CINCINNATI — An inflated housing market is putting pressure on charitable organizations like Habitat for Humanity of Greater Cincinnati,.
On Friday, the group held a kickoff celebration for the start of construction of a new home being built in Lockland for a truck driver named Reggina Taylor.
“I'll be there every weekend putting my hard work in,” said Taylor. “It’s something that is going to be there for years.”
Taylor and a group of volunteers from Ohio National Financial Services spent the morning laying the framework for Taylor's exterior walls.
“Habitat is not just building homes, they’re building communities,” said Pam Webb, Ohio National Financial Services' senior vice president. “If you go to streets in different neighborhoods you’ll see several habitat homes, they are supporting each other.”
Habitat for Humanity president and CEO Ed Lee said in recent months volunteers, materials and money to construct homes are getting harder to come by because of rising costs and supply chain issues.
“It's impacting everybody in the building industry,” he said. “Our costs are way up and that increases the cost of the mortgage also for the habitat homeowner.”
Getting their hands on concrete and other materials has taken longer than normal, he said.
“We're now warehousing windows,” he said. “We're warehousing refrigerators and other building materials that we have never had to warehouse to have in stock for when we need them because now we know we can't just call up a supplier and expect delivery.”
A Habitat home can take upwards of 20 weeks to build. Taylor said she hopes to move in by the end of the year.
Lee said about one in 20 applicants end up buying a Habitat home.
“We're not able to meet the demand, we cant raise enough funds, nor can we find enough volunteers, but we are doing our part to help some,” said Lee.
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