Weld-Greeley Habitat for Humanity aims to bring more than 300 affordable housing units to the area with Hope Springs project to address housing crisis

Photo by @bweaver via Unsplash.

By Dan England

As Cheri Witt-Brown thinks about those struggling to find housing, she will tell a story about a single mother paying $1,300 in rent for a mobile home with broken pipes and no heat for the winter. 

But really, the director of Weld-Greeley Habitat for Humanity thinks about the workers at the meatpacking plant, and  nursing assistants, and EMTs, and the many service workers and retail employees who make less than $50,000 a year. Those people make up a good chunk of Greeley’s workforce. In the past, they might have been considered borderline middle class and could probably find a decent place to live and maybe eventually own a home. Now they are now swallowed up by the price of housing. 

Owning a home for them may be nearly impossible now, even in Evans, where many homes cost $375,00 and up, or Greeley, where the median price is now $400,000. But rents are also rising as home prices make others scramble to find a place to live. 

“They slide into poverty,” Witt-Brown said of those with their heads just above the surface of middle-class wages, “because housing costs are way more than 50% of what they make.”

This is why Greeley’s Habitat is making some bold moves. 

You probably know Habitat as the organization that calls on volunteers to build homes for those with lower incomes who would otherwise not be able to afford one. The homeowners themselves put in hundreds of hours, more or less, of so-called sweat equity and pay a mortgage on the house, but they are also allowed to sell it after a time, which builds wealth. Witt-Brown, who became Habitat’s director nearly seven years ago after growing up in contracting and home construction and running her father’s company for a time, still believes in this program. 

But the program wasn’t designed to solve an affordable housing crisis, as the model doesn’t allow Habitat to build more than a few homes a year. 

Until now. Habitat is getting into the developing game.

A project in Greeley, which Habitat will call Hope Springs, is set to bring more than 300 high-quality but affordable apartments, a park, and a childcare center within walking distance to schools, grocery stores and mass transit. It will also have 174 single-family housing lots from Habitat. It will be one of the largest affordable housing planned communities in the West, Witt-Brown said. 

Habitat is working with the city’s planning department on the project and hopes to start construction by late next year. The area will be around the Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club off 23rd Avenue. 

Habitat plans to  partner with a private builder to get the apartments done, though volunteers will certainly have their place in building the homes. 

“I believe in that model so strongly,” Witt-Brown said. “I’ve been here six years and we’ve had one foreclosure in 36 years. But we are taking this affordable housing problem very seriously. Really, Hope Springs was everyone coming to the table and saying what kind of community we need to develop. By partnering with private sector builders, we are bringing a scale to this that we couldn’t do on our own.

“We didn’t want to just build five homes a year. I knew we weren’t even going to scratch the surface. We were seeing families in unsafe conditions, and we needed to get them out. We can help more of those people immediately.”

The first experiment was with the Mission Springs community in Evans. Habitat and the City of Evans sought out money from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, which invested $3 million in federal dollars from the 2013 floods. The development of 95 units of townhomes, cottages and single-family homes both by Commonwealth Companies, one of the country’s largest multi-family builders, and Habitat’s volunteers and staff helped replace some of the affordable housing washed out by the flood, Witt-Brown said. Commonwealth built 68 affordable townhomes and cottages of the 95. 

Habitat’s waitlist of 450 families could all be helped by the Hope Springs development, once it’s all built.  

This change has caught the attention of Habitat for Humanity’s International office, which asked Witt-Brown to present at its annual conference. 

“They think I’m a unicorn,” Witt-Brown said and laughed, “but I know any Habitat affiliate can do the work that we are doing now.”