CINCINNATI — Walking through the newest house on Hemlock Street, Jaslynne Scruggs can’t help but feel a surge of pride.
She’ll happily point out the trim, door frames, and other detail work, all put together by her and her fellow Building Value participants.
She’s one of more than 40 construction workers in training who had a hand in building the three-bedroom house in Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills neighborhood, through a partnership between Easterseals Redwood, the Port, and local construction companies.
The collaboration hopes to do good on multiple fronts, providing job training in a high-demand field, making use of vacant property, and putting young men and women who might have barriers to employment to work.
Scruggs said she always had an affinity for DIY projects, but building and construction seemed inaccessible. It was difficult to imagine how she’d gain those skills, and she wasn’t sure where to start looking for training. A friend suggested the Building Value program through Easterseals Redwood.
“We’ve gained a lot from being able to be in there,” she said. “They taught me a lot of tricks.”
Most of the work is demolition. Building Value takes down homes and commercial properties and salvages and recycles any building materials it can. On the Hemlock St. project though, Scruggs said she got her first opportunity to be a part of a build.
“This is my goal,” she said. “I want to be in residential. I want to be able to do this every day.”
Besides the Building Value program, participants from other Easterseals construction training programs, such as YouthBuild and FastTrac, assisted with the design, fabrication, and construction of the house. It was built almost entirely off-site, through Unibilt, transported to Walnut Hills in four pieces, and put together on site.
“You can see where it meets, like if you look in this seam right here,” Scruggs said, walking through the building. “Then we put a piece of plywood on just to cover it up and this will just be dry walled flat.”
The Hemlock property is the first fabrication project and partnership with Unibilt, but Debbie Smith, the vice president of economic empowerment, said Easterseals is hoping to provide more partnerships with a diverse selection of construction companies to build these connections and potential pathways to employment.
“These are high-demand jobs that these students will gain in construction,” she said. “We focus on working with individuals of color and females and getting them connected to the construction industry.”
For Scruggs, it’s already panned out. She said she got an offer from a construction company just a few weeks into her training with Building Value and plans to start as soon as she completes her OSHA training. It’s a massive step forward from where she was a little over a month ago.
“You really have no idea what goes into a house until you’re the one doing it,” she said. “At this point, with today’s techniques and the few things that they taught me, I feel like I could build a whole house.”
The Hemlock Street project is a few finishing touches away from its completion. By the end of the summer, the home will be sold to a Cincinnati family for below-market value.