bedroom home.

Of course, the Quintanas weren’t just handed this opportunity on a silver platter. First, they had to pass through a stringent qualifying process, which required them to have excellent credit and employment histories and at the same time be considered low-income earners.

Then the couple had to commit to working 40 hours a week between them during the 10-month building process. This effort in lieu of a down payment is often referred to as “sweat equity.”

“We’re trying to build self-sufficiency,” said Jeanette Duncan, executive director of the San Luis Obispo-based organization. “They are doing 60% to 70% of the work to build that house.”

The organization has helped almost 800 families build their own homes from Moorpark in Ventura County to the Monterey County line, with most of the focus on helping poor families in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties.

In Duncan’s view, the program offers more than just housing. “I think poor people, if given the right opportunities and the right program, can really pull themselves up,” she said. “It really changes people, especially women.”

Today, a year after Quintana and her family moved into the home, she is still busy. In her latest project, she is pouring a sidewalk along the side of her house, using leftover cement she hauled home from a job site down the street. Before that, she applied textured plaster to the garage walls and ceiling, and installed a closet alongside the washer and dryer.

“I built this,” she said, standing in the middle of the pristine garage. “I put in this wall. I put in these shelves--all by myself.”

This contrasts with Quintana’s mind-set before the whole process with People’s Self-Help Housing Corp. began. “When they told us we were going to build our house, I said, ‘I don’t believe it,’ ” she recalled. “Now I told my husband, ‘It’s easy to build a house.’ ”

Quintana’s next-door neighbor and fellow home builder, Maria Noriega, is also filled with pride about her new house and her part in building it. Using her 12-year-old son, Benjamin, as a translator, Maria Noriega proudly showed a visitor the door jamb she had installed and the cabinets she had built.

Noriega moved to California from Mexico 15 years ago, and has worked in the lettuce fields in nearby Guadalupe in northern Santa Barbara County since 1985. Her husband, Prospero, works in a freezer plant.

Low-income families like the Quintanas and Noriegas--who dream the nearly impossible dream of owning a home on the Central Coast--typically find out about PSHHC’s upcoming subdivisions by word of mouth and public service announcements.

Plus, the organization has a list of 7,000 interested families who are contacted when opportunities become available. The average interested family waits four years before being considered for the program.

For example, a recent subdivision in Nipomo, in southern San Luis Obispo County, drew 700 applicants for 57 lots. Once the 57 families qualified for the program, they were divided into teams of 10 families to work together on 10 homes. Homes range from three to five bedrooms, depending on family size, and no family pays more than 30% of their income for the average mortgage of $90,000 to $95,000.

One home builder in Nipomo who can hardly believe her good fortune is Sonia Mendoca, who is about halfway through the building process. Along with several other Spanish-speaking women, all wearing scarves and tool belts, Mendoca climbed down off the roof of her house recently to tell a visitor about how much she has learned.

“At first, we would crawl all the way to the peak (of the roof) and hammer,” Mendoca said. “Now we learned not to be afraid of heights. Now we can stand and work. We’re not afraid. Now we practically jump around.”

Mendoca isn’t the only eager one. Another woman in the group said in Spanish, “When we’re at home, we’re anxious to get back here. We want to get it done. We hate nights. You can’t work nights.”

This spirit is appreciated by building supervisor John Elom, who has been working for PSHHC for four years and calls this the best job he’s ever had.

“I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this,” Elom once told an interviewer, “but you’d be surprised. Some of the people, especially the women, catch on fast. They remember measurements and everything. They know exactly what goes where. . . . They know exactly what’s going on.

“Ladies are pretty good at whatever you put them to,” Elom added.

The motivation to get the homes built is strong, Duncan said, because the families are sometimes living in squalid conditions.

“I’ve seen some of the places these families live in. They’re dumps,” said Duncan, pointing out that with two adults working full time and earning minimum wage, which is typical pay for jobs in the tourist, farm work or fast food industries--their annual combined income is only about $18,000, hardly enough to qualify for a home loan in Southern California.

