Hawaii Self Help Housing
Claudia Shay, Executive Director
1427 Dillingham Blvd., Suite 305
Honolulu, Hawaii 96817
(808) 842-7111

Hawaii may be almost like paradise, but it's a terribly expensive place to live, and the possibility of home ownership isn't a practical dream for many middle-class people, much less poor people. The median price for a single family home is $350,000, and the rent for a decent apartment starts in the neighborhood of $1,000 a month. It's no surprise that the rate of home ownership in Hawaii is the lowest of any state in the country; and with the high cost of bringing almost every consumer product over from the mainland added in, the state's cost of living runs some 35 percent higher than most of the rest of the U.S. With much of the economy based on tourism, the military and farm labor, salaries do not rise to meet the high living costs. "People live hand to mouth and don't have savings," Claudia Shay says.

It was in this context, more than a decade ago, that Shay and other activists began organizing around housing issues, lobbying the state legislature to develop alternative housing programs, tenant-rights protections and more. From there, it was a short step to the development of a self-help housing program: A non-profit initiative that would muster creative financing, help low-income individuals become qualified home buyers, and perhaps most important, use "sweat equity" to substitute for the cash reserves that simply weren't there. The organizers visited model programs in New York City (where Shay once worked as an organizer on the Lower East Side), California's Central Valley and Florida, then established the Self-Help Housing Corp. of HI in 1984.

The model -- a highly effective one -- uses a TEAM self-help method. Typically, the organization will locate and develop a land site for a subdivision, then recruit a group of about 10 prospective homeowners who'll work as a team to work together and build all of their houses. The organization screens applicants (often winnowing a group of several hundred applicants down to 10 to 20 participants), then works with them in a holistic fashion, providing financial counseling, intensive training in home ownership, and nuts-and-bolts training in building skills. (In some situations involving Native Hawai'ians who've never owned houses, "Home Buying Clubs" provide even more thorough basic training in home ownership.) When construction begins, team members are expected to put in 32 hours per week, building all houses in "mass construction" so they all begin and are completed at about the same time.

"Sweat equity" accounts for more than half the value of most houses, Shay said; in one subdivision of 3 and 4-bedroom double-walled houses, the actual cost per house was $40,000, while the finished houses were appraised at $88,000, well over double the cash investment. Sweat equity literally replaced the down payments.

It generally takes eight to 10 months to build 10 houses. So far, the Self-Help Housing Corp. has built 92 of them in nine projects. They're sturdy, too. Just as we saw with a similar project that stood firmly against Hurricane Andrew in South Florida when market-rate subdivisions nearby were flattened, this group's houses on Kaua'i survived Hurricane Iniki in 1992 ... surely because they are built well, with pride and care.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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