Churches using buildings to address crisis

WASHINGTON» Helen Mcilvaine gets excited when she sees a church.

Driving around her hometown of Alexandria, Va., on a bright and sunny morning last week, Mcilvaine slowed the car at white spire after white spire. She turned her head, cocked an eyebrow and scrutinized each red-brick square on its grassy plot.

“I sort of go past everything and say, ‘That could be affordable housing,’ ” Mcilvaine explained. “I go past a Scottish Rite temple and say, ‘Do they really need all that land?’ Once you start looking, you can’t stop — there are opportunities everywhere.”

Over the past five years, Mcilvaine has proved to be her own maxim. In her work for the city of Alexandria — where she serves as director of housing — she has shepherded four churches through selling or leasing all or part of their land and converting it to space for affordable housing. At least two more churches are “in the pipeline,” Mcilvaine said.

And it’s not just Alexandria. Churches across the District, Maryland and Virginia are turning their properties into living space for low-income residents. David Bowers, vice president of the nonprofit group Enterprise Community Partners, said his organization helped seven houses of worship in the Baltimore-washington corridor do this in the last 12 years.

Enterprise is working with roughly two dozen more churches. It also boasts offices in Denver and San Francisco.

Bowers said the Mid-atlantic region has become a national leader in this arena, pioneering a faith-based solution to the dearth of affordable housing that advocates around the country are beginning to imitate. He and others at Enterprise — which formed its Faith-based Development Initiative specifically to encourage this tactic in 2006 — hope to bring the strategy to major cities across the nation.

Proponents say churches are ideally suited to build affordable housing. Houses of worship often sit on valuable land but are less concerned with cutting the best deal possible, thus minimizing costs borne by nonprofit develop-

ers. And, for churches faced with shrinking congregations and underutilized buildings, installing affordable units offers a fresh infusion of cash and a better way to serve the community.

“In Matthew 25, we are called to feed the hungry, clothe the naked,” the Rev. Sam Marullo, a former professor at the Washington’s Wesley Theological Seminary, said at a forum on faith and affordable housing in the District of Columbia last month. “I would add in to that Matthew 25 quote, ‘Build housing for those that need housing.’ ”

When Mcilvaine walked through the door of Alexandria’s Office of Housing in 2006, no one there was thinking about churches.

But she couldn’t get them off her mind. Mcilvaine had just completed a stint at the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing, where she had launched the First Baptist Church of Clarendon on its long and contentious — but ultimately successful — fight to build affordable units on its land. Clarendon was one of the first churches in the area to try its hand at affordable housing, and Mcilvaine wanted to keep a good thing going.

She felt churches were the future. The faith groups “just have a natural heart for it,” she said.

Initially, though, the idea drew skepticism in the region, Bowers said.

“When we started about 12 years ago, there were a number of folks who were dubious, who would say, ‘These are not developers. Why would we work with a house of worship?’ ” Bowers said.

He heard these comments from bankers, government officials and affordable housing experts. Over time, though, the wind changed.

The area’s affordable housing crisis deepened as low-income individuals poured into the region while low-income units disappeared. Alexandria offers a typical example: Between 2000 and 2017, upscale redevelopment projects and rising rents in the city slashed by 90 percent the quantity of apartments affordable by individuals who earn roughly 50 percent of the area median income.

At the same time, churches were facing a crisis of their own. Over the past 60 years, church attendance in the northeast sector of the country has declined. The problem may worsen in years to come: A 2015 study by the Pew Research Center found that religious disaffection is soaring among Americans under 30.

The intersection of these two trends did a lot to quell doubt and make religious leaders and housing advocates more willing to risk a new scheme, Bowers said.

“A lot of these faith communities are in crisis. They had their peak attendance in the 1960s, so they have these overbuilt facilities and yet they want to be good stewards of these places they’ve inherited,” said Nina Janopaul, the president of APAH. “So, they see this as a win-win — they can right-size their facilities to the size of their congregation and serve their mission at the same time.”

In 2013, seven years after Mcilvaine’s arrival, the city of Alexandria issued a Housing Master Plan. For the first time in city history, the plan specifically suggested places of worship as a source of affordable housing.

Today, the church-to-affordable-housing pathway is well-established in the Washington region.

In each of the church projects Mcilvaine has undertaken, the city of Alexandria contributed a longterm loan often amounting to several million dollars. Mcilvaine said the Office of Housing typically receives a yearly budget of between $4 million and $6 million it can dedicate to affordable housing initiatives.

Bowers said local governments around the region are starting to follow in Alexandria’s footsteps and recognize houses of worship as “potential partners” in the battle to create more affordable housing. So are state officials further afield — Bowers said he took a call a few years ago from New York City’s housing department, which wanted to learn how it could better work with the “faith community” in the five boroughs.

“So we are starting to see more of it bubble up in some key places around the country,” Bowers said. “We are intentionally looking to bring it to a number of cities.”