The coronavirus is devastating churches' finances. Affordable housing could provide an answer.
The Arlington Presbyterian Church in Virginia was dealing with declining Sunday attendance, and fewer donations, before deciding to turn to an affordable housing developer for help. In 2016, with membership down to about 60 from a height of 1,000 in the 1950s, the church sold its century-old sanctuary to the nonprofit Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing (APAH). The developer razed the church and built a seven-story, 173-unit affordable complex in its place, allowing the congregation to escape increasing costs while fulfilling an obligation to care for the poor. Today, the church leases space on the ground floor of the building to serve its congregants.
“We had an alignment of mission,” Nina Janopaul, the CEO of APAH, said of the $71 million project that opened in November. “Their mantra was, the church is the people and the mission, not the building.”
Americans were already going to church less and less before the coronavirus shut down large social gatherings. After physical church attendance fell to zero for months during lockdown, the financial troubles caused by waning religiosity were thrown into sharp relief. But the situation, seemingly grim, has been cast as an opportunity by affordable-housing advocates and religious leaders working to combat homelessness. Religious institutions own thousands of acres of land in the U.S., and amid falling membership and participation, calls to convert surplus faith property and places of worship themselves into housing have gained traction.
“Land that belongs to faith communities is supposed to be for the services of the vulnerable,” said Monica Ball, who helps lead the Yes in God’s Back Yard (YIGBY) movement in San Diego. “If [the coronavirus] leaves us with more open space to build more desperately needed housing, amen.”
Property owned by religious institutions usually isn’t taxed, meaning those parcels tend to be revenue drainers for cities in addition to being underused sites for housing. In California, a state with one of the country’s largest homeless populations, about 38,800 acres of land are owned by religious institutions and have development potential, according to a study published in May by University of California, Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Building affordable housing on some of that land could go far in addressing the state’s housing shortage; religious institutions own more than 9,000 acres of land in San Diego and Los Angeles counties alone, according to the Berkeley study.
Proposed legislation passed by the state Senate in late June would make it easier to do so. The proposal would allow developers of low-income housing in California to circumvent some land-use rules when starting projects at sites owned by faith organizations. A plan to redevelop church property as affordable housing in San Diego last year got bogged down in local ordinances that required the church to have a certain number of parking spaces based on square inches of pew space -- the apartments would have eliminated too many parking spaces. This bill would remove those roadblocks by granting faith sites seeking to build 100% affordable housing special designations that allow projects to skip parts of the rezoning process for multifamily housing. A significant share of faith-owned property in California is zoned exclusively for single-family use, according to the Berkeley study.
If the bill passes the full legislature, it could clear the way for projects in California similar to Denver’s St. Francis Apartments development, a 50-unit affordable complex that opened in 2018 after St. John’s Cathedral leased an underused parking lot it owned to a nonprofit developer. The building houses formerly homeless people in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, meeting the religious mission of the congregation that it neighbors while satisfying affordable-housing advocates who see big surface parking lots as barriers to overcoming homelessness. “The housing crisis is obvious to everyone,” Richard Lawson, the dean of St. John’s Cathedral, said in 2018. “And I think it's incumbent upon all of us ... to look [at] how to use all of our resources on behalf of those who are not benefiting from this economy.”
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