Habitat Los Angeles’ Erin Rank on Disaster Recovery and Homeownership

Erin, let’s begin with an introduction for our readers. Summarize Habitat LA’s mission and its evolution over two-plus decades of your leadership.

When I started with Habitat Los Angeles over 25 years ago, we were focused on building one house at a time using an all-volunteer model. I was the first paid employee of Habitat for Humanity in the area, and we were truly a volunteer-driven organization: the community came together, cities donated the land, volunteers built the houses, and each family paid an affordable mortgage that funded the next home.

We realized that in Los Angeles, we weren’t going to make a dent in the housing crisis one home at a time, so we looked for ways to scale. We went from building individual homes to communities to full neighborhoods. We now build and renovate about 150 homes a year.

That work now includes more than the single-story home people associate with Habitat—we’re building townhomes, duplexes, large subdivisions, doing wildfire rebuilding, and critical repairs for LA’s aging housing stock. We’ve also expanded far beyond the City; we now build across Los Angeles County, from Lancaster to Long Beach, Inglewood to Santa Fe Springs, and almost everywhere in between.

Let’s allow you to elaborate. Beyond new home construction, walk us through the other services you provide—repairs, down-payment assistance, and neighborhood revitalization.

At the heart of Habitat is providing people the opportunity to purchase a home affordably—and to help existing homeowners stay in their homes and age in place. Our housing continuum starts with critical repairs for low-income homeowners, especially seniors or people with disabilities who can’t physically or financially maintain their homes. Habitat fixes health and safety issues—leaking roofs, new windows, accessibility modifications—and we install solar to help with utility bills.

We also build new homes, which is what we’re best known for, and sell those homes to first-time homebuyers with affordable financing. 

Additionally, Habitat offers down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers purchasing in the market who are otherwise shut out by high upfront costs or interest rates. 

Another valuable tool is our Pathways to Homeownership program, which provides a series of classes and tools to prepare people for homeownership. Pairing affordable construction, affordable lending, and counseling is the difference between staying rent-burdened and building generational wealth.

Many people still associate Habitat with Jimmy Carter’s legacy, but also with your famously sturdy homes. How does someone get involved in your ecosystem?

Habitat LA engages over 6,000 volunteers a year in LA County. Four or five days a week, we have groups of 25–50 volunteers on site, and we teach them everything they need to know to build. But to build more, we also use a production model for some developments, acting as a general contractor and hiring subcontractors.

To get involved in our efforts, you can sign up on our website for volunteer days as an individual or group. You can also shop at one of our three ReStores in LA County. These ReStores are a cross between a thrift store and a home-improvement store: everything is donated, and proceeds fund our housing work.

For those interested in potentially owning a Habitat home, you can start on our website or give us a call. We’ll share information about upcoming homeownership opportunities, repair programs, or down-payment assistance if you’ve identified a home to buy. We have full-time staff—some Habitat homeowners themselves—who help applicants navigate the process.

What are the parameters of who qualifies for a Habitat home?

Our homeownership programs are designed to help first-time homebuyers earning less than 80% of the area median income (AMI), who have a stable income to make ongoing mortgage payments. For reference, currently, this would be $121,150 or below for a family of four. We do ask homeowners to contribute “sweat equity”—volunteer hours alongside others, but qualification is mainly income-based.

I was involved years ago with high-school students, also building these Habitat homes. Does that still go on?

Yes. We have youth volunteers as young as elementary school doing gardening, mailbox building, or “Nickels for Nails” fundraising. We use denim insulation, so kids run denim drives. Starting at 16, they can help build on-site.

Turning to the fires that devastated areas like the Palisades and Altadena, what role has Habitat played in recovery?

It's been really devastating, and sadly, Habitat has a lot of history helping people rebuild after natural disasters. Our disaster rebuilding work goes as far back as the Northridge earthquake here in Los Angeles. Habitat LA helped people rebuild after Northridge. More recently,  after the Woolsey and the Creek fires, we helped over 100 families rebuild and repair their homes. And so we knew as soon as the wildfires started earlier this year that we would be there responding and helping people recover and rebuild.

Habitat is one of the few organizations that commits long-term to helping people rebuild after a natural disaster. We are currently responding to the Maui fire, where rebuilding is underway, in Lahaina, and in North Carolina after the floods. Our largest response was after Hurricane Katrina, where we rebuilt hundreds of homes in the Gulf Coast. Globally, Habitat for Humanity is responding to natural and man-made disasters all the time.

Here in Los Angeles, our initial response focused on urgent relocation needs. After the fires, we staffed disaster resource centers seven days a week and provided over $4 million in resources to stabilize households. Now we are helping families with smoke and soil remediation, major home repairs,  and complete home rebuilds. We are focused on helping income-limited families who have an insurance gap or no insurance, and we are helping them with their plans to rebuild. 

We have developed five plans that Habitat will build that they can choose from, or if they want to work with their own contractor, we offer loans to bridge the gap between what insurance or FEMA is providing them and what they actually need to rebuild. These loans require no payments for up to 30 years.

