MOVE THAT DIRT! Infrastructure begins on The Avenues Project

From a dream to broken ground, today members of the Habitat Greater Sacramento team gathered to celebrate a very exciting moment in Habitat history – the beginning of the infrastructure on Habitat’s newest development on 43rd Avenue and MLK Jr Blvd in South Sacramento.  The project will be Habitat Greater Sacramento’s second largest development in 32 years and will eventually feature 5 Habitat homes. 

As Leah Miller, Interim CEO for Habitat Greater Sacramento, and her team joyfully shouted “MOVE THAT DIRT!” , Teichert (a partner on the project) revved up the tractors to mark the official start of infrastructure on the project.  Teichert will be working on putting in the dry and wet utilities, as well as some other infrastructure needs, for the next few weeks after which time Habitat will immediately begin above ground construction.

The cost of above ground construction for the entire 5-home development is $1 million. It will be Habitat’s first large-scale development where the above ground construction was made possible completely through local donations with no state support – so far over 60 partners have committed to the project with over $900,000 raised to cover the cost of construction. The land and infrastructure for the project was made possible through support from Sacramento Housing Redevelopment Agency and Habitat, as well as trade partner support from Teichert. The entire project will take just over a year and over 20,000 volunteer hours to complete. Like all Habitat homes, the families will each put in 500 hours of sweat equity, working alongside volunteers to build their homes, and at the end of construction will purchase the homes from Habitat for a 30-year, 0% interest equivalent mortgage.