Issue date: April 21, 1999
By JENNIFER DESAI
It sounds like a variation on the old joke about how many engineers it takes to change a light bulb: on a recent afternoon, 12 engineers and analysts have gathered at a Belle Haven construction site. Some scrape old asphalt into a wheelbarrow on a spot that will be lawn in a few weeks, while others prepare to paint newly hung aluminum siding and trim.
"Phil?" one asks a supervisor. "I'm going to be painting and I need to use a roller -- which one do I use?"
Surveying a pile of nearly identical rollers stacked up by the project site, Phil looks a bit confused. "I think you could use just about any one of these here," he says at last.
The engineers, from Sun Microsystems offices in Mountain View and Menlo Park, are here as part of a team-building exercise. But instead of the usual Outward Bound-type bonding experience -- or the cushier, culinary team building some Silicon Valley companies are opting for, in which employees cook a gourmet meal together to nourish better communication -- they're here today to help build a house.
The house they're working on, on Madera Avenue in east Menlo Park, is one of two single-family homes that have been built this year by Peninsula Habitat for Humanity. Founded in 1989 to help provide affordable houses for low-income families on the Peninsula, the chapter is one of 1,400 registered affiliates of Habitat for Humanity International. Locally, Peninsula Habitat has built 36 homes since its incorporation, many of them in East Palo Alto; worldwide, the organization has built over 50,000 homes since its incorporation in 1976.
The first of Peninsula Habitat's two Belle Haven projects, on nearby Carlton Avenue, has been completed and was dedicated in February. The Madera Avenue house, too, is nearly complete, or complete enough to keep project coordinator George Waffle confident all will be ready for the May 1 housewarming.
Outside the house, hardware engineer-turned-housepainter Hans Eberle rejoins a quartet of fellow volunteers. "It's not like we're trying to escape the office," he says. "There's something like 200 people in my division at Sun -- it's really big. This is just a good chance to see people and do something good."
Susan Banta, who has been helping to coordinate the volunteer effort at Sun, agrees. "Instead of hiring an expensive outside facilitator to teach us how to connect with each other, we thought it would be better to actually accomplish something." For the next four days, she adds, teams of 12 will spend the day working on the Habitat house. And though each individual worker's commitment to the project might be short-term, Sun Microsystems has been a longstanding corporate supporter, according to Habitat spokesperson Pat Irish.
Companies like Sun Microsystems, where workers often communicate as much by e-mail as in person, like the collegial atmosphere of the construction sites -- what the Habitat for Humanity Web site describes as "postmodern barn-raising." Corporate sponsors donate building materials to keep the costs of building Habitat houses down, board members often work with city officials to find low-cost or vacant sites on which to build -- and, for the most part, volunteers do the rest.
Those volunteers are the backbone of Habitat chapters local and international, says Mark Moulton, executive director of Peninsula Habitat. But increasingly the crisis-level shortage of affordable housing has driven groups like Peninsula Habitat to try to find help, and offer it, in other ways.
While Habitat for Humanity's method of helping families -- building one house at a time for one family at a time -- is the group's most basic mission, Mr. Moulton says Peninsula Habitat is taking a more broad-based, educational approach to try to get people more concerned about creating affordable housing. As area real estate prices soar and gentrification sends the working poor looking for homes elsewhere, the problem becomes more widespread, and the need greater.
Families whose income is too high to qualify for Habitat's help -- a yearly average of $25,630, according to the latest estimates available from Peninsula Habitat -- still can't afford housing here. For families with lower incomes, who often spend 40 percent of their incomes on rent and who then need cars for the long commutes to their jobs, saving money toward a down payment is next to impossible.
"In this county we're basically saying to people: If you make less than $50,000 a year, you're welcome to work your day job here -- but sleep somewhere else," Mr. Moulton says. "This means community figures like teachers and librarians, and police officers or fire fighters who aren't in upper management can't live in the communities they serve. Our community has failed."
As it has become a more established force in the community, Peninsula Habitat's mission has broadened to include forging alliances with the business community and "basically anyone connected with housing," says Pat Irish. "We're working to be a convener in terms of the players in the county," explains Mr. Moulton. "You don't get houses built in large numbers without money." As part of its educational and lobbying goals, Peninsula Habitat for Humanity has joined up with the Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition and two other local agencies to form a leadership council on housing.
"Habitat for Humanity is tiny compared to the Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition," Mr. Moulton admits. "After 10 years here, we're just about to become really visible. But community is important, and education is important: I want to make sure we do that part of it well, even if we don't build as many houses. Some Habitat affiliates build 50 houses a year; that's my dream, if we can get there."
Finding the way there, though, is a challenge. After the Madera Avenue house is dedicated, Habitat will begin work on six houses in Redwood City, and then a 10-unit site in Pacifica. "It's expensive to build houses here, whatever we do. No matter how you slice it, those houses are hard for our families to afford," Mr. Moulton says.
Although the Sanchez family -- whose Madera Avenue house will be ready for move-in May 1 -- paid Habitat's required 500 hours of "sweat equity" rather than a traditional down payment, for example, their mortgage payment will still be about $700 a month.
And there are many more families, as Mr. Moulton and his staff are aware. Still, for Habitat volunteers and staff, each house built is a small victory. "There are skeptics who say self-help building programs can never supply the need for affordable housing," Mr. Moulton says. "But what we build here will last."
And what they're building is more than just one house, more even than the 36 houses Peninsula Habitat has built since it began. Minnesota native Theresa Smith, who is supported by a yearlong Americorps grant to work full-time for Peninsula Habitat, pauses in her paint-stained clothes for a brief rest. "When I moved out here to work, I had just graduated from an arts high school, and I'd never swung a hammer. The skills I've learned since I've come here, I couldn't have imagined."
In September, she'll return to Minnesota to go to nursing school -- she already has completed emergency medical training training, she says, which came in useful recently when a volunteer broke her ankle -- and she'll take back memories of the families she's helped house. "I've worked alongside the families who'll live in these houses, and their families, and it's just amazing to have that experience," she says.
Even just one day working on just one house seems to build a sense of community among the engineers. Or something.
"It is a great workout," puffs Mick Jones, who is ordinarily a senior staff engineer. Right now, he is hacking away at a slab of asphalt. "Of course, I am missing sitting at my desk right now; I find it works off a lot of my aggression, typing."
Swigging at a water bottle, he muses. "Seriously, though, today it's been necessary to cooperate with others, which is not always true at work." He looks back at the growing pile of broken asphalt, and the swath he has left to break up with his shovel. It's a respectful sort of look. "This has been a very interesting experience," he says. "Rather like physics."
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