Financing for the PSHHC subdivisions comes from a variety of sources. In rural areas, such as the Nipomo subdivision, sliding-interest loans are available from the Farmers Home Administration. While a family may initially pay less than $400 a month on a $90,000 mortgage, their payments go up when their income goes up. Most often, they are paying the full mortgage payment within five or six years.

“It’s typical that after they get through this process, they get new skills and they tend to earn more money and have upward mobility,” Duncan explained.

In non-rural areas, such as Santa Maria, PSHHC arranges a potpourri of loans, including first mortgages derived from tax-exempt bonds. In addition, secondary financing has been provided by the city of Santa Maria, which defers payment for the 33-year term of the mortgage, and by the State of California, which not only defers payment, but forgives the loan after 20 years.

The beginnings of People’s Self-Help Housing came in the late 1960s when “public housing was in bad, bad straits,” Duncan said. Then, a San Luis Obispo group of Methodists and a Legal Aid attorney took guidance from a self-help housing program then operated by the Quakers in the San Joaquin Valley.

By the early 1970s the local Methodist church and 10 individual churchgoers got enough money together to buy lots in Los Osos, in San Luis Obispo County, applied for Farmers Home Administration loans and hired two people to administer the program. The program now has 27 employees.

People’s Self-Help Housing was honored in May with a $25,000 grant from the Fannie Mae Foundation, created by the Federal National Mortgage Corp., for its work in meeting the housing needs of low-income residents in its community. PSHHC was among six nonprofit groups chosen from 175 applicants nationwide.

While Duncan has seen the organization grow during her 16 years as director, she said the housing situation for poor people has gotten worse over the years.

For one thing, land has become more expensive even as state funds have dried up. “You have to spend so much to get these programs going,” Duncan said.

Plus, the organization has also faced fierce opposition from property owners who don’t want low-cost housing built in their communities. To combat this, PSHHC’s volunteer board of directors--which typically includes at least one minister, an attorney, a banker and a city planner--has gone out and persuaded the opposition that poor people are not to be feared.

“The majority of people don’t know who low-income people are,” Duncan said. “It’s someone who checks you out at the grocery store. We have city employees--clerks, street workers--who can’t afford a house. They don’t think of the working poor. And that’s who we’re trying to serve.”

PSHHC is now also helping renters. Eight years ago, PSHHC responded to the many calls from poor people who were behind in their rising rents. They now own 200 rental units, and another 200 units are “in the pipeline,” Duncan said. Many of the tenants are elderly and/or handicapped.

Also, the organization is involved with housing repair, helping low-income homeowners with minor repairs and setting up loans for major repairs.

For Duncan--who was named 1991 Woman of the Year by the San Luis Obispo County Commission on the Status of Women--the reward is seeing people become empowered by building their own home.

She told of one couple who had worked as a cook and a waitress in the same restaurant for 14 years when they started building their PSHHC home. After the home was completed, the couple opened their own now-thriving Mexican restaurant in Grover Beach.

Nancy Etteddgue, now the city clerk of Guadalupe, in northern Santa Barbara County, is another PSHHC success story. Before getting involved with the program, Etteddgue was in a bad situation.

“I was a divorcee with two small children,” she said. “My husband had stopped paying child support. I was getting partial AFDC. I didn’t have a car at the time. It all makes you feel so helpless. So hopeless.”

But once she was accepted into the PSHHC program, Etteddgue’s life started to change. As she was building her home, she started getting promoted in her job.

“My whole self-worth just grew,” said Etteddgue, who was finally promoted to city clerk in May of 1979, just one month before she moved into her newly built home.

Today, Etteddgue feels like a new person. For instance, she just recently tore up her yard so she could redo the landscaping.

“Before, I always felt like a failure,” she said. But since she built her home, “Things don’t seem impossible anymore. It really makes you feel like you can tackle anything. It was a turning point.”