Children scurried about in a newly constructed home, some play-fighting, some complaining to their mother and others pacing, off in their own little worlds.
In the middle of the chaos was Paulina Rodriguez, mother of the eight kids, who constructed her new 1,400-square-foot home in Heber City mostly by herself.
Paulina was a participant in the Self-Help Homes program, in which qualifying families get into affordable, single-family homes through “sweat equity.” Essentially, they build their homes themselves with help from a construction supervisor, volunteers and fellow participants, who are divided into crews to help build each other’s homes.
After applying in 2022, Paulina began construction with the rest of her group in May 2025. On March 5, the 10 families celebrated moving into their homes just east of Wasatch High School with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Self-Help Homes has built over 650 homes in Utah since 2000 and has had a presence in Heber City since 2010. Since then, the program has built 143 homes, with plans for another 12 to begin construction in the next few months. Self-Help Homes is also installing infrastructure on about 17 acres of land near the Wasatch County Events Complex to develop into another 44 homes.
The nonprofit estimates that families save an average of $70,000 on their Self-Help Homes.
Participants apply for Section 502 loans, a rural housing program for single-family homes administered by USDA Rural Development. Section 502 loans assist low-income applicants in obtaining housing, subsidizing interest rates as low as 1%.
The program requires 35 hours of construction by the family per week, which was a tricky requirement for Paulina to meet. She works full-time at an appliance repair company, and her husband, Jessie, is legally blind and was unable to assist in construction.
“The best I could do was just watch the kids while she does everything,” Jessie said. “She’s the backbone of the operation. I’m really happy. I’m really blessed to have her.”
At least one individual listed on the mortgage is required to commit 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Saturday for construction work, but Paulina always stayed until 4 p.m.
Construction was complicated by the fact that Paulina was pregnant with her eighth child for much of the 10-month process.
“I always joke that the creator up there didn’t think I was challenged enough,” Paulina said.
But, she noted, it worked out because the more intensive work, like framing, had been completed by the time she was seven months pregnant, allowing her to focus on less physically strenuous tasks, like caulking, in the months leading up to her due date.
When she gave birth, members of her group donated time and labor to ensure her home’s construction would stay on schedule.
Families must make below 80% of the area median income and fall within a certain annual salary range to qualify. For example, a family of four in Wasatch County would qualify if its annual income was between $72,500 and $104,200.
Certain families, like Rodriguez’s, are prioritized. A priority family in Wasatch County would have five or more members and make between $72,500 and $87,100 annually.
Some families in this group applied for the program as far back as 2018.
Connor and Rachel Flynn applied in 2020. The couple have two kids, so they were not classified as a priority family.
When they were eventually approved to participate in the program, they came up with a game plan: Connor would dedicate himself to work while Rachel would make homebuilding her full-time job.
Connor works for American Eagle Ready Mix’s power division and is currently working on an electric grid improvement project in Colorado, which keeps him from home for months at a time.
Connor would come home, gung-ho and ready to rumble, while the rest of his group, including his wife, were exhausted from the work they’d been doing week after week.
“Most other guys I work with, they rotate out. They get to spend a week at home. Me, on the other hand? ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m going to beat myself up in the sun. I’m going to go and die just a little bit more,’” Connor joked.
He continued, “But you can’t look at it as pain or agony or suffering or anything like that. … There is nothing better than knowing that you have put forth the very essence of who you are. It’s your mind, your body and your spirit that you’re putting into this to not just help you. You’re building everyone’s homes, as well as their futures. There’s nothing more gratifying than that in my eyes.”
Rachel started the construction process with only basic building knowledge, but by the end of it, she’d shingled each of the 10 homes’ roofs in the summer heat. Now, if the couple ever wanted to renovate their basement or build another house, they’d know exactly what they were doing.
Kaitlin Larson was the same way. Her husband, Quaid, is a general contractor and was the only member of the 10-family group who had a construction background.
“I know how to read a tape measure,” Kaitlin joked. “But everything else was new.”
Her favorite part of the program was building homes alongside her future neighbors.
“Instead of moving into a neighborhood where you have to go meet the neighbors, we all know each other really well because we spent more time with each other than anyone else this year,” she said.
Fellow participant and Timpanogos Middle School teacher Nicolle McCullough joked that the most challenging part of the program was “feeling like a student again.”
“Being the one that was doing the learning and making the mistakes and having to sit in that discomfort of doing something wrong was the challenge. But it was also rewarding because you keep going. You try again. You don’t give up on it,” she said.
Jeremy Phelps, the lead construction supervisor on Self-Help Homes’ Heber City projects, said his favorite part of leading groups is teaching them new skills.
“I feel like my job, in a way, it’s like a shop teacher on steroids,” he said.
And no, there haven’t been any wild construction accidents, Phelps joked. Usually, participants are timid, asking plenty of questions before diving in headfirst.
“I’ll usually have someone in the group who’s afraid to even climb up a ladder … and then by the end, they’re up on the roof, and they’re harnessed in, doing shingles,” he said.
Phelps is a former participant of the program himself. He learned about it during an apprenticeship with Heber City craftsman Don Hyde, who constructed cabinets for Self-Help Homes.
When Phelps realized he may no longer have to commute to and from Alpine every day, as he had done for the past two years, he was ecstatic. He moved into the home he built in Heber City in 2013 and applied to work as a construction supervisor with Self-Help Homes five years later.
When Phelps participated in the program, the minimum annual income to qualify was $25,000. Making $25,056 a year, he barely made the cut. The fact that the minimum income requirement has nearly tripled since then is “crazy” to Phelps, who attributes it to factors like inflation, the housing market and increased land prices and cost of living in Heber City.
Phelps was 24 when he moved into his home, but he believes owning a home in Heber City at that age has become near-impossible unless one has “very wealthy” parents.
“You might be able to get into an apartment or a condo, but homes? You’re just outpriced,” he said. “I see a lot of people who work in town, or people that are from here and want to stay here. This program is really the only option.”
But new federal loan limits are stonewalling Self-Help Homes, explained Executive Director Brad Bishop.
The Section 502 loan limit was previously 80% of the Federal Housing Administration mortgage limit for a single-family home in a given area, but on Feb. 10, USDA Rural Development changed that loan limit to 60%.
That leaves Wasatch County largely unaffected, as the Section 502 loan limit is now $698,200, still more than the price of a Self-Help Home, which tends to be between $420,000 and $430,000. But in Utah and Washington counties, where Self-Help Homes also operates, the Section 502 loan limits have become $360,800 and $364,300, respectively.
“I think the desire was in the right place. ‘Hey, we’d like to save money by lowering the loan limits.’ But that just eliminates higher-cost states,” Bishop said. “We had families actually approved for loans. We were waiting to close on them, and then this rule came out last month. All it did was eliminate 40 families from being eligible to build their homes after waiting three, four or five years and finally getting into a group eligible for the loan.”
Because the loan limit was changed through an update to a USDA Rural Development handbook, it did not have to go through Congress. But Bishop is hopeful that the change can be reversed by getting the attention of Utah’s congressional representatives.
“Our senators have come out to visit. They recognize the need, (and) I think everybody recognizes the need for home ownership and the need for units,” he said, adding that Self-Help Homes builds about 150 homes annually in Utah, but with the new loan limits, he expects the number of homes the nonprofit can build a year to be pushed down to 20 or 40.
For now, Bishop urges anyone who cares about the program to call their congressional representatives to let them know the challenges Self-Help Homes is facing. And though the program has a long wait list, interested applicants can learn more at selfhelphomes.org.
