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Self-Help Builder News October 2012 Volume 5, Issue #3 >
Self-help housing: A view from the road
By Jeremy Raff, RCAC multi-media specialist
Ana Robles belonged to Somerton, Arizona's
first group of self-help builders in 1982.
Photo by Jeremy Raff
It’s been a while since I've eaten fried summer squash on young moms' and dads' front lawns with a gaggle of kids turning somersaults, vying for attention. This scene was not out of place in the last two weeks of July, however, as I traveled the West interviewing self-help families in Montana, Utah, Colorado and Arizona, asking what it is like to build your own home.
Families were very forthcoming about the program and their build groups. Surrounded by still-drying paint, freshly laid tiles, and not-yet-unpacked boxes, new homeowners often expressed what you might expect: a mixture of disbelief, exhaustion and overwhelming gratitude for a program many called “the only way we’d ever be able to get into a house like this.”
People who had been in their home for several years showed the personal touches they had added since moving in, such as Tim Engebretson’s custom tile and bathroom fixtures in his Kalispell, Montana home.
The self-help building process is physically, mentally and emotionally demanding.
Ana Robles, who belonged to Arizona’s Housing America Corporation’s first group in the early 1980’s, sat in her expertly furnished living room, a cool respite from the punishing southern Arizona heat. She described warm memories embedded in her walls, and implied that she and her husband’s self-help example influenced her children’s success.
The self-help building process is physically, mentally and emotionally demanding. Most builders work full-time jobs all week, while laboring an additional 16 hours on their houses, shingling roofs in snowy Utah winters or waking at 3 a.m. to beat Arizona summer heat, every weekend for up to a year.
Amelia Leineweber waits for pizza in Kalispell, Montana. Lenny and Sheila, her parents, are pictured in the background.
Photo by Jeremy Raff
Lenny Leineweber, another Kalispell builder, said like many others he didn’t have a day off for five months. Some of the concerns are predictable: building these homes consumes the little time that people have for their kids or to enjoy themselves.
There were also stories of “bad management.” Several people described favoritism (“the supervisor gave the pretty girls the easy jobs”), dysfunctional and gossiping groups, and disorganization — “when we arrived early on our only day off and there aren’t even materials for us to build with, of course we’re going to get angry.”
Spencer Harvey was still in college when he began managing these problems as a construction supervisor at the Provo, Utah-based Rural Housing Development Corporation. He applied what he was learning in business school about management and the history of industrialization to his work with self-help builders.
The first idea that paid off was that Spencer is careful to refer to lot numbers instead of last names (“meet at Lot 48” instead of “the Garza home”) to suspend a sense of ownership, keeping accountability to the group for all the houses in the build.
His next change of methodology was to break down his build-groups into work-crews specialized by task and trained by him. So instead of 20 or 30 individuals arriving early Saturday morning asking “what am I doing today?,” each work-crew — dry wall, framing, stairs or landscaping, for example—completes the same task on every lot.
This swiftly solves many of the management problems. Because people consistently do the same task, their skills improve so they’re less frustrated. This predictability leaves little room to perceive favoritism, time to gossip, and helps the construction supervisor plan for materials accordingly.
Most importantly, the fact that people build skills makes overall construction times much faster. Spencer said that before specialization, his groups took between eight and 10 months to finish construction. Now they finish in four-to-six months.
The difference of the work-crew approach seems to make a huge difference in peoples’ self-help building experience. Neighborhood cohesion flourishes when the building process is less contentious; these durable friendships, though difficult to quantify or codify programmatically, grow from positive self-help experiences.
Whether through specialization or another method, I have little doubt that both the homeowners’ and the staffs’ level of engagement and dedication has an enormous effect on how painful or positive the experience is, and whether or not an authentic community emerges from the many months of shared labor.
Kaycie Sorenson with her yellow summer squash, Ephraim, Utah.
Photo by Jeremy Raff
Kaycie Sorenson, the Ephraim, Utah self-help builder whose garden was responsible for the fried squash, belongs to one such authentic community. Several families from her build group maintain a “dinner group,” rotating cooking duties throughout the week. Standing in her garden, she surveyed her kids tossing a football in front of tall blue mountains and described the self-help process with the refrain I heard most consistently among dozens of self-help homeowners scattered across four states: “In the end, it was all worth it.”
Note: The Self Help Builder videos (English and Spanish versions) shot this summer will be available to view this fall.