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Barb Barasa says delays and poor initial supervision over construction prompted her to drop out of GroundWorks’ Rice Park project in Ashland after putting in 1,000 hours of work.

An organization that provided affordable housing in the Rogue Valley for 20 years has closed down, shuttered by troubles with an Ashland project and a real estate crash that left a glut of cheap homes on the market.

Medford-based GroundWorks Community Development, formerly known as the Rogue Valley Community Development Corp., dissolved at the end of 2011 after finishing the Rice Park affordable housing project near the Ashland Dog Park, said John Wheeler, the group's former executive director.

"Once we finished Rice Park and the families moved in, we took a look at the books and we didn't have what it took to carry on," he said. "The board decided to dissolve it."

Wheeler said the major problem for GroundWorks was that it was built on the mutual self-help model, in which residents of a planned affordable housing project team up to build their own homes. In addition, its cost to build homes exceeded the amount the houses would appraise for, so it couldn't get grants or loans to build. And with the drop in housing prices, people had more affordable options, he said.

"The clients were less inclined to build their own affordable home because there were affordably priced houses on the market," Wheeler said.

In the past, GroundWorks was able to find people to fill slots for housing construction projects within a few months. When it recently tried to find people for a planned project that would have been built in Ashland or Medford, GroundWorks identified no qualified applicants after four months of recruiting, Wheeler said.

"Clients with enough gumption to build their own house had also explored options to buy a house," he said. "Why not just buy a house and save yourself a year of hard labor?"

People who built their own homes through GroundWorks were required to work 32 hours each week on construction. They could have family members and friends put in half the hours.

GroundWorks and its clients finished two affordable housing projects in Ashland in about one year for each project.

But GroundWorks and a fresh batch of clients ran into multiple hurdles on the Rice Park project, located off Nevada Street.

Residents who built eight homes for Rice Park's first phase had to put in several months of extra work beyond the year they had expected to spend.

A troubled project

At the beginning of the project, someone broke into a tool storage shed and stole $10,000 worth of power tools needed for construction.

Additionally, the affordable housing project was meant to be built alongside the Verde Village subdivision of environmentally friendly, market-rate homes.

But the real estate crash extinguished the Verde Village project when financing for new market-rate home construction disappeared.

Verde Village was going to put in infrastructure for both the market-rate subdivision and the Rice Park project, but GroundWorks ended up having to put in the infrastructure for the affordable housing, said Ashland Housing Program Specialist Linda Reid.

GroundWorks also ran into added headaches and extra costs to make the affordable housing units environmentally friendly.

The passive solar homes were designed to absorb heat from the sun in the winter and to shade the homes' interiors in the winter. They had to have sufficient mass to limit temperature fluctuations in different seasons.

"It was difficult to build passive solar homes, especially when they're long and narrow like ours," said Wheeler, referring to the townhouse-style of the Rice Park homes. "You have to add thermal mass. That increases the weight and you have to change the framing to carry the load. The calculations had to be changed."

Wheeler said a water harvesting system in which rainwater is stored in underground tanks was expensive to build. The homes were built with the capacity to use the stored water for flushing toilets in the future, but the homes are not hooked up with the system.

Wheeler said GroundWorks also added other green features, such as solar hot water heaters.

The entire project was more complex and expensive than anticipated, he said.

GroundWorks ended up paying for overages on Rice Park's 15 homes in order to keep promises made to the participating families about what their costs would be, Wheeler said.

Under GroundWorks' model, the families work on the houses but also carry relatively inexpensive mortgages.

Rice Park resident Richard Whitney said the project was delayed for a number of reasons, but he thinks the green features were worth the added hassles.

"We save so much on our energy costs," he said.

Whitney, who has carpentry experience, said construction at Rice Park was set back by months because the first person GroundWorks hired to supervise and help the clients lacked skills in areas such as framing.

Whitney said that, overall, the Rice Park project wasn't managed very well.

Barb Barasa had similarly unfavorable views of the first construction supervisor and the management of the project.

She said she dropped out of the program after putting in more than 1,000 hours of work.

Barasa credited the second construction supervisor, general contractor Dana Hopkinson of Gnome Construction, with turning the project around.

"The houses would never have been finished if he hadn't helped. He was wonderful and he knew what he was doing," Barasa said. "Once he came on board, things were working much, much better."

Future uncertain

Although GroundWorks has folded, the Roseburg-based nonprofit NeighborWorks Umpqua has taken over GroundWorks' three completed affordable housing projects in Ashland and will continue to operate them as affordable housing, Wheeler said.

"They are a wonderful organization doing more and more work in Southern Oregon," he said. "They understand mutual self-help projects. They are a stable organization. It will be safe for the families and they will keep the affordable housing functioning as we envisioned."

Reid said GroundWorks' demise means there is a narrower pool of groups providing affordable housing in the Rogue Valley.

However, organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, the Ashland Community Land Trust, ACCESS and the Jackson County Housing Authority remain, she said.

NeighborWorks Umpqua is now on the Rogue Valley housing scene, and private developers can build affordable housing as well, Reid said.

But the future for housing programs in which clients build their own homes is uncertain in an era of depressed real estate prices.

A GroundWorks affordable housing project planned next to undeveloped parkland on upper Clay Street in Ashland has been abandoned.

The city is selling the land to the Ashland Parks and Recreation Department for $124,600. The land will be used to expand the size of a park that will be developed there someday, Parks Director Don Robertson said.

For his part, Whitney said it was worth it to build a house for himself and his family at Rice Park, adding mutual self-help programs can be a good fit for certain people.

"Some people are in a position to work instead of borrowing a lot of money," Whitney said.

Staff reporter Vickie Aldous can be reached at 541-479-8199 or vlaldous@yahoo.com.