How Women Build Week helps women own affordable homes they build themselves

PERTH AMBOY, N.J. (PIX11) — It’s called Women Build Week, and while it lasts more than a week, and involves a few men helping out, it underscores how rare it is for women to work in home construction. It also promotes home ownership by some women who are statistically among the least likely to be homeowners.

Virtually none of the women involved in the Women Build project build homes as a career, but the Morris Habitat for Humanity program helps them to acquire building trades skills and do good at the same time.

“I helped with a build after Hurricane Sandy,” said Stacey Kavanagh, one of the volunteers on site for the Women Build activity on Tuesday. She said that it was latest of many Habitat projects she’s worked on.

Now, she and a group of nearly a dozen fellow female executives at Provident Bank give of their time at least once a year to help build homes for other women.

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It’s a program that’s attracted growing support over recent years, according to Morris County Habitat for Humanity CEO Liz DeCoursey.

“We are doing two full weeks at two different construction sites,” she said, “and we still have to cut it off.”

She formally launched the women’s build out event with a noontime ceremony on Tuesday attended by Perth Amboy city leaders. It was followed by some work by the predominantly female crew, which was anything but ceremonial. It was, in fact, instructive, according to some of the women on site.

“You don’t need your husband here or [if] he’s at work, and you’re like, ‘I’ve got to do it myself,'” said Mylcaryz Moquete about the skills she’s acquired working on the home here in which she’ll eventually live. “You’re like, ‘Hey, I learned that from building my house. I can do it.'”

Moquete had a lot of skills of her own before signing up for and being accepted to the Habitat for Humanity program. She served 10 years in the U.S. Army as a medic. She said that now her self-imposed assignment is to help build the home she’ll share with her husband Juan De los Santos and their 10-year-old son, Mason.

“I’ll have my own space,” Mason said about the prospects of living in the three-bedroom, two-bathroom home that his parents are helping to build.

It’s one of two houses that are back-to-back on two streets in the central New Jersey city. In the other house, Penelope Zorrilla and her grandmother, Maximina Velez, are preparing to move in with the rest of their family, after they complete construction work for which they’re getting help this week from mostly female work crews.

Velez, whose primary language is Spanish, asked her granddaughter to translate her comment explaining what she was most looking forward to about their new place. Very little translation was needed, however.

“Dos ba?os,” Velez said — two bathrooms. Having more space was what both the grandmother and granddaughter said was appealing about the home they’re building.

“I currently share a room with my grandmother,” said Zorrilla, “and I’d prefer to have my own room.”

She’s on course to get it when the two Women Build homes are completed this fall.

Meanwhile, the women who are working on those projects said that they’re aware of how rare they are. According to the Construction Employers Association, 93.8% of home construction workers are men; only 6.2% are women. At the Women Build site on Tuesday, those numbers were essentially inverted.

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