Rebuilding Her Faith : Volunteers: An alleged scam left a mother of six without her Willowbrook home. Now, two dozen workers are pitching in to reconstruct it.

Barn-raisings were common in the Old West. When a neighbor’s farm or ranch building was destroyed by lightning or other natural disaster, friends would grab tools and lumber and work together to build a replacement in time to beat the coming winter storms.

On Friday, they had a house-raising at Betty Young’s place in Willowbrook.

Two dozen carpenters, electricians, plumbers and wall plasterers were in a three-day race to build a home to replace the one she lost in a not-so-natural disaster: an alleged equity fraud scam.

Working feverishly to install flooring, outer walls and roofing joists, the crew promised to finish the three-bedroom home by Sunday night. By late Friday, the exhausted workers had the home’s roof in place for protection from today’s predicted rainstorm.

The volunteer project is a lifesaver for Young, a 45-year-old single mother of six who for the past two years has worked 16 hours a day to pay off the loan and to rent a tiny replacement house to keep her family off the street.

“I just can’t believe this,” Young said over the pounding hammers and the scream of power saws. “My family was suffering. My dignity was gone. This is a wonderful day.”

Young had scrimped to save $1,000 as a down payment in 1985 to purchase the aging, two-bedroom house from a friend. The $75,000 home needed work, but it was a nice step up from the one-bedroom residence she had rented for 11 years.

By 1991, however, several grandchildren were living with her and the 750-square-foot house was getting crowded. When equity loan “consultant” Tim Barnett allegedly approached her and offered to refinance her mortgage to pay for the home’s renovation and for a bedroom addition, Young jumped at the chance.

Trouble is, the project never got built. In a scenario that authorities warn has become increasingly common in the urban core, Young signed for the loan and laborers came to start the work. But they did not get far. In fact, they disappeared after removing the little house’s doors, windows and plumbing fixtures and sledge-hammering down some interior walls.

The house was now uninhabitable--Young was forced to move to a $1,100 per month rental. To make matters worse, payments on her refinanced mortgage for the unusable house had leaped by nearly $120, to $866 a month.

Her 8 a.m.-to-1 p.m. job as an aide at 93rd Street Elementary School was not enough to cover the rent and the mortgage. So she took a second job as 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. supervisor at a Los Angeles group home for emotionally disturbed children.

A conscience-raising was responsible for Friday’s house-raising.

San Luis Obispo developer Kenny Gazin was moved by news reports of how some victims of the alleged scam had been left destitute. About 30 have sued Barnett, who is under investigation by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, authorities said Friday.

Gazin rallied others in the construction business to help. At first, he figured on simply rehabilitating Young’s windowless and fixture-less hulk of a house. But workers found rotting wood throughout it when they traveled to the 11700 block of Slater Street to look it over.

“So we decided to tear down the old one and build a new one,” said San Luis Obispo architect Tom Brakovich, who drew blueprints for a 1,188-square-foot structure.

Los Osos contractor Bob Crizer recruited carpenters and other trades workers willing to volunteer their services. Los Angeles lawyer Eugene Trope stepped in to prevent foreclosure on Young’s house while banker Michael Iachelli of Diamond Bar refinanced her loan to pay off creditors and generate cash to purchase building materials.

Fund-raising specialist Shalom Elcott of Los Angeles lined up donations of cash, lumber and concrete while local representatives of Habitat for Humanity, a national group that builds homes for people in need, arranged for other volunteer craftspeople to do finishing work on the house.

Young was taking snapshots of her newly framed house Friday--and of the workers building it. She clicked one of Kevin Mulholland, a Los Osos builder who interrupted work on a new $1-million home in Cambria to come to help her.

“ ‘Thank you’ is a trivial word,” Young told him. “But thank you is the best I can give.

“You are giving my family the best Christmas ever.”