Fifteen years ago, my husband, Steve, and I purchased our first home in Morgan Hill. With housing prices what they were, we hadn’t thought homeownership was possible for us and our five young children.
We made it happen, though, by purchasing our home affordably through Habitat for Humanity.
Our home was built by our own hard work and thousands more volunteer hands, working alongside us to raise our walls from the ground up. It was built with the help of countless donors and supporters giving with open hearts.
It was also built with the help of CalHome, the state’s only funding program that builds affordable homes for ownership by Californians earning low incomes.
CalHome funding helped make my home, my five neighbors’ homes, and many more homes across the state a reality.
Unfortunately, that help will stop if CalHome isn’t funded in the next state budget. As the proposed budget stands, there isn’t a single dollar allocated to this crucial program!
Our Habitat for Humanity home wasn’t just a place where we lived. It was the stable ground on which we planted our family and watched our children grow and flourish. It was the ability to say yes to so many opportunities that blessed us and others around us.
The day we received our house keys was the beginning of an adventure that changed the course of direction for our whole family.
CalHome funding didn’t just help build a house. It helped build a harbor for our five children. A harbor that kept them safe and protected—and, as harbors are meant to do, gave them a place from which to launch.
Today, indeed, all five have launched, and Steve and I have just begun our newest adventure as empty nesters. An adventure we look at with excitement in a stable, affordable place of our own, rather than with anxiety about rents and displacement that so many we know wrestle with.
When you make homeownership affordable for more families, you change the kinds of conversations they have at their kitchen tables. Rather than stressful conversations about the necessities of survival, families will talk about their values, their futures, their dreams.
Rather than looking just at the first of the month when the rent check comes due, they’ll be looking at the horizon and what’s possible for their family.
I know this is true because this is my family’s story. I know there are so very many other families who can tell a similar story because of CalHome.
I continue volunteering enthusiastically with Habitat for Humanity every opportunity I get. I speak out often to get other people engaged in this mission. I do this passionately because I want to hear thousands upon thousands of stories that sound like my family’s story.
If CalHome isn’t funded, those stories stop being created and told. Organizations like Habitat for Humanity that are working hard to build the homes so many working Californians need—they will lose one of their most important sources of funding.
And so many families, eager to plant deep roots in the soil of homeownership in California, will be left behind.
CalHome isn’t a line item in a budget. CalHome is my family and others like mine. Don’t close the door on all the futures still waiting to be built. Join me in asking for $500 million in funding for CalHome by visiting this link: tinyurl.com/39uu74f4.
Elaine Hays
Morgan Hill
