“Starting over is difficult. I had gone through a divorce, was pretty broke, and looking for a place to live. This is a hard housing market. We’d moved around a lot for a consistent place to live that I could afford. I nearly had to file for bankruptcy. I always knew I wanted to own a home but couldn’t afford a house through other housing programs. I’d heard of Habitat for Humanity and didn’t realize it was an option for me or that it existed here. It took two people encouraging me to look into Santa Fe Habitat’s program before I made the leap. I got a call in December of 2018 saying that the Board picked me. It was like winning the lottery!

In the meantime, we had to move again. I daydreamed about was how amazing it would be to afford rent and not have to move around anymore. I reached out to friends and made Facebook events to help get my sweat equity hours done. Our home got moved up in the order and I had to get my hours done earlier… I like a good challenge! Our community really rallied and showed up to help.

For me, it’s important that I have a stable home for my son where I don’t have to move him around, somewhere he can make friends and go to the same school. I could only afford a one-bedroom place in Santa Fe – which still took up half of my monthly income. My Santa Fe Habitat home was finished in December of 2019, which immediately took away a large part of my internal worry which was occupied with housing. It has freed up parts of my brain to do other things and taken me out of survival mode to just ‘go go go go go go’ in order to make half of my income pay my rent. A lot of stress fell away once we got our home and I was able to think about what I want our futures to look like. My kid gets a new school, we’ll never have to move again, and can make friends here. It’s grounding in this really cool way. It’s finally sinking in that I have my own home! I remind myself all the time that this is our house and we don’t have to leave. We’re putting down roots and establishing relationships with the community.

Housing is important, it’s a necessity. It’s a base that is needed to thrive. If you live in unaffordable or substandard housing, you’re spending a lot of time, money, and energy just getting by. You’re just existing. The stress of housing affected every part of my life – interactions with my kid and others, stress levels, patience, trust, and it affected my level of hope. I had very little hope and felt discouraged. Having a stable place to live that I can afford is awesome…basic but fantastic. It frees up that energy and stress to be like, ‘Hey, how can we actually enjoy our life?’ I think part of that is having consistent, affordable, and good housing to make a life worth living. This program is completely life changing. Right now, I’m out of work because my place of work is closed due to Coronavirus. Because I have an affordable home and a stable place to live, I can look toward what I want my second career to be, which is a privilege. This process has completely rebuilt my faith in people and notion of community.”

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