 Ableton On Air is sponsored by Green Mountain Support Services, empowering people with disabilities to be home in the community. Washington County Mental Health, where hope and support comes together. Media sponsors for Ableton On Air include Park Chester Times, Muslim Community Report, WWW, This Is The Bronx.info, Associated Press Media Editors, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, U.S. Press Corps, Domestic and International, Anchor FM, and Spotify. Partners for Ableton On Air include Jihad, New York, and New England, where everyone belongs, the Orthodox Union, the Vermont Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Montpelier Sustainable Coalition. Ableton On Air has been seen in the following publications, Park Chester Times, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, WWW, This Is The Bronx.info, and www.h.com. Ableton On Air is a member of the National Academy for Television Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England Chapter. Hello and welcome to this edition of Ableton On Air, the one and only program that focuses on the needs, concerns, and achievements of the definitely able. I've always been your host, Lauren Seiler. And before we get to our important show today, let's thank our sponsors, Washington County Mental Health, Green Mountain Support Services, and many others, including the support from the Association for the Blind of Vermont, and the Division for the Blind of Vermont, and many others. We would like to welcome our guest today, Zachariah Watson of the Executive Director of Habitat for Humanity of Central Vermont. And today we are talking about housing options for people with special needs, and for people in general for people with special needs. Welcome to Ableton On Air. Thanks, Larry. Thanks for having me. Okay. Tell us the missions and goals of Habitat for Humanity. So Habitat for Humanities has been around since 1979, and their vision is creating a world where everybody has a decent place to live. Now, when you say decent place, I know during COVID now it's been really hard for people with challenges, or people in general to find decent places to live. Can you explain how Central Vermont is working towards that goal and maybe changing things, especially for people with disabilities and housing? Certainly. So the pandemic has certainly raised awareness about the shortages of housing in Vermont, especially in Central Vermont, and especially with the recent trend of wealthy urbanites moving into the state and paying well above asking price for properties. It's really made it apparent that there is a need for housing, not just for the homeless, which has been on the radar a lot recently, but also for low and middle income Vermonters. So how does it work? How does the whole thing work? Because owning a house isn't easy. Yes, you have the challenges, maybe a small apartment, but how does owning a house, because you have a mortgage, you have to do certain things with that, lots of paperwork. So going into some of the challenges that people might face and how you help hammer that away, so people are not scared. Absolutely. And I think it's important to mention that when Miller Fuller started Habitat for Humanity International in 1979, his goal was, it was his mission. He's a Christian man and it was his mission to provide housing for income sensitive folks. And the way he designed his program was essentially they would use volunteers to make the house affordable. They would then create a zero percent interest mortgage that those funds would go into a revolving fund so they could continue to build housing for the next person. So housing in the United States is majority of the, sorry, most Americans, their number one asset, their number one source of equity is their house. And what that is, that's a piece of mind. It means that you have something to fall back on. You have your own equity, a substantial amount of equity. So when things get financially difficult you can draw on that in the form of a home equity loan or something like that. So when folks don't have a home, they don't have that piece of mind, they don't have that financial equity. In addition to all the other things that we associate with home, we recently did a poster design contest where we asked kids in K-6 to draw their idea of home. And for adults we think of a home as that financial equity, it's that piece of mind. But for a child it's memories, it's the holidays you spend, it's time with your family. You know, quite simply it's the best place ever. So there's an emotional investment that comes with home that if you've never had a home then you don't have that experience. Because living on the street is not the greatest place in the world. And that impacts your relationship with your community? Your systemic way of, yeah. Exactly, yeah. And it impacts your health, your emotional well-being, your trust in the society and the social safeguards and nets that are there. So not having a home and whether it's homelessness or being housing insecure where your folks are constantly renting in a market where rent is way above what anybody can afford to pay with our current minimum wage. And so if you're bouncing from house to house, you're never going to have that experience. You mean couch surfing or? Couch surfing or even just rentals. You can't afford your rent for a couple months and your landlord boots you out. And so then you have to find another place and you lose your down payment on the house that you're renting. It's a major drag on somebody's finances and it prevents them from ever being successful. Last question before my wife asks a couple questions. What is equity defined equity in terms of what you're talking about? So people can't kind of understand. Yeah, sorry. Thank you for asking. So equity I'm referring to is their financial assets. So like I said in this case it's the house. It's how much money you've paid towards your mortgage and that amount that you've paid towards your mortgage that you own that amount of the house plus the value of the appreciation of the home as well. Can you give an example? So through us we have a shared equity model where an individual, we provide a mortgage for our homeowners that's based on what they can pay, not on the actual value of the home. And then if they choose to resell that house down the line they receive 25% of appreciation in addition to the amount that they've actually paid towards the mortgage. You want to ask a couple questions? Go ahead. Yes, yes. Take your time. Since 1989 we've built rehabbed or recycled 30 homes. What does it mean by rehabbed? Rehabbed is repair work. You have an existing structure that you're working to bring up to livable standards. Surprisingly about a third of the houses for sale right now in Washington County are for very low-income families. But you buy the house, you get it for really cheap but then you need to put 50 to 100,000 