It has been said that what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, which must make South Shore Habitat for Humanity one of the strongest organizations in the state.

After five years of facing the countless challenges of building a community of affordable homes on an unforgiving site in Quincy, South Shore Habitat has finally symbolically handed over the last set of keys to the neighborhood’s newest homeowner. And according to its leaders, the group is ready to take what it has learned through this experience and apply it to future projects.

In 1995, Habitat was presented with a unique opportunity when Atlantic Development Corp. offered the group a piece of land near the Braintree line where it was developing a shopping center. While traditionally sites given to Habitat provide room for only one or two units of housing, the Quincy site afforded the opportunity to add nine units of affordable housing to the area’s inventory.

The site also stood apart from previous projects in a number of other ways. Instead of building one or two homes that would blend into the fabric of an existing neighborhood, Habitat would essentially be building a community from scratch, as the surrounding area is dominated by commercial and retail uses and had few homes.

Also, whereas Habitat officials were used to working with sites that required little preparation and are close to town utilities, the location off Bower Road had no access road or any other infrastructure to hook into. And thousands of cubic yards of stone had to be removed to bring the site to a usable state.

“We had to reorganize the whole Habitat for Humanity organization,” said Julie McKinney, former Habitat president and project manager for the development, which is called Quincy Granite Village. “We had to reorganize the way we did fund-raisers, we had to do everything differently.” Infrastructure and other site preparation work costs at Granite Village totaled $1.3 million.

“For a nonprofit organization, that’s a huge price tag,” McKinney said. The costs were covered through several partnerships with businesses and by fund-raising, she said.

“This is our first-ever neighborhood development. We created it out of a quarry,” said W. James Flanagan III, current South Shore Habitat president.

“We had an opportunity for three single-family homes and three duplexes, and we had a challenge to make it buildable, so we moved a mountain to make a neighborhood,” Flanagan said. “It was impressive. We blasted 40,000 yards of rock for this.

“But it was an extreme challenge to our resources,” he added, saying the group came close to calling it quits on more than one occasion. “For the board of directors and all the volunteers, it really tested their mettle. I never thought I would see the end of it.”

“I don’t think the board [in 1995] realized that this was above their capabilities when they took on the project,” McKinney said of the site preparation work involved. “Anything that could go wrong did. We knew it would be a challenge, but when we had to turn down literally thousands of applications for this housing we realized the needs in the area. The chance to build nine units was an opportunity we couldn’t refuse.”

‘Barn Raising’
With the site prepared, construction on the first of three phases of the project began in 1998.

Once the homes were completed and residents began moving in, both Habitat and the homeowners were faced with another challenge unique to the multiple-unit development – the homeowners association. Because most of Habitat’s projects are on individual lots, each homeowner is responsible for his or her own property. In the case of Granite Village, however, an association had to be formed to take on the responsibility of maintaining common areas.

“It’s always tough putting more than one homeowner in a group together,” McKinney said. “To get things done, it’s not as easy and streamlined as you would like it to be.” Additionally, residents of the three duplexes in the development faced forming a condominium association to take care of building repairs and other concerns.

“When you deal with people owning their own home for the first time, it takes a lot of work,” she said. “Then you have add on the responsibilities of a homeowner association. You have to train and work with them.”

McKinney reported that things appear to be running pretty well now in Granite Village, and a sense of community has already been established. In addition to having to invest a minimum number of work hours on their own homes, the new homeowners also invested time building their neighbors’ homes, she said.

“The families worked on each other’s houses,” McKinney said. “They really got to know each other. It was kind of like an old-fashioned barn raising.”

The nine housing units consist of three single-family homes and three duplexes. Each of the units has three bedrooms, McKinney said. “There’s a deck on the back of each unit, and we put a porch out front to really give it a neighborhood feel. The architects also worked hard to not make it look like a cookie-cutter neighborhood.”

Each unit has two floors, and some of the rooms have vaulted ceilings. Each unit has about 1,250 square feet of living space, McKinney said. Because of the rocky nature of the building sites, Habitat could only put in crawl spaces below each building instead of the usual full basement. To make up for the lost storage space, the project included sheds for each unit.

Along with the several hundred hours of sweat equity, homeowners at Granite Village are also responsible for mortgage payments. McKinney said the mortgages are about $60,000 each, have no interest charges and are payable over 20 years. “That’s a pretty good deal, considering what homes sell for in Quincy,” she said. The median sales price for that community is currently $199,000, according to statistics provided by Warren Information Services, a sister company of Banker & Tradesman.

Despite the challenges that faced South Shore Habitat, and the fact that parcels of land big enough for several houses selling for a token $1 price don’t come along often on the South Shore, McKinney said she hopes her group’s first neighborhood project won’t be its last.

“We’ve learned a lot here,” she said. “It would be a shame not to apply what we’ve learned somewhere else. You make some mistakes, and you know how you can do things better for the next time.”

“My thoughts are that we’ll probably never build in a quarry again,” Flanagan said. “But we will look for other opportunities to build multiple units.

“There’s a lot of excitement with a project like this. These families have never had a home before, and now they’re homeowners,” he continued. “Their situations were pretty dismal, but now you drive up [to Granite Village] and you see all the kids riding around on their bikes and you see the parents who own their own home. It’s hard to explain what they’re feeling, but you can see it in their faces.”