Charity Joins Top Home Builders' Ranks

A dozen female volunteers gathered recently in this blue-collar Long Island town, enduring the heat to help form the entryway of an 1,100-square foot home for Cheri Sabolenko and her two young children. The Sabolenko house will soon join more than 5,000 other homes expected to be built, repaired and rehabilitated in the U.S. this year by a well-known addition to the upper echelon of America's largest home builders: the nonprofit group Habitat for Humanity International. As the housing and financial crisis struck several years ago, the large publicly traded builders, including D.R. Horton Inc. and KB Home, pulled back. But Habitat kept building. "We're a lot less tied to the market as a whole," said Mark Andrews, Habitat's senior director for U.S. operations. "We've been able to keep chugging along at a pretty solid pace." As a result, Habitat, a Christian group founded 34 years ago in Americus, Ga., around a philosophy of constructing and rehabilitating homes for low-income families, was recently ranked as one of the nation's top 10 builders for the first time in a closely watched industry list compiled by Builder Magazine.

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