New:

With the acquisition of the McPherson Street site complete, we are applying for an 8 home condo project on the site. We are scheduled for City review in October. Five new families have been selected and are already logging sweat equity hours on Dick Williams Way. Look for information on the families page.

The Vaughans have moved in at 118 Dick Williams Way and construction has begun on the Martinez home next door. Pictures on the families page. To volunteer please call Chuck at 707-937-2418.

Thanks to the efforts of Bruce Erickson and Maggie Watson of Menocino Solar Service we have been able to stretch our PG&E grant to complete the solar project for five of the seven homes on Dick Williams Way.

How We Work

Habitat for Humanity of the Mendocino Coast seeks to draw people of all faiths and beliefs together to provide simple, decent housing to working families who do not qualify for conventional mortgages. We accomplish this by enabling deserving families to purchase homes at affordable prices, homes that they have helped to build and therefore know how to maintain. These families are selected on the basis of need and willingness to operate in fellowship to accomplish this goal for themselves and others.

Habitat is open to people of every race, creed, gender and sexual orientation willing to express their care for each other and their community by helping to build families and strengthen neighborhoods through the medium of housing.

Each Partner's mortgage payment repays the community's donations to Habitat which in turn is used to purchase more land to develop additional houses. Every donation, due to our low overhead, is thereby used again and again through time.

McPherson Street Project

McPherson Street represents a new era for Habitat on the Coast: our first townhouse condominium with a Homeowners Association, a collaborative governing body of Family Partners and the necessity for cooperative property maintenance. It also represents a logistical and funding challenge to develop eight homes in four duplex units with common walls. Each unit will be similar in scope to the Oak Duplex done in 1992, but the overall task will unfold on a much larger scale over 6 years at triple the cost.

We plan to phase this project to isolate construction impacts as much as possible. If feasible, we will retain the existing very low income rental until the last stage, so we propose to grade and prepare the site around it as Phase 1 in 2009. Phase 2 in 2009-10 will be construction of the North East unit with parking and utilities placed for the South East and South West units as well. Phase 3 will be completing these 2 units between 2010 and 2012. The last phase in 2013-14 will be to raze the old house and complete the project with the North West unit and final landscaping.

The units will be heavily sound buffered, each with its own assigned parking spaces and yard as well as access to common trash units, utilities and vegetation which will be native and drought tolerant and scaled to the site. The units will have 1100 square feet of living space, 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and open living/dining area. They will be Hardie sided in the same basic color scheme with pergolas, porch details and entrance colors harmoniously varied to individual tastes.

It is our goal, despite sharply rising land and construction costs , to sell these units for about $200,000 and to insure they are as attractive as the Dana/Dick Williams Way project within the constraints of a higher density project.