Inspectors, relief center provide cottages for elderly

Every Saturday, a senior Lowcountry resident moves closer to a better home.

Area building inspectors, including Lewis White Jr. of Mount Pleasant, have spent a day of every weekend since Jan. 26, building a transportable cottage outside Hibben United Methodist Church for the United Methodist Relief Center's Elderly Transportable program.

The United Methodist Relief program provides elderly or disabled residents, who live in housing beyond repair, a cottage to live in the rest of their lives. When the resident no longer needs it, the relief center moves the transportable house to the next person who does.

Currently, 36 residents wait for homes while living in what Pat Goss, United Methodist Relief Center executive director, describes as deplorable conditions. The people on Goss' list live in homes with sinking floors, kitchens coated in years of cooking grease and toilets that don't flush. Some have no running water.

"They are not fit for human habitation," Goss said. "You wouldn't ask a dog to live there."

Most residents of the program have let their homes slowly decay because they have no re-sources.

The units built in the program resemble a single-wide trailer. Clients live in the home lease-free, and the relief center also is responsible for the homes' upkeep.

Since the relief fund implemented the program in 1998, volunteers have built 50 cottages. Each unit takes about $25,000 in materials and free labor.

Goss and relief center staff created the program because in a similar owner-occupied rehabilitation program they found that some clients' families took advantage of them.

Other times they would repair homes and the resident would die shortly afterward.

"Sometimes the people who benefited were not who we chose to benefit," Goss said.

White and other inspectors from the American Society of Home Inspectors and the South Carolina Association of Home Inspectors took on the project because they wanted to make a charitable contribution and stress the importance of inspections before purchasing property.

The crew expects to complete the home in June. Goss said it takes an average of four months to complete each home.

"This is not 'Extreme Makeover' from TV," White said. "This is reality."

For more information about the project, go to umrc.org or call 884-4860.

Reach Jessica Johnson at 937-5921 or jjohnson@postandcourier.com.