Ruth Reyes Cohen put her hands on the wall frame of her home under construction in Ashland almost to test if the latest Rogue Valley Habitat for Humanity project was real. It is. She and her four daughters should be settled in this year, maybe by Thanksgiving.

Standing under the structure’s open rafters last Tuesday, she recalled the day she learned she would have a permanent place to live. Surrounded by her children, she was told by a local Habitat for Humanity worker: “You said everyone kept saying ‘no’ to you, but we’re saying ‘yes.’” She cried. “That was the moment when I realized, this is it,” she said, opening her arms wide in what will be her living room.

The multilingual preschool teacher, who was born in Puerto Rico and lived in and out of the United States as her father was transferred during his long military career, had three dreams: Safety, a great education for her girls and the security of owning a home.

Before moving to the Rogue Valley in 2019, Reyes Cohen lived 13 years in Israel, where her daughters were born. “We had rockets flying overhead, I had babies and toddlers,” she said.

In Oregon, she found landlords didn’t want to rent to a large family, and home lenders wouldn’t approve her for a mortgage because her teacher salary was too low to offset the student loans she needed to earn a master’s degree in education. Even a tiny house on a 48-foot-long toy trailer would set her back six figures that she did not have.

A friend tagged her in 2022 when Rogue Valley Habitat for Humanity posted on Facebook that the organization’s preferred candidate for a home in a new Ashland development was a teacher with a large family. “That’s me,” she recalled. She applied, set up an individual development account for down payment matching funds, and jumped into working the required 500 hours of hands-on building and taking homeownership classes.

Her three-bedroom house will be the 80th dwelling completed by Rogue Valley Habitat for Humanity since the regional agency started in 1987. The 81st home is under construction next door.

The two homesites were donated by Ashland-based KDA Homes and are close to schools, shopping and bus lines. The Habitat homes were designed to blend with the neighborhood’s fire-wise, all-electric single-family houses, priced at $525,000 and more, in the new 10-acre Beach Creek subdivision.

This is the first time in 20 years Habitat for Humanity has had a project in Ashland due to the high cost of land, and complexity of complying with city building requirements and taxes, said Denise James, executive director of the Rogue Valley affiliate of the international nonprofit organization.

As of 2021, Ashland requires developers to reserve 20% of the land for qualified nonprofits to build homes for families who earn 80% of the area’s median income. For Beach Creek, KDA Homes has set aside eight of 52 homesites for affordable housing, with the future development of six sites to be decided as the development is completed over three years.

“I am thrilled for the two local families that will become part of the Beach Creek neighborhood thanks to Habitat,” said Laz Ayala, a managing partner at KDA Homes. “Our community desperately needs more affordable workforce housing.”

Habitat for Humanity relies on volunteer labor to reduce the cost of building a home. Teaching homeowners and volunteers building skills based on safety is Rogue Valley Habitat for Humanity construction manager Kurt Nicholson. “It takes a lot of hours to build a house,” he said. For the homeowners, “it’s not a free ride, no one won the lottery.”

Like all Habitat for Humanity homeowners, Reyes Cohen has to invest hours taking classes in personal finance and homeownership, as well as perform “sweat equity” construction work before assuming a zero-interest mortgage.

After she completed 100 hours of work, she was able to ask friends and family to volunteer hours on her behalf. Recently, two strangers told her they were working for her because they had a mutual friend.

“It’s amazing that people volunteer to work and people like me, working toward my home, can exchange human power to earn their home,” said, who teaches at Ashland’s Olive Tree Preschool.

On her homesite and other Habitat homes being built in Medford and the city of Rogue River, homeowners and volunteers are assigned different jobs. “I was afraid of using power tools, mostly the table saw,” Reyes Cohen said, “but like life, you accomplish something you thought you couldn’t by setting your mind to it and taking it step by step.”