Beer and housing: a perfect pair. Soon, a Pierce County mom and her boys will move in
The kids haven’t even seen the new place yet.
Their mom is certain they’ll love it.
“I think they’ll be excited,” Elaine told me on Tuesday, one of the 28-year-old bank teller’s days off.
For the last four years, Elaine — who asked to be identified by a different name to maintain her family’s privacy — has been living with her two young sons at her mom’s house in Puyallup. Sharing a single bedroom, it’s been a circumstance of necessity for the single mother. When rent at her former apartment climbed too high, Elaine and her kids were priced out, becoming statistics of the regional housing affordability crisis we hear so much about.
The boys have coped, as children do, Elaine said, but it’s been difficult.
“Kids are pretty smart,” she reminded me.
Though they’ve had a place to sleep, her 6- and 7-year-old have ached to “go home,” even if — in this case — “home” was an abstract longing.
“They just know, ‘This is not my house,’” Elaine said. “They’ve been wanting to go home for a while now.”
In the coming weeks, they’ll finally get the chance.
Three bedrooms await them at a recently finished new home in Midland. The single-family residence — which Elaine will purchase — is the final piece of Tacoma-Pierce County Habitat for Humanity’s 11-property Tyler Court development. It’s also unique, having been paid for and built from scratch in large part by a Puyallup-based company that’s best known for distributing pallets of beer to local stores, bars and restaurants.
Habitat for Humanity calls the project, “The House that Beer Built,” and credits Olympic Eagle Distribution — which supplies the area with Anheuser-Busch products as well as offerings from a number of local craft brewers — with much of its funding and construction. With financial help from Constellation Brands — the company that represents happy hour mainstays Corona and Modelo — it’s an example of the kind of creative partnerships the nonprofit relies on to help families achieve home ownership, according to Tacoma-Pierce County Habitat for Humanity director of community engagement Tracey Sorenson.
The idea was borrowed from Boulder, Colorado, Sorenson said, where the local Habitat for Humanity affiliate constructed the first House that Beer Built back in 2015 with the help of craft breweries in the area. Like much of the agency’s work these days, Tacoma-Pierce County Habitat for Humanity’s project is intended to bridge the growing divide between stagnant wages and the skyrocketing cost of housing. While Elaine has worked as a bank teller for five years and has sterling credit, she earns 53-percent of the Pierce County area median income, which has made even renting a one-bedroom apartment in most places nearly impossible.
Providing the chance of home ownership reverberates for years to come, Sorenson believes.
“It’s wealth building and it’s often an end to generational poverty,” Sorenson said. “A lot of families that come to Habitat, they’re first-time homebuyers, not only themselves but the first in their family to own a home. So it’s really about the generations moving forward.”
For Elaine, the new home in Midland — which she was able to tour earlier this month — will mark the fulfillment of a dream, not that she has the privilege of basking in sentimentality. For her family, the upcoming move will mean “stability” at long last, she said. That’s what matters most.
“The most important thing is having affordable housing,” said Elaine, who qualified for Habitat for Humanity housing based on her income, financial readiness and her willingness to perform 200 hours of labor working on homes the nonprofit is building.
“It will be a sense of relief, just knowing that … I will be good, and don’t have to worry about where I’m going to lay my head,” Elaine said. “It has just been really difficult to even find a decent place.”
According to Neil Pearson, Olympic Eagle’s director of marketing, they’re words that make the last year of hard work worth it, not that the time, effort and money his company has expended have ever been in question.
From last July through the end of March, Olympic Eagle employees worked on the home nearly every Friday, raising its walls and hammering its nails. With Constellation, the company also paid $75,000 for construction materials, which Sorenson said made up two-thirds of the “sticks and bricks” cost of the home.
Pearson described it as a way for Olympic Eagle to give back to its community, and also an opportunity to strengthen company bonds during a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has forced people apart. While Olympic Eagle has volunteered with Habitat for Humanity in the past, spending a few days every year helping to build other homes, dedicating itself to funding and completing the “House that Beer Built” has provided a sense of pride, he said.
Working on the home also has inspired friendly competition, he said, with employees across the company — from sales reps, to warehouse workers and delivery drivers — quickly taking ownership of the project. Olympic Eagle has already committed to doing it again this year, he said.
“It definitely felt like a piece of our company. Just walking through it, there’s a smile on everyone’s face. People are like, ‘I’ve never done flooring, but I did that flooring,’ or ‘I’ve never put a cabinet up, but I put that cabinet up,’” Pearson said. “It feels like it’s your own house at some level. … You get to see it progress, and go from start to finish.”
Elaine said she can’t wait to show her boys the final product.
“They know that where we’re staying is grandma’s house, but it’s not their own,” she said of the family’s living situation over the past four years.
“So the fact that we got lucky enough to get three bedrooms — and they will have an option to have their own rooms — is even more exciting.”