dollars of work into it. It's not actually affordable for somebody that's low income. So rehabs are an important part of the future of affordable housing in Vermont. We have a lot of old housing stock that needs some work to make it so it's livable for. I could imagine, yeah. Right. Now in terms of excesses, we've talked about accessibility here. Let's say example. Let's say someone who is special need, who works and wants other options in terms of not having an apartment. Because so to be honest with you Mr. Watson, in my opinion small apartments are not conducive to people with mobility impairments. So how can Habitat for Humanity or how does Habitat for Humanity make a house accessible for people with special needs who want that house? Excuse me. Well, so we actually don't design our house until we find our homeowner. And that means that whoever we select depending on their family size, their accessibility issues, we design that house for that person. And so somebody with mobility challenges applies for our program and they're accepted through our home ownership program. We would make the house universally accessible. What's that? What's the difference between that and barrier free? I'm not really sure. Barrier free means like accessible bathrooms, larger rooms so wheelchair can get in there, etc. So universally accessible means that all the hallways are a certain width. All the outlets are a certain height. It means that the bathrooms have stress bars that somebody can use either in the bathtub or next to the toilet. There's a bunch of specifications that you need to meet to make a house universally accessible. And obviously two stories doesn't make sense for somebody that's in a wheelchair. So ideally we would design a single story household mostly because additional options for bringing somebody up to a second floor can be very expensive even with one of those... They do have them. Yeah, but they're $10,000, $15,000. And when we're trying... Do you eat just for a lift? Absolutely, they are very expensive. And we're always trying to make the home as affordable as possible so that we can continue to build more houses. So we look into all those things to design the house for the needs of our homeowner. And you go ahead, ask more questions because they have in Washington County, they have tiny houses. So what's the difference between a house and in a tiny house or like with your partners? Like what are some of the partners that Habitat for Humanity has? Do you work a wheelpad and some other... So most of our houses, I would say the majority of them are single family households that have three bedrooms, one and a half bath and about 1200 square feet. So we've never built a tiny house before. It's something we've considered. So I think for us, the concern with a tiny house is the resale value. What does that mean? Well, so we want our homeowners to receive some additional appreciation on their home so the house gets more valuable over time. I'm not sure what the appreciation value of a tiny home is, but if it's anything like a mobile home, mobile homes actually go down in value, whereas a single family house on a slab or foundation, their value will almost inevitably go up even after a housing market collapse. So a tiny home, there's the risk that the house will actually lose value over time. And that means that that equity piece that we talked about earlier, it means that they're actually losing equity on their home. They're paying towards equity and then the houses value, the house is going down. I don't know if that's necessarily the case for a tiny home. I could be very wrong about that. But it's not the same thing as wheel pad, the accessory dwelling units that you're referring to. That's an entirely separate thing. Okay. Now, in terms of misconceptions, they have this old prejudice thing, acronym, not in my backyard, which you've probably heard before. Okay. So what are some of the misconceptions around people with special needs? Now that if someone wants to rent a home, is there any, you know, situations that might be in their way or people not giving them a chance like land, you know how landlords, they pick and choose who they want to live in their apartment building. But what are some of the misconceptions that might be around home ownership and people with disabilities? So I'm not aware of those and it's not because they probably don't exist. But what I can talk about is NIMBYism, not in my backyardism around having a low income homeowner. If I said the wrong question, I'm sorry. No, no. I can talk about what I'm familiar with and that's the low income families, which, you know, we work with low income families somewhere between 30% and 60% of area median income. That's a family of four making 25 to $48,000 a year. We know that there is, there are folks that are opposed to having low income houses in their backyard and it's for their own, it's for the interest of their equity there. I think there's some fear that by having a lower income house in their neighborhood, that it'll bring down the value of their home. That's not the person living in that home. It's the home itself. The home itself, I mean, there are certainly misconceptions about the type of folks that might be low income. And those are misconceptions, like I said, there's fears of drugs or something like that. So those are just, it's fear and it's not accurate. Our homeowners, they spend 250 hours of their own personal time building their household. So they literally have sweat equity in their home. Yeah, so what exactly is that? Yeah, they come, they go through a financial wellness course with us that we partner with Downstreet Housing and Community Development on. They actually come on the work site, they bring their friends and their family, they build their house. They put their own sweat into the house. So there's a financial, there's a sweat investment in addition to they own the home and which is way different than renting because it means that they are really building their equity. They're part of that community. And so I think that there might be some fears around low income neighborhoods where there's rent, where there's a high percentage of rental rates. That's not the same things you see from homeownership. Go ahead with more questions, Arlie. Do you accept vouchers for the house or how would that work? We look at all forms of income. And so that could be section eight. It could be social security, it could be child support. It needs to be verifiable and it needs to be considered consistent. Social security is consistent. That is a consistent point of income. Absolutely. So as long as there's a history of receiving something or an expectation of receiving it in the future, then we will consider that as part of your income. We're not a handout program necessarily, not at all, excuse me. Like I said, we have the SWOT equity. And while we are a non-traditional lending, we