When Wyandotte County residents need home repairs, this man takes action - for free
When Robert Flores arrived at the house on Haskell Avenue eight days before Christmas, he was ready to work.
Flores wore the same attire he often does when out repairing homes: a red shirt, black hat and black jeans. The shirt dons the name of his youngest daughter. She died a few years ago — a motivation for starting his charity.
Flores approached the single-story panel house — the 75-year-old has a little bend to his back — to finish an improvement to a storm door for Burnice Clark’s home. It was his second trip to the house. Flores, along with his most trusted volunteer, Fran Arnett, would finish the job in two hours. Neither one would be paid.
In fact, Flores did not charge Clark a dime.
Flores has installed porch railings, fixed hot water heaters and refaced a garage. He’s done 100 jobs since 2016, when, amid a rise of anti-immigration rhetoric and policy in the U.S., he started a nonprofit to help Hispanic and Latino residents in the area.
The charity, Habitaciones Para Latinos Association (HPLA) — which translates to Housing for Latinos — helps low-income families and homeowners throughout Wyandotte County with basic, but needed repairs.
Flores and his wife, Donna, are the main funders of HPLA, though, donations from the general public have trickled in on a regular basis to help buy materials for repairs or pay plumbers or workers for jobs Flores cannot do himself.
Though HPLA’s mission was targeted toward helping Hispanic and Latinos, Flores — who is Mexican American — said he does not discriminate when it comes to the families he serves and the people he helps. To him it’s all important, making sure families who can not afford home repairs — burst pipes, broken fences, new doors — can live comfortably.
“What he does is he balances the scale with love,” said Edgar Galicia, the executive director of the Central Avenue Betterment Association, where Flores would volunteer from time to time. “If there is anyone suffering, like if someone went through surgery and cannot step down or go down a staircase, Bob comes in and builds a ramp for this person to be able to walk in and out.”
Flores packs the tools and supplies in his car — a 2006 gold Honda Odyssey, nicknamed Blondie — stockpiled with two handheld power saws, an electric drill, nails and whatever else may be needed for the project at hand.
“Part of his hope is to allow people who might otherwise have struggled living on their own, he allows them to live in their house, where they want to be and where they want to remain,” said Jeff Flannegan, the pastor at Harvest Ridge Covenant Church, where Flores attends.
Flores knows he is in a unique position to help do these kinds of repairs. Throughout his life as a homeowner, he remodeled and repaired his homes himself. He has years of experience and muscle memory that the people he helps may not have.
How it started
Flores notices how low-income families sometimes have to choose between spending money on a repair or spending money on other necessities, like food or gas.
It’s not fair, he says.
“These people live paycheck to paycheck and they can’t afford a breakdown of any kind,” Flores said. “I don’t think that when someone is in need that we should kick them in the side by forcing them to come up with money that they don’t have. As long as we can do it for free, we’re gonna do it for free.”
Flores knows what it’s like to have to deal with hard times, to feel like you do not have any money and that everything has to go according to plan.
Flores and Donna had three daughters before they settled in the Kansas City metro area in 1986. For a stretch of time, Flores was balancing two jobs while Donna worked her job as a key punch operator.
He worked in commercial building cleaning during the days and as a gas station attendant during the night three times a week.
After retiring, Flores did volunteer work with Galicia and the Central Avenue Betterment Association, cleaning neighborhoods and picking up trash in area parks. The cleanups are focused in Wyandotte County, specifically the area between Interstate 635 and the West Bottoms.
It’s during these cleanups that Flores saw the needs of the community.
“Our community is populated with a mix of incomes and a mix of races and a mix of education levels,” Galicia said. “So you can walk through the area and see a beautiful house or a well taken care of house next to a really older and kind of run down house.”
Flores had been a handyman for much of his life. He had helped his dad fix cars when he was growing up. He served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, from 1964-1968, and was trained as a machinist for aircraft.
