Dreams of a Home Rise With Habitat Foundation’s Help

A spadeful of dirt from a vacant lot on Bliss Street was the beginning of something Francisco and Eloisa Rodriguez said they were too poor even to dream of--their own home.

The Willowbrook upholsterer and his wife and two children helped break ground Saturday for the first of 100 houses that Habitat for Humanity International, a nonprofit home-building group led in part by former President Jimmy Carter, plans to build for the poor in Los Angeles by 1995.

With the group’s help, the Rodriguezes will be able to move out of the cramped garage they have rented for the last five years and into a three-bedroom house valued at $135,000 that will cost them about $30,000.

Construction is to begin Monday and the house is expected to be completed in September.

“It was impossible for me to have a house because of the high payments and the down payment was too much,” Francisco Rodriguez said in Spanish. He and his wife came here from Jalisco, Mexico, 13 years ago, but they despaired of ever owning a house, he said.

Then Habitat chose his family from 35 applicants in Willowbrook to be the beneficiaries of the charity’s first house-building project in Los Angeles--across Bliss Street from their rented garage.

“I feel very happy,” Rodriguez said after he and his family helped Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and Habitat officials toss the first few pounds of sand with shovels that had been spray-painted gold. “I used to think it was impossible, but now this reality is something to rejoice about.”

On Monday, Watt Homes Inc. will send construction workers to begin assembling the house free of charge on a lot that Habitat bought from Los Angeles County for $1 in a deal that Hahn’s office helped arrange.

And as other beneficiaries of Habitat housing projects have done, Rodriguez plans to help the construction workers build the house.

A consortium of Los Angeles banks--City National Bank, Manufacturers Bank, Sears Savings Bank, Sumitomo Bank and Union Bank--will issue the Rodriguezes a 20-year, no-interest loan for the $30,000. The consortium will issue similar loans to others chosen for houses the organization plans to build or renovate during the next three years.

With this help, mortgage payments for the Rodriguezes will be $250 a month, said Mary Hagerty, administrator of Habitat’s Los Angeles chapter.

Eloisa Rodriguez said she will be glad to give up the garage where the family has been living. It is so small, she said, that family members must squeeze past one another to move around. Carmen, 12, and Francisco Jr., 5, had to share a tiny partitioned-off bedroom and the family had to cook meals in a tin shed.

Eloisa Rodriguez’s eyes welled up as friends congratulated her and her children played with the gilded shovels.

“I’m very happy,” she said. “Because I didn’t know anywhere else to go.”