With the dramatic increase in housing prices, organizations are stepping up to create solutions for Southern Arizona. Habitat for Humanity Tucson recently showcased its new CHUCK Center, a project CEO Charlie Buchanan called a comparable answer to the growing problem.
“This is a crisis we haven’t experienced in generations,” Buchanan said. “It’s not a low-income challenge anymore, it’s an everybody challenge. It’s redefined housing affordability.”
The purpose of the new Connie Hillman Urban Construction Knowledge Center is to support the lack of affordable housing in Greater Tucson and to address the need for a skilled workforce in the trades. Habitat Tucson will be able to prefabricate homes and store materials in a temperature-controlled warehouse. The center will not only accelerate housing production but the education of schools, colleges and other programs in the area.
It’s a development for the nonprofit, and Buchanan noted its potential for increasing work quality within Habitat Tucson.
“We build homes, community and hope,” Buchanan said. “This isn’t anything new to us, but it’s certainly a different scale. The ultimate goal is to provide more housing solutions in a challenging environment.”
The CHUCK Center holds offices, a classroom and a large warehouse. Habitat Tucson will use the space to store tools and materials for projects across the community, including prefabricated panels made in the facility.
A one-story home under 1,500 square feet takes 18 to 26 panels to build, while a two-story of the same size requires 24 to 32. Habitat Tucson plans to build at least 10 panels per day and store up to 144 panels, enough for around five to eight homes, in the CHUCK Center.
Tony Lundberg is an AmeriCorps member with Habitat Tucson, and addressed challenges in the past associated with building these panels and procuring materials.
“It would lag our construction progress,” Lundberg said. “At some point during the builds we had in Marana, we weren’t able to procure doors or windows, even lumber. It’s beneficial to have a safe, dry indoor spot for all of these sensitive materials.”
The CHUCK Center was primarily funded by the Connie Hillman Family Foundation, along with other organizations and nonprofits like The Stonewall Foundation, Bank of America and the City of Tucson. Its partners contribute to the facility with donations of money but also labor, as is the case with AmeriCorps.
AmeriCorps contributes workers to volunteer with Habitat Tucson projects, one of the options for their member commitment to one year of intensive service. According to Lundberg, most organizations and nonprofits offer housing, but in past years, Habitat Tucson didn’t have the budget for it.
The CHUCK Center is building a duplex house in its backyard to meet the needs of out-of-state AmeriCorps members. Lundberg expressed his relief for future members and their access to this housing.
“The AmeriCorps members receive only a small stipend for their service, making living in Tucson hard for most,” Lundberg said. “It’s very difficult to pay rent and groceries on the stipend, so it’s a necessary means to find affordable or provided living for nonprofits like Habitat.”
Another key part of Habitat Tucson’s commitment with the CHUCK Center is to provide educational resources to assist trade students. The nonprofit has started this by partnering with the Building & Construction Technologies program at Pima Community College. Lundberg of Tucson’s AmeriCorps team was one of the program’s past students.
Due to current space constraints on campus, BCT Discipline Coordinator Himat Khalsa visits Habitat Tucson with his classes weekly. Pima Community College works to increase its facilities for the program, but for now, the CHUCK Center allows students to gain real-world experience and make an impact on the community.
“A lot of this has been facilitated through the CHUCK Center because there’s a real training focus,” Khalsa explained. “Here, there are potentially other people from different trades that will interact with the students as we’re building. Those are features that are hard to simulate in a lab environment.”
Khalsa and his students utilize the CHUCK Center to complete varied curriculums, building homes and designing plans which Habitat Tucson puts to use throughout the region. Between the college and nonprofit, their collective goal is to engage 100 student learners in construction trades in 2023.
The partnerships between programs, organizations and the nonprofit will not only create hands-on learning experiences but contribute to Habitat’s goal for universal housing. Here in Southern Arizona, Buchanan and Habitat for Humanity will continue to combat the housing crisis, developing new and innovative solutions to support Tucson.
“The CHUCK Center was our acknowledgment that the status quo wasn’t meeting the need to support the affordable housing crisis,” Buchanan said. “The potential and the partnerships are going to create opportunities for not only trade students and their careers but opportunities for families to have stability.”
Habitat for Humanity Tucson