How does resiliency fit into our conversation?

Resiliency is a global Habitat value: we never want a family to lose their home. 

We rebuild to the highest resiliency codes possible. For California-specific rebuilds from this year’s fires, that means IBHS-plus standards, which are actually above what the code requires. That’s to ensure our homes would withstand the same extreme events that happened earlier this year.

Piggybacking on that, another issue is neighborhood-building as you work on individual homes. Elaborate on Habitat’s community-building efforts. 

Well, I think Habitat for Humanity has the ideal model for building community. Over the years, we have seen the ripple effects wherever we build—neighbors engaging, blocks stabilizing. We also have a community engagement team; we’re present in neighborhoods long before construction. 

But I think Habitat for Humanity’s most important and impactful community-building happens on-site: people from all walks of life show up at 8:00 AM to build a house for a family they’ve never met, doing tasks they’ve never done. There's such collaboration, and there's no distinction between who has money, status, what they believe, or where they come from. Everyone’s simply engaging in this one goal: to roll up their sleeves and build a home for someone who needs it. I think you find the best of humanity on a Habitat build site.

Let me ask a provocative question, as this all might sound almost too good to be true. Jimmy Carter has passed away, we’re now in a different political environment, and people are “bowling alone.” How has the spirit evolved?

I think it’s a really great question. President Carter and Mrs. Carter were our most famous volunteers, and really our inspiration, in the sense that wherever they went, they treated the homeowners and the volunteers like their next-door neighbors. That gave us a great model to say we can spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about our differences, but when it comes down to it, we are all people who want connection, are worried about our kids’ futures, and want to provide the best for our families.

Habitat is that common ground where we aren’t involved in the political climate, but we try to continue to find ways to bring people together. We have an interfaith partnership where people from all faiths come together; young people, seniors, and all kinds of business industries that come out to build with Habitat. That’s the difference between the way we build affordable housing and the way most affordable rental housing is built. We build it with community.

Your wisdom would be valuable in addressing the region's housing shortage, exponentially large from your vantage point. What constraints stand out given the challenge of providing affordable housing at scale?

I think LA has a deep mismatch between where and how we allow housing and the scale and need for housing. There are a few barriers that consistently show up in our work. The first is restrictive zoning that locks away large pieces of the region into low-density opportunities for housing. 

Single-family zoning has opportunity with the building of ADUs and such, but what I’ve seen and continue to see is the under-utilization of land. When you drive around urban areas that do not have the vast land wealth that Los Angeles does, you see how they’ve become more creative in building taller multi-use buildings, including residential over retail.

In Los Angeles County, even our major corridors, like Sepulveda or Pacific Coast Highway, are predominantly made up of single-story 1950s-era strip malls. Without much imagination, we could replace those with attractive structures three or four stories tall—with similar businesses on the main floor and 3-4 stories of housing above it. Without even talking about upzoning single-family homes, I’ve seen examples of this in cities like Anaheim, where they still honor the retail nature, but allow for the building of housing above their retail.

On the wherewithal that allows Habitat to do what you’ve spoken to, what are the profiles of your donors? Are there any prospects in mind?

Well, we’re fortunate that we have a deep land bank, and most of our land is donated by jurisdictions—cities and the County. We currently have about 300 parcels of land. We are currently seeking funding to bring these projects out of the ground. Habitat LA has a great combination of corporations, foundations, faith groups, and individuals who support us, and sometimes, cities can provide financing. When we sell our homes, we have the mortgage revenue that we can use to help a project pencil out or to fund the next project. But we are always seeking additional partners. 

Another source of our funding is through our ReStores. That’s our social enterprise. If people donate or shop in our ReStores, they’re helping us build more houses.

Let me close with this: In your 25+ years with Habitat, what have you learned?

One thing I’m always intent on sharing with others in the affordable housing community is that our model is not novel. It can be expanded; it can be utilized by others. There’s such a proclivity for housing dollars to go to rental because of the assumptions that low-income people can’t afford homeownership, be responsible, or maintain the property. Habitat proves that notion is so flawed. Our homeowners have less than a 1% default rate in 30 years on our Habitat homes and take beautiful care of their properties. These are folks who are just excited to have the opportunity.

The challenge with the rental model, and not as an either/or to ownership, is that it disincentivizes people from earning higher incomes because they’ll have to move out and then somehow figure out the gap in housing costs between an affordable place and a market-rate place. Our homeownership model provides people with the opportunity to build generational wealth over time—and use that to start a business or send their kids to college. In my mind, it really breaks the cycle of poverty or low-income status for generations to come.

And with the same or fewer dollars, we could actually create more homeowners and less dependence on vouchers and tax credits. Instead of putting people into a unit and calling that a permanent placement or permanent housing, you allow them the flexibility to transition from affordable rental to affordable homeownership. Then, the next person who needs that affordable rental unit will be able to move in, instead of being stuck on a waitlist or in situations where there’s just no mobility. 

It creates a flow and pathway, instead of a bottleneck.