“It’s been a tremendous project,” Habitat for Humanity Development Director David Mauch said, “because of our partnership with Cliff Park School in Springfield.”
The alternative high school and Habitat for Humanity worked together on the project to rehab a southside vacant home acquired from the Clark County Land Bank in order to upgrade the home to “like-new” condition and offer it for sale.
According to Mauch, Cliff Park students did demo work in the early stages and helped in nearly everything since, including building cabinets and doors.
“This collaboration was designed to allow students to acquire trade skills and real-life experiences to prepare them to enter the workforce,” Mauch said.
Fifteen Cliff Park students provided most of the labor on the project. Cliff Park High Construction teacher Matt Bandy praised the opportunity to work with Habitat. When the build launched, Bandy said his students were looking forward to the experience.
“We’re not just rehabbing this house, we’re taking 900 square feet of it to the ground and then rebuilding part of it,” he said.
Now, their work is complete, and the house is being handed over to a first-time home owner. Habitat for Humanity holds the mortgage on the home, and the purchaser is able to buy the house at a flat rate, with a no-interest loan to repay. The house payments will be made directly to Habitat, which will recycle the dollars into another house rehabilitation and resale project.
A second Habitat home being constructed from the ground up is nearing completion and expected to be handed over to a new homeowner this spring. Springfield native Katana Wood has already logged hundreds of hours volunteering work on her own future home as well as volunteering hours at Habitat’s Dayton ReStore retail shop. She has also logged many educational classes to become eligible to purchase the house.
Her move-in date can’t come soon enough.
The prices of rental properties in Springfield housing since COVID have skyrocketed, and Wood said she’s “had a terrible time finding homes in a safe area.” Her current rental property does not meet that standard and has posed one problem after another for the single mom of four. Her children are not permitted to play outside since shootings took place in the neighborhood. They have bicycles they have already outgrown in storage because of the danger on their street.
The rental property where they live is owned by a landlord who resides outside of Springfield, and Wood and her children have facied serious challenges in getting the owner to address needed repairs to the property. They’ve been living with a leak into the basement that allowed raw sewage to accumulate on the floor. That problem was bad enough, but then the resulting moisture shorted out her furnace. Black mold is also an issue and has caused breathing problems for her youngest son, who requires the help of a machine to sleep.
But Wood said it could be worse — at least she and her family have shelter and are not living on the streets.
Wood began her quest for a better home for her children - Nyelle Gilbreath, 16; Shyelle Gilbreath, 13; TyAhn Dearmond, 8 and TyKel Dearmond, 6 - three years ago. After hearing about her struggles with finding safely located and affordable rental properties, some of the women she works with recommended she look into Habitat for Humanity.
“Then my church pointed me in the right direction, and I got a packet about Habitat,” she said.
Wood earned a degree from Clark State Community College in while working full-time, raising her first child and expecting her second.
Inspired by the idea of a home of her own, Wood was up for the challenge and signed on as a volunteer at the Dayton Habitat ReStore to qualify for the 275 volunteer hours required before groundbreaking could be held for her home. Once construction started, Wood has been actively hands on “from the first nail in the wall. I actually helped build the roof and put it on, and have been involved with drywall, plumbing, all of it,” she said with pride.
Her newly built three-bedroom home will cover “all the necessities for my family,” she said. Unlike her current home, every bedroom in her new house will have closets, the neighborhood is safe and the kids “will have a yard to run in.”
Like most who work with Habitat on a new home build, Wood will be a first-generation home buyer in her family. She said she’s learned a lot over the course of her Habitat experience.
“If you’re doing a fixer-upper, other than hands, the Dayton Habitat ReStore has almost everything you need,” she said. “And you connect with others who are also involved with building and can learn from them.”
She also learned that if you keep up on the small things that go wrong, they don’t become big things. Wood is optimistic that she won’t run into the types of problems she’s experienced with her rental.
“If the landlord had kept up on needed repairs at the start, the big problems we have today would not have happened. I know I’m going to jump on the first problem at my new house quick,” she said.
Katana said people who are interested in working with Habitat to build a house “have to be determined individuals. It helps if they have a strong support system. I only have my mom, so Habitat has also been my support system. It can be trying at times and difficult, but stick with it. I do it because I’ve got kids. I’ve got to.”
Habitat for Humanity is committed to building two additional homes in Clark County in 2023 and has an agreement with the Clark County Development Department on those projects.
“The Clark County Development Department has provided funding to assist our efforts for both of those builds,” Mauch said. “We are working to secure the locations of those projects and hope to start in spring or early summer 2023. We are planning to build many more homes in the coming years and are working to create partnerships and capture funding to enhance our capacity.”
Details about how to qualify for a Springfield Habitat home are available on the Habitat for Humanity of Greater Dayton website, www.daytonhabitat.org. For those in Springfield who are working to rehab their own home, Habitat has a local ReStore outlet at Northland Plaza, 2990 Derr Road, open Tuesday - Friday from 10 am to 6 pm and Saturday from 10 am to 3 pm.
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