Established in 1982, the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition (CVHC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building quality homeownership and rental affordable housing for low-income individuals and families throughout Riverside and Imperial counties in the Southern California region. Recognizing that people need more than housing to thrive, CVHC also offers a pipeline of Resident and Community Services programs that enrich the lives of the people living in its housing.
Since 1989, CVHC has been helping families fulfill their dream of homeownership through the Mutual Self-Help Housing model in an effort to help them reach economic stability, improve their quality of life and their livelihoods. The mutual self-help housing model means homes are built in part by their purchasers. In the mutual self-help housing model, families work together and collectively build each other’s homes—mutual self-help housing is accomplished through training and supervision provided by CVHC. Working in groups of five to thirteen, families provide 65 percent of the construction labor or the “sweat equity” on their own and each other’s homes. The building process can take between 10 and 12 months to complete and no one moves in until all the homes are completed. A combination of cost-reducing program elements such as permanent financing from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development 502 Housing Loan program and state sources help make mortgages affordable to very low- and low-income families.
CVHC is currently recruiting prospective families interested in building their homes in the City of Desert Hot Springs, CA; the City of Imperial, CA; and the community of Thermal, CA.
