Hayden Homes pledges $25 million for local charities, housing support

Hayden Homes is tying every house it sells to a $300 charitable donation, a move that could send a steady stream of money into Kootenai County as housing costs remain stubbornly high and local nonprofits compete for support. The Redmond, Oregon, builder announced the $25 million Give As You Go Fund on April 15, saying the money will flow through 2030 to housing solutions, youth and education, food security and First Story.

The structure matters as much as the dollar figure. Under the company’s Every Home Gives program, Hayden Homes fully funds the $300 donation on each home sale. A portion goes to First Story, the nonprofit the company launched in 1998 to expand affordable homeownership for under-resourced families, and the rest is directed to nonprofits in the county where the home is sold, with buyers able to nominate organizations they care about. That means the local benefit will rise or fall with the number of Hayden Homes closings in North Idaho.

The first Kootenai County test came quickly. Hayden Homes and its nonprofit arm marked the launch in the Idaho Panhandle with a $10,000 donation split between the Boys and Girls Clubs of Spokane County and the Boys and Girls Club of Kootenai County. For the local club, that money can help pay for after-school programming, academic support and safe supervision for working families in Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls, where the organization serves youth ages 6 through 18.

The timing is notable. Kootenai County’s median single-family home price was $545,000 in March 2026, down just 0.2% from a year earlier, while Zillow put the county’s average home value at $596,723 and its median sale price at $561,833 in February. Coeur d’Alene Regional Realtors has said nearly 27,500 additional housing units are needed by 2030. Against that backdrop, Hayden Homes says it has built more than 28,000 homes across Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana since its founding in 1989.

The company has already shown how it wants the pledge to look on the ground. In 2024, Hayden Homes and First Story worked on a Rathdrum home for the Reeser family, and in August 2025 the company donated $10,000 to help launch a local program aimed at homeownership costs in Kootenai County. For this latest pledge to matter here, the clearest measures will be how much of the $25 million lands in county nonprofits, how many families are served, and whether the money produces visible gains in housing access and youth services.