UVA Today

Welch’s interest in affordable housing was nourished at UVA, where as a student of environmental thought and practice, she’s been learning about the topic. The summer trip and a spontaneous chat with a woman in Missoula, Montana, would deepen her understanding.

The Problem

Housing is an increasingly serious problem in the United States. The nonpartisan Urban Institute has found people who rent “face the biggest challenges to finding affordable housing. There are only 7 million affordable units for 11 million households with extremely low incomes, but of the 7 million, 3.3 million are occupied by households with higher incomes.”

Before embarking on their trip, Welch and the rest of her 19-person team were assigned readings on affordable housing and asked to raise funds for travel expenses and affordable housing nonprofit organizations like Habitat for Humanity and Rebuilding Together. Since its founding 20 years ago, Bike and Build has granted more than $6.5 million to dozens of affordable housing groups.

From Yorktown to the Oregon Coast in 2½ Months

The format of the program moves in cycles. You bike, you build a house, you spend the night in your sleeping bag on the floor of a church or high school gymnasium, and then you do it again. And again. And again. Until you’ve covered nearly 3,500 miles.

Elli Welch, an avid cyclist, has logged thousands of miles. She began biking with her family when she was 4 years old. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)

State-by-state, Welch’s group biked through Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and, finally, Oregon.

They set out May 29 from Yorktown.

Welch said one of the most challenging parts of the ride for her, and she surmised for most, was traveling from Charlottesville up onto the Blue Ridge Parkway, because riders were just beginning to get their “bike legs.”

“The mountains here are pretty impressive and the roads were built so long ago that there are a lot of places where it gets up to like a 16% grade, and you’re just going up and down all day long,” she said.

Kansas

Kansas, Welch said, was the cruelest state. “Kansas lasted forever,” is how she put it. It took the bikers nine days to traverse the Sunflower State, some days riding headlong into unrelenting winds. It was a physical and mental challenge for the UVA student, who said at one point, she was weeping as she pedaled. “It was painful and I wanted it to be over,” she said.

Welch, far right, is 4 in this family photo. Also pictured are her father Bruce Welch, younger sister Madi Welch and mother Teresa Miller. (Contributed photo)

Typically, the large group would break into smaller clusters of bikers. On this particular day, after having already been on the road for 30 days, Welch said she fell in with a group of particularly strong bikers.

“My legs were burning. I think my cardio base was giving out. I was kind of hurting all over,” she said. “I think I remember, like, getting to a point where I asked folks to pull off and stop two or three times in the last 10 miles, just so we could breathe and catch our breath.”

Welch said Colorado was “Kansas, part two. And then we hit the mountains, and we started heading north into Wyoming. We touched Idaho and then Montana, then we went up to Missoula.”

Missoula

Incredibly, the physicality of the trip did not rest solely with biking hundreds and hundreds of miles, day upon day. There were daylong stops where the actual building took place. And “building” is a loose term. Yes, Welch and her team framed and painted houses in Missouri and Kansas – but they also helped organize Habitat for Humanity stores along the way, and before that, did flooding cleanup in Hazard, Kentucky, which was still reeling a year after devastating cascades of water obliterated neighborhoods and killed more than 40 people.

She found gratitude and growth along the way.

Welch said her favorite build was working with the Habitat for Humanity in Missoula, Montana.

She was in a group of four and their job was to let people in a neighborhood know the nonprofit organization would soon be building a home there. They went door-to-door, putting explanatory fliers on mailboxes and chatting with residents.

“I went up to this one lady’s house and said ‘Hi’ to her, and she got really involved in talking to me and talking about how she had been considering applying for a Habitat for Humanity house,” Welch said. Then, the conversation shifted to the issue of affordable housing in Missoula.

The woman told Welch she was thinking about moving away because she couldn’t afford the cost of living, but worried at the same time about how a move would reduce her access to resources like transportation.

“She talked about her family. She talked about a friend who was going to move in with her family because of lack of housing resources,” Welch went on. “I got to see her little daughter come out and play with her cats.” For the fourth-year student, who is wrapping up her coursework this month, the exchange was a human example of the sometimes-abstract concept of affordable housing.

Building houses hadn’t fully driven home the vexing topic for Welch. “When you build the house, you understand, ‘That’s where the walls come from. That’s how the house fits together.’ That’s cool,” she said.

Welch, third from the right, is pictured here with some of her cyclist friends before embarking on the nearly 3,500-mile trip. (Contributed photo)

Then she took a pause to consider what she would say next. “In talking to individuals, I feel like that concept of ‘This is a really difficult thing,’ and ‘This really isn’t affordable, and this family is considering moving outside of the city even though they’ve lived in the city their whole lives.’ … It sort of connected the dots for me,” she said.

Virginia

Of the 10 states Welch traveled, she said Virginia was her favorite.

“My personal favorite was our route that went up through the Corner. That was just insane, riding up the Corner and pointing out the Rotunda to all my friends and stuff like that. It was wild. We came in via Old Lynchburg Road and then we went out by going down Ivy and then we were headed toward Lexington,” she said.

It was a nice blending of the familiar and the new for Welch. She embarked on a new adventure with new people, and the beginning of that journey allowed her to travel through the entryway of her University, ahead of the many unknowns that awaited her.

This fall as she looked back on the experience, she said, “I've definitely changed in a few ways, but I think more so in a way that’s grounding than breaking new ground. It was like solidifying ideas that I already had and seeing real-life examples of things that I theoretically knew about.”