For The Laurel Magazine, a short piece about a small revival in a Swannanoa neighborhood

The house on the hill is not THAT old, after all, built in 1976 when its current owner moved in.

Even so, 35 Appalachian winters can take a serious toll and, for Mrs. K., who didn’t want to move from the place that’s been home for so very long, the future was looking grim.

“Rack and ruin is more like it,” she says.


That’s her description of life around the next bend if Mountain Housing Opportunities hadn’t responded to her call and brought her into its Rural Home Rehabilitation program.

Beginning in the latter part of November and well into February of this year, “rack and ruin” has shifted to “rehab and revive.” In that time frame, experienced contractors have restored plumbing, re-graded her yard, put up a deck with hand rails, insulated crawl spaces, caulked windows, re-aligned gutters and replaced roofing, updated fixtures and baths, painted walls, installed siding and generally brought the entire home up to federal housing standards.

“I’m excited,” she says. “My house was the best Christmas present I could have had. But then, I’m trying not to get too excited. Not until everything is finished!”

When Mrs. K. (who prefers not to use her full name) first applied for assistance, living alone and disabled and with a freakishly high water bill, she had reached a point of desperation.

“I was taking care of my mom and the house stuff was overwhelming,” she remembers. “What would I ever do to fix this?”

Following her mom’s death, she networked her way into a connection with Mountain Housing Opportunities (MHO)--making an initial phone call to “211.” Through its Emergency Home Repair program, the agency immediately tackled her plumbing line breaks. Then she applied for structural repairs, working with Mike Lauff, MHO’s rehab specialist, in a program developed for Buncombe County called Rural Home Rehabilitation.

“Funding for rehabs takes place in cycles,” Mike Lauff reports. “To get an authorization, we have to get down the whole world of everything that needs doing, including all the pieces and parts of things that need to be replaced. It can be pages and pages of lists. Then we put the project out for public bids, which can be extremely competitive.”

Underwriting flows from Community Development Block Grant funds distributed by the NC Department of Community Assistance. Since 1991, when the Rural Home Rehabilitation program went to bat for low-income families, there have been more than 138 structural rehabilitations in rural Buncombe County administered by MHO.

“This is taxpayer money,” says Mike Lauff. “So there’s a ton of due diligence involved. What’s cool is the dollars are re-invested right back into the community where the work happens. It goes to a very useful purpose.”

“Useful” would be a major league understatement for Mrs. K.

“I had to wait a long time,” she says, “but I’d sure do it again. With all they’ve done around here, all the energy savings, I’m not planning to go anywhere. I love my house.”