Sharee Conely is a first-time homeowner, but it's not just any home. It's the 200th house built by Habitat for Humanity of McLean County.
That's an exciting milestone, said Lindsey Jarboe, the agency's community engagement director — given the financially challenging climate for the non-profit. She said the price for building materials has increased in step with the demand for affordable housing, adding, "Pre-COVID, we were doing about 5 or 6 homes a year; this year we're doing 3 to 4."
Building a new home is a lengthy process because construction projects need funding in order to open the application period. "Certain things need to align. We need to have sponsors, funding, and building lots," Jarboe at an event on Friday when the Conely family received the keys to their new home.
Conely, a Bloomington preschool teacher, applied for the program in 2022 and waited two years before being selected. She said her motivation to stay the course was her children.
"I wanted something better for me and my kids," she said. "I wanted them to have a place they can call home, and where we were just wasn't good."
Their former home was on a corner lot prone to motor vehicle accidents, creating what she said was an unsafe environment for her youngest child to play outside. "We had someone crash through our fence and into our yard," she said.
When the call finally came, Conely was ready, noting, "They called and said it could be less than a year before I was in my home."
The new four-bedroom home in West Bloomington began as an empty lot and took six months to complete. The construction was made possible with the help of more than 100 volunteers, including many from the Bloomington-Normal Rotary, and "sweat equity" invested by the Conely family.
"We helped put in the walls, the floors, paint. You name it," she said.
Jarboe said the program is a "ladder out of poverty," enabling homeowners to pay a zero-interest mortgage.
Creating affordable housing was the mission of Habitat for Humanity of McLean County's founder, Judy Stone, said project manager Hank Campbell, adding, "She started Habitat McLean County out of the back of her car."
Stone reached out to Campbell, a construction management professor at Illinois State University, to assist with a collegiate build in the 1980s. "We built 26 houses in 26 consecutive years," he said.
The Conely home was dedicated in her honor.
