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Self-Help Builder News June 2012 Volume 5, Issue #2 >
Families work together for home ownership
Reprinted with permission from Nogales International, May 4, 2012.
Nine families worked together to build houses in Rio Rico, and here they show the fruits of that labor:
keys to a new home.
Eight months of hard work paid off for nine families on Tuesday when they were handed the keys to their new homes in Rio Rico.
The families – Fonseca, Porchas, Rios, Ibarra, Cañez, Peralta, Agosttini, Santacruz and García – are participants in Chicanos Por La Causa’s Self-Help Housing Program, an effort that helps low-income families who are unable to purchase homes through conventional methods to build their own homes.
Raquel and Carlos Agosttini, left, show off the key to their new home while sharing a smile with Gabriela Pacheco of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, right.
As part of this mutual self-help program, participating families, under qualified supervision, perform 65 percent of the construction labor on each other's homes.
The nine families given keys this week by CPLC housing director Alejandro Martinez and Gabriela Pacheco of the U.S. Department of Agriculture “worked very hard for eight months to be able to build their homes and tonight they will enjoy the fruits of their labor,” CPLC said in a statement issued Tuesday.
Five new families have signed up for the Self-Help Housing Program, CPLC said, and are ready to start construction as early as this weekend in Rio Rico.
The program, supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “has helped build 247 homes and made homeownership a reality for hundreds of deserving families in Santa Cruz County” since 1997, CPLC said.