Building on Spirit of the Season : Housing: Habitat for Humanity is building homes for two families, just in time for Christmas.

By CATHERINE GEWERTZ

Dec. 22, 1994 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

For years, Sally Wills knew that no Santa could grant her fondest wish: to own her own home.

But this year, 300 volunteers are making her Christmas wish come true. They are building a house for her and her family in Lynwood.

“It’s getting more and more exciting as I see them put it up,” said Wills, 26, as she watched the Habitat for Humanity crew hammering together the frame of her three-bedroom home. “It’s so important for us to know we have someplace to live all the time,” said Wills.

She, her husband, Anthony, and their three children have been sharing a small apartment in Lynwood with relatives. In the nine years before that, they had to move many times.

For Travon, 9, the Willses’ oldest child, the greatest thing about the new house was the promise of his own basketball hoop nailed to the garage.

“That’s what I want most,” he said.

The Wills family will move into their new house on Christmas Eve. Moving into a four-bedroom house next door on the same day will be Oscar Salazar and his family. Both homes are being “blitz-built” in one week by Habitat for Humanity, the national ecumenical organization that builds homes and sells them for no profit to those who need them.

Former President Jimmy Carter works with the group and has become its most visible symbol. This summer, Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, along with 2,000 Habitat for Humanity volunteers, plan to build 31 homes in the Watts/Willowbrook area.

Businesses, individuals, churches or other organizations donate funds to cover the cost of materials, generally between $50,000 and $60,000. Each family must make a down payment of 1% and contribute 500 hours of “sweat equity,” such as helping pave driveways or frame windows, toward their home or another Habitat home.

The mortgage payments of about $300 per month are put in a revolving fund to help build other Habitat homes. Families who apply for the homes are chosen on the basis of need and ability to repay the no-interest loan.

For the Lynwood project, the city of Lynwood used federal affordable-housing money to buy the lots, and sold them to Habitat for $1 each. Key sponsors included the Rancho Los Cerritos Assn. of Realtors and the California Assn. of Insurance Professionals.

Last Saturday, the building site on Louise Street was bustling and festive, with Santa Claus picking his way among planks and nails to pass out candy canes. A volunteer crew from the culinary program at Los Angeles Trade Technical College dished up free turkey dinners.

Licensed architects and contractors oversaw teams of volunteers, some of whom had never lifted a hammer before.

“Usually, someone else does my hammering for me, so I don’t know much about this,” said a smiling Eliza Tam Hemans, 39, of San Gabriel, who on weekdays is a banker at United Savings Bank in Artesia. “But it’s a good cause, helping someone become a homeowner.”

Gerard Munson, 40, of Castaic, chief credit officer at JCB Bank N.A. in Los Angeles, is also a carpenter and fix-it man, so he brought expertise to his volunteer work. He said one of the things he liked best about the project was that it “wasn’t a handout, but a hand up” for someone who would also work hard to become a homeowner.

“It’s part of the American dream, to move into your very own house on Christmas Eve,” said Lynwood Mayor Louis Byrd, who beamed as he watched bustling crews at work.

And that is just how Oscar Salazar felt as he watched the walls of his new home go up.

“I feel great,” said Salazar, 44, who immigrated from Guatemala as a teen-ager. “It is my realized dream.”

Salazar, an unemployed warehouseman, has never owned his own home. He and his wife, their two daughters, son-in-law and two granddaughters will now be able to move out of their rented South-Central Los Angeles house, which has a slanted foundation, broken windows and leaky plumbing caused by the Northridge earthquake.

With all the hard work going into the two houses, the construction site had more smiles on it than most typical building sites. Jack Davidson explained why.

Davidson, who has supervised the building of the six prior homes by the Los Angeles chapter of Habitat, said there is a feel-good factor in this work that is lacking in the commercial building industry. He should know. For years, he was a building superintendent with Santa Monica-based Watt Industries, which builds residential and commercial properties.

“If this were a professional job,” he said, “you’d have the plumber fighting with the electrician, saying, ‘He won’t let me put my pipes there,’ and you’d have the electrician fighting with the contractor,” Davidson said.

“They’re all in it for money. That’s it. But here, all I hear is, ‘What do you want me to do, Jack?’ Everyone’s happy because they know what the end result is.

“Come Christmas Eve, when we put these people in their own homes, that’s the great thing,” he said, shaking his head and smiling. “It’s wonderful.”