Angela Phillips, executive director of Habitat for Humanity Las Vegas, stands behind the Habitat for Humanity Las Vegas ReStore warehouse on West Sahara Avenue Friday, May 24, 2024. An April 21 arson fire damaged the warehouse roof and a roll-up door.
Sunday, June 2, 2024 | 2 a.m.
For three decades, Habitat for Humanity Las Vegas has been one of the area’s lone nonprofits dedicated to building affordable housing for people with a low to moderate income.
It also provides qualifying residents with free financial education courses and free home repairs, said Angela Phillips, executive director of the chapter.
Fulfilling Habitat for Humanity’s mission is not without its challenges, however. Inflation, a booming construction industry, decreased donations and lower sales at the nonprofit’s ReStore shop in the southwest valley have forced the organization to modify the size of houses it builds, while increasing their costs, Phillips said.
“Pre-pandemic, we were building two-story homes, 1,400 square feet — three bedrooms, two baths — for $210,000 each,” she said. “And now, after the pandemic … we’re building single-family, two-bedroom, two-bath homes — 800 square feet — for $265,000. So it significantly increased. So how do I keep doing what I was doing before in the current climate?”
And now, she can even add “fire” to the list of obstacles facing the nonprofit.
On April 21 around 10:30 p.m., Phillips said, someone lit a fire at the back of the building that houses Habitat for Humanity Las Vegas’ headquarters and ReStore, its thrift shop, located near the intersection of Sahara Avenue and Decatur Boulevard.
The fire was set in the alley outside the ReStore warehouse, where Habitat for Humanity receives all donations that will eventually be moved onto the sales floor, Phillips claimed. Security camera footage showed someone going through the dumpsters behind the building, “focused on what his mission was going to be,” before lighting the fire, she said.
“The exterior of the building was burned, along with different pipes on the outside,” she said. “And then the fire came into the building in the back of the warehouse. Luckily, where it came in, there was a fire sprinkler right there. So that went off and the fire department responded pretty quickly. And so the great news is the damage could have been much worse than it was.”
Unfortunately, she said, first responders had to cut through the giant roll-up door to the warehouse in order to put out the fire. Without that space, the store cannot accept many of the larger donations it usually would, Phillips added.
No one was in the building and therefore no one was hurt, and apparently residents of a nearby apartment complex can be thanked for immediately seeing the fire and making 911 calls, Phillips said outside the warehouse in May, about a month after the fire, where a hole in the wall that used to be the roll-up door had been boarded up.
No arrest has been made, she said, and the suspect — wearing a hood — cannot be identified in unclear security-camera footage.
“The added cost, the effect on, just, operations in general, has really impacted us here in the Restore,” she said, noting that the organization had just closed a second store at Flamingo and Pecos roads, due to a lack of revenue, two weeks before the fire. “Just made a whole other layer of challenges I didn’t expect.”
The store — where locals can usually be seen browsing plush couches, marked-down appliances and other home goods, or interacting with staff members in bright blue Habitat for Humanity T-shirts — had to shut down while officials met with arson and insurance investigators and assessed damage to the warehouse’s inventory, Phillips said.
It’s certainly a sudden financial burden, since the revenue through Restore goes back to support Habitat for Humanity’s mission of building homes for people who need them, said Phillips, who noted there’s not a final estimate on the cost of damages from the fire.
“We take pride in what we do here,” she said. “Many of the staff that work here have been here (for) seven years or more. So this isn’t just a job for us. We’re passionate about what we do. So anytime we have a setback like that, it really does affect everyone.”
Kayo Loveless, a supervisor in the Restore warehouse, said operations really slowed down when employees couldn’t do their work in the area affected by the fire. For a time, he said, donors had to bring big donations to the front of the store, which caused traffic and other issues.
“It was also, I wouldn’t say shocking, but (an) upsetting thing to know that where you’re working one day is nice, or at least really comfortable to work, and you come and it’s not like that anymore,” he said in the warehouse, teeming with donations. “Now you got more work to do because you got to clean up the mess. And it was pretty bad for Habitat.”
But now, he said, the organization is on “a downhill slope” in its recovery and operations are returning to normal.
“We love working here,” Loveless said. “We love working for Habitat and having this job … We’ve been here and will continue to be here. We continue to work.”
A new roll-up door is still pending, however, with Phillips saying she’s been told it will take six weeks for it to arrive, and then it will need to go through installation and inspection. The fire sprinklers have also caused water damage that has led to mold, she said.
She hopes everything will be “back to normal” within the next 60 days or so, Phillips emphasized, and is determined to prevent anything similar from happening again in the future.
“What I love about the team, though, here — everyone goes above and beyond and really bands together in times of need,” she said. “And so it’s been great to see people go above and beyond in our staff. But it’s somewhat defeating when you’re just trying to make forward progress and get things to be more stabilized and something like that happens.”
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