“I go home happy every night.”

That’s not something everyone can say about their job, but Jim Sandknop does. Sandknop was a traditional, commercial home builder for years – since 1982 – building homes and selling them for a profit.

He has found a higher calling in his later years. Sandknop is now part of Community Housing Solutions, which is helping rebuild neighborhoods in Greensboro that were devastated by a tornado on April 15, 2018.

“The beautiful thing about this program, the people who are buying these houses, most of them have a connection to this neighborhood. This is where they want to be, this is where they want to stay and now they have that opportunity to have homeownership in the community that they love,” Sandknop said.

People like Teresa Enochs.

“I love that when I drive into the driveway, that this is my house that I worked for this house, that I can come into this house and do what I want to in this house. This is my space,” Enochs says. “This is a place that my mother would have loved to have had. She had 15 children and no place to call her own. She would have loved to have been able to do this.”

For Nashade Peoples, it’s a second chance. She moved to Greensboro from Philadelphia in the 1990s. But, soon afterward, her new husband, Charles, died of lung cancer. She’s been working hard to get back to where she wants to be, financially, ever since and this will go a long way toward that. As she stands in the front yard, looking at what will be her new home soon, she smiles as she thinks about how this is where she’ll live out her days.

“And I’m looking forward to that, yes, I am. Sit up on the front porch in my chair and just have a cup of coffee,” Peoples said.

And Sandknop sums it all up, simply, when he says, “We’re giving people hope. We’re giving them an opportunity, we’re giving them a place to turn.”

See what stood on the ground where Peoples’ home is being built in this edition of the Buckley Report.