March 22, 2001 | Read Time: 2 minutes
By NICOLE WALLACE
Peninsula Habitat for Humanity is looking to provide low-income families with homes on the information superhighway.
Working with Cisco Systems, the Menlo Park, Calif., chapter of Habitat for Humanity is wiring 36 town houses it is building in Redwood City for high-speed access to the Internet. Cisco hopes to take the lessons learned from the project and offer similar assistance to other Habitat affiliates.
Wiring a home for the Internet may sound like a luxury feature, but Peninsula’s site superintendent, Joe Mangiapia, says that’s not the case. “To wire a building as it’s being built is a very easy thing to do,” he says. “After the fact, it’s very expensive to try to get the lines in.” Cisco is picking up the cost of the supplies — about $250 per home — and some of the company’s engineers have volunteered to help install the lines.
Telephone and data lines will be placed in the kitchen, living room, and bedrooms of each home, with all the lines running to a central location in a closet in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Mr. Mangiapia says the sophisticated configuration means that “in the future we could connect things that we don’t even know about at this time.”
The organization hopes that the low-income families who buy the homes will be able to use the Internet to improve their economic circumstances, says Jacquey M. Carey, Peninsula’s administration director. Children, she explains, will be able to use the Internet to help them with their schoolwork, while adults can use the technology to look for a new job or to find out about educational and job-training opportunities.
The group is now looking for a company to donate computers for the housing development’s planned community center, where technology classes will take place.
To get there: Go to http://www.homestead.com/peninsulahabitat.
