Pit Stop Portables is proud to announce our new partnership with Habitat for Humanity!! 🥳🎉🎊
Pit Stop Portables will be supporting their build projects in Mission and Richmond this year, housing 31 families once complete!
Habitat for Humanity offers families a hand up, not a handout. They partner with working families who earn a working income between $35,000 and $75,000 a year and offer them the opportunity to become homeowners. The goal is to empower hardworking modest-income families to gain equity from monthly payments, so they no longer live in substandard conditions or require housing subsidies to pay rent and meet life’s basic needs, and eventually move into market housing having earned equity from the Habitat model.
This hand up gives hardworking Greater Vancouver families homes that they can afford. It also enables them to add to savings and helps them break free from the cycle of living paycheque to paycheque.
During their stay, Habitat for Humanity provides their Partner Families with extensive homeowner training (money management, credit and financial planning, home maintenance), as well as ongoing support services. The families invest 500 hours of sweat equity (volunteer time) in building their own home (or volunteering on our builds, at our events or at our ReStores), committing them to homeownership and helping ensure a successful transformation in their lives.
The long-term benefit to Habitat and their Municipal partners is very rewarding. Habitat families are free to move ahead at any time within the lease term, and they will receive an indexed amount of money back to help them with a down payment to move into market housing. This model is unique to Habitat for Humanity.
Partner Families then pay an interest-free long-term lease building equity with every payment tailored at no more than 30% of their annual gross income; maintenance and upkeep of the houses are their responsibility, as with any other homeowner. The indexing of payments allows families to improve their financial status and to become contributing members of our community, and of course, offers an exit strategy from poverty to the open market of homeownership.
Each lease payment from current Habitat Partner Families is then reinvested and deposited in the Build Fund which is leveraged to build additional homes for more Partner Families—while simultaneously building a savings fund for Partner Families for future use in the traditional mortgage market. When a family starts to thrive and is ready to move on, a portion of their equity is returned to them in cash, while their home remains within the Habitat for Humanity inventory for another family to benefit. Through the Build Fund, the annual mortgage payments from every twelve homes can fund one new home per year. Just one more way that Habitat families give back to their communities.
Over the past two decades, Habitat for Humanity Greater Vancouver has played an important role in addressing the demand for affordable housing in the city, but still more needs to be done.
Pit Stop Portables believes what Habitat for Humanity is doing to help our communities grow in this difficult economy is SUPER and look forward to working with them on future builds!
To learn more visit HabitatGV.ca