Students help build Habitat for Humanity home

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Evan Richter

The Bowen family’s new home, built with the help of Habitat for Humanity.

Parking officer Cedric Bowen will share a very special holiday gift with his family this year: a brand new home.

Habitat for Humanity broke ground on the project in May and, with the help of numerous volunteers from their RIT and local chapters, finished construction in November. The house is located on West Main Street in Caledonia. Bowen, his wife and their four children moved into the home Friday.

“All I can say is that these guys are just the best,” said Bowen. “They could have been in a thousand other places, but they chose to come here. I believe everyone should be able to have a home built like this, and I will be volunteering to help with the next Habitat for Humanity house.”

Bowen and his family worked alongside Habitat for Humanity volunteers over the summer in order to meet their 500-hour “sweat equity” requirement for the home. A dedication ceremony was held on Nov. 29 celebrating the completion of the project.

“A common misconception about what we do is that we give away these houses,” said Evan Richter, a fifth-year mechanical engineering technology student and president of the RIT chapter of Habitat for Humanity. “The homeowners are required to complete 500 hours of something that we call sweat equity—work that they do on the house themselves.”

The market value of the home is approximately $150,000, according to Richter. However, the Bowens will only need to pay a fraction of that figure.

“About 50 to 70 percent of the cost of a new home is attributed to labor, so since we build houses through volunteering, we’re able to discount all of that off of the total price,” said Richter. “The family also gets a flexible zero interest mortgage through Habitat for Humanity.”

The RIT chapter of Habitat for Humanity has more than 80 active members and has worked on five houses this year. Each semester, the club volunteers more than 1,000 hours of labor. The Bowen home is the first project that the organization has worked on for a fellow RIT community member.

“As students, we spend all of our time here at RIT working for ourselves. I think it’s absolutely worth it to take some of that effort and work toward someone else’s future.”