Houston Habitat for Humanity

Houston Habitat for Humanity's mission work includes new home construction, home rehabilitation, and repair, infrastructure development for new communities, neighborhood revitalization, and community building in Houston. 

Houston Habitat has built more than 1,050 homes in 11 Houston neighborhoods, including the Fifth Ward and Northeast and southeast quadrants. A shortage of low-income single-family homes existed before Hurricane Harvey, and with the loss of many homes, the need has been exacerbated; therefore, Houston Habitat continues to fill that gap. 

The organization has repaired countless other homes throughout Houston, principally repairing homes damaged by 2015, 2016, and 2017 floods. Since Hurricane Harvey alone, Houston Habitat has restored more than 500 homes for families without resources to make repairs. 

The magnitude of the Houston Habitat new home construction and repair of homes program depends on the public's support, and the need only continues to grow. 

Recent data shows that 1 in 6 households in the U.S. spends more than 50% of their income on a place to live. The Houston, Woodlands, Sugar Land Metropolitan area provides only 18 affordable units for every 100 households with extremely low-income. This data represents the third-worst ratio of all U.S. metro areas. It is our goal to change these statistics in the city of Houston.

The stability of homeownership is transformative to partner families. "For most buyers, homeownership leads to wealth creation," stated a report in the Journal of Housing Studies. Homeownership provides financial stability as homeowners build wealth through home equity and invest their communities by paying property taxes.

Houston Habitat programs also help to address the home ownership gap for people of color, widely recognized as the major source of the wealth gap between whites and people of color. Greater than 90% of the families that Houston Habitat has served in its home ownership program are African-American and Hispanic, as are the neighborhoods that Houston Habitat works to revitalize.

The COVID-19 pandemic has again brought the need for safe, secure housing and financial stability to the forefront and added to the urgency to address it. While for most, home is the place to stay safe from a global pandemic, for more than 19 million U.S. families, sheltering in place has only increased their housing insecurity, vulnerability and feelings of uncertainty.