do provide mortgages to individuals who typically wouldn't qualify for a traditional bank loan. And that's because we look at all these things. Is that because of credit or? We look at credit somewhat, but that's about giving us an idea of where to look in somebody's finances. But where banks typically rely a lot on the credit score as well as your debt-to-income ratio. We're looking at a lot of other factors that we believe can show that you are going to be a good homeowner. What are some reasons landlords don't like to rent to people? Or, well, you know, because they're like, if they have bad credit or criminal record, do you guys look at any of those things to work with folks? We do look at their, our homeowners have to, one of the other requirements is that our homeowners need to be in need of housing, which means that, you know, their housing is too expensive. It means that they're in an unsafe condition. They don't have adequate resources like kitchens or enough bedrooms for their family members. Or the rent is too expensive. Or the apartment is way too small. Or the apartment is too small. We look into a number of things that really qualify somebody as being in need of housing. We do ask for references from current and past landlords. If you've been somewhere for less than two years, we ask for a reference from the previous landlords. We understand that, you know, that there are not always great relationships with landlords and the individual we're working with. It's not the only factor we look into. But for us, our organization depends on our mortgages so that we can continue to pay, to build more houses, right? And so we do need to make sure that we are verifying that we're working with somebody that has, that really wants to be there, that is really in need of being there, and that is going to be a reliable partner with us because it is a partnership. Okay. Any more questions before we end because we only have a couple more minutes? Arlene? Okay, I lost her. I lost her. What is the future with Habitat for Humanity going forward and with the sweat, equity, and all of that? What is the future goals of Habitat for Humanity? Great question, Larry. So we are currently working on a house in Barry. It's our first home rehabilitation. So it's a 19-20, so it's a 100-year-old Victorian four square that we are converting into a high-performance energy standard home. That means that the homeowner will pay very little on heating and cooling at our home. This is one of our goals that we will continue to strive towards in all of our future builds is that they are all energy efficient with high efficiency appliances. Is that difficult taking an older home, like you said, 1920s? Yeah. So basically the more older the home, is it more difficult to do things? Absolutely. Well, rehabs have their own issues. Every wall you open up, there's a new issue that you run into that you weren't expecting. Older homes have demolition. What about, let's say, if you're just a human, let's say you're working on an older home and you happen to be, you know, you have to go through a wall to fix something and then all of a sudden you see this rotting wood and you see bugs. I know that's a horrible word in termites or whatever you want to look at. How do you deal with those things? We are fortunate in Vermont. We don't have termites, so that's one thing we get to avoid. No, we have to, we rip it out, we just place it. The house that we just did in, Barry had a whole back section, about 800 square feet, two-story part that was structurally unsound. We had to go in and tear the whole thing down. The foundation was basically stones with some granite right on top of dirt that is not stable. We were surprised it had been standing like that for 100 years, so we had to go in and build interior concrete foundation walls with a vapor barrier and insulation so that we're insulating the shell of the home and making so that that house is going to last another 100 years. So yeah, it's very challenging, but this is the future. The other challenge that we run into, Larry, and to get back to the accessibility issue is not every home is going to be, every rehab, we're going to be able to make universally accessible. So this is a two-story house that you have to go up a steep incline to even get into the entrance. For us to make this universally accessible, we would have had to have built a 40-foot ramp for it, which can be challenging and very expensive in addition to the second floor. So this house wasn't a good candidate for somebody that was needed a universally accessible home. Fortunately, our partner homeowner didn't need that, but we do strive to make all of our homes at least visitable, meaning that your grandparents or when you get older, you can still enter the home if you do have some mobility challenges, but we don't need to make the whole house universally accessible. Any last questions you want to ask? Okay. Well, we would like to thank you for joining us on this edition of Ableton On Air. Any place where people can contact you? What is the website? Certainly. Yeah, we are always looking for volunteers to help out on our build. We are a volunteer-run organization. That's how we keep our houses affordable and no experience is necessary, just a willing heart. We provide all the training. And so you can access us, you can get in touch with us through our website, which is centralrunwanthabitat.org, or call us at 802-522-8611. We love to have individuals, as well as groups, employees, communities. Say that number one more time. 802-522-8611. Okay. Well, please, please partner with Habitat for Humanity for more information. The number is 802-522-8611. That is 522-8611. And you can go to www.habitat, is it? Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity.org. Centralvermonthabitat.org. That website, once again, is centralvermonthabitat.org. Well, I'm Lauren Silas. See you next time. Ableton On Air is sponsored by Green Mountain Support Services, empowering people with disabilities to be home in the community. Washington County Mental Health, where hope and support comes together. Media sponsors for Ableton On Air include Park Chester Times, Muslim Community Report, WWW, this is the Bronx dot info, Associated Press Media Editors, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, U.S. Press Corps, Domestic and International, Anchor FM, and Spotify. Partners for Ableton On Air include Jihad, New York, and New England, where everyone belongs, the Orthodox Union, the Vermont Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Montpelier Sustainable Coalition. Ableton On Air has been seen in the following publications, Park Chester Times, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, WWW, this is the Bronx dot info, and WWW dot h dot com. Ableton On Air is a member of the National Academy for Television Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England chapter.