“My ability to do minor home repairs is part of my growing up, part of my education,” Flores said. “I’ve owned my own homes and always maintained my own homes for the most part, remodeled my own homes and that gave me years of experience. So 50-plus years of experience knowing what to do to fix things at home. That’s what allowed me to choose.”
Another motivation for Flores and HPLA came with the loss of their youngest daughter, RoDonna “Donni” Flores, who died after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014. She was 45.
“Robert was struggling to find something to do that he felt would help somebody else,” said Donna, his wife of more than 55 years. “He was struggling to deal with his grief and he wanted to do something to help somebody else, and he was mainly concerned with the Latino community because he is Latino.”
On his HPLA shirt he wears to every home repair is Donni’s name, along with the name of a nephew who died in a motorcycle accident.
‘God blessed me with Bob’
Martha Smith does not know what she would have done without Flores.
In recent years, Smith, 70, had trouble moving around her one-story house in Kansas City, Kansas. She relied on a walker to move around. But sometimes that was not enough.
She had suffered numerous falls in her house. Often, getting up from using the bathroom was also a problem. Her son lives with her but she only has one income. She had applied for assistance through the Unified Government but the UG informed her it could not do the kind of repair she was needing, Smith said.
It likely would have been easier to move out of the house and into a nursing home. But she’d lived in that house since 1989.
“All of our memories are here,” Smith said. “Senior citizens, we’ve been in our homes a long time and we don’t wanna be put in a nursing home, if we can get a little help.”
She found out about Flores through word of mouth: she told her physician what her situation was and her physician told her she knew someone who might be able to help her.
Flores installed the handrails into the hallway and the bathroom. He also cleaned up her front yard and helped fix a foul odor that was coming from her kitchen sink.
“God blessed me with Bob,” Smith said.
How Smith found Flores is similar to how several of his clients have found him, he said. Most of it is word of mouth. Someone will need a repair done and they will know someone who knows Flores.
The need for Flores — or people and charities like him — likely will not stop. Over the past several years, home repairs have gotten more expensive.
In 2021, Americans spent an average of $10,341 on home improvement, according to Angi’s 2021 State of Home Spending Report. That’s a 25% increase from 2020. Angi is a website that provides information on contractors.
But it wasn’t just home repairs that were needed. Spending on emergency home repairs also shot up 42%. And then you have to factor in that Wyandotte County — where Flores spends most of his time working — is among the poorest counties in Kansas.
A little over 21% of the population lives below the poverty line, according to census data. The poverty rate in Kansas is a little over 11%.
“It’s a compounding consequence because if you can’t afford to repair a window or your roof, or if you can’t afford to insulate your home, in addition to the cost of just that repair, it also results in much higher energy costs per square foot,” said Brennan Crawford, the executive director of Community Housing of Wyandotte County, a nonprofit that has helped renovate and repair 600 houses in Wyandotte County. “So our low-income residents in aging housing are paying a hell of a lot more in utility costs than someone who could afford to invest in energy efficient improvements.”
The Unified Government does have a home repair program that residents of Kansas City, Kansas, can apply to. The purpose of the program is to “eliminate blight in a target area of Kansas City, Kansas by providing assistance to very-low income households with repairs that would pose a health and/or safety issue for the homeowner and the community.”
On a recent December day, Flores scrolled through his computer and looked at a list of possible clients he knows for the future.
There was one client who he saw as the most important one, a woman he’d helped out close to a dozen times, including fixing her water heater and her plumbing.
But now, there was something wrong with the pipes in her bathroom, leading to low water pressure.
“It may include replacing all of the faucets,” Flores said.
The job would be expensive. He’d need more funding to do it, he said. But he would figure it out.
“We know that there’s lots of people out there that are needing our help,” Flores said. “We’re looking forward to this.”
If you would like to donate to HPLA Charities online, visit HPLAcharities.org/donate.
This story was originally published December 29, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
