 | Press Clipping: Building Power
Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine, 08/06
By Deborah Hopp
Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity takes on multifamily housing, with the help of some friends. [Central Community Housing Trust]
You've seen the images. Everyone from Jimmy Carter to Wells Fargo chief Jon Campbell wearing Tim Taylor tool belts on the site of what soon becomes the centerpiece of the American Dream for a fortunate family willing to join their own sweat-equity efforts with those of Habitat for Humanity. Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity has been hammering away since 1985, providing more than 600 welcome home-sweet-homes. But the times, they're changin'. The affordable housing shortage is a crisis. Rising land and construction costs have forced Habitat to shift its strategy to multifamily housing units, a more complicated and expensive proposition. One such project under way at Glenwood and North Penn Avenues is historic on several levels.
Central Community Housing Trust is redeveloping the former Ripley Maternity Hospital into fifty-two affordable rental units. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the property was home to the first maternity hospital in Minnesota, founded in 1886 by Martha Ripley, a rare female physician for that day. Hospital births were even rarer then and risks for both mother and child extreme. She opened her doors to women without regard to marital status, ability to pay or ethnicity, eventually adding social services, housing and even vocational training for needy mothers. A suffragette and social reformer, Ripley was the ideal inspiration for Women-Venture to add its muscle to the new Habitat project. Cochaired by a pair of equally inspiring women - Padilla Speer Beardsley CEO Lynn Casey and LFE Capital CEO Leslie Frecon-WomenBuild 2006 will build one of eight new units alongside the remodeled hospital. "It's the perfect fit," says WomenVenture president Tene Wells. "WomenVenture gives women the job skills needed for high-wage positions, including in construction, so they can afford to buy their own homes. After our five-week course, a woman who was making $7 an hour increases that 70 percent to at least $12 to $15 an hour. Now she can not only afford a home, she knows how to build one."
The Ripley Gardens project will train five women working side by side with volunteer crews of women, including a dozen from this magazine. The project will be featured on both HGTV's Restore America and Hometime on PBS.
Back
| |