Amid housing crunch, religious groups unlock land for homes
Emma Budway, a 26-year-old autistic woman who is mostly nonverbal, had been living with her parents in Arlington, Virginia. She longed for her own place, but because she earned little income, she could not afford to move out. So when the opportunity came to move into a two-bedroom apartment in December 2019, she jumped at the chance.
Now Budway lives at Gilliam Place, an affordable-housing complex built on property formerly owned by Arlington Presbyterian Church. “My world has gotten so much larger,” she said.
Budway is the beneficiary of a growing real estate trend: Across the nation, faith-based organizations are redeveloping unused or derelict facilities to help rectify a housing affordability crisis while fulfilling their mission to do good in the world.
With the exception of a few well-heeled churches or synagogues, most religious organizations tend to be land rich and cash poor, said Geoffrey Newman, an executive managing director at Savills, a real estate services company.
“They are analyzing what they can do to alleviate their financial stress and what role real estate plays in that process,” he said. “If the stars align with good property, a robust real estate market, active developers, favorable zoning and forward-thinking institutional leadership, then
there’s a wealth of potential.”
Still, the challenges are mounting. As more houses of worship venture into affordable housing, they face resistance from parishioners, a “not in my backyard” reaction from local residents and questions of solvency from lenders. But, as the Rev. Ashley Goff of Arlington Presbyterian put it, faithbased organizations see the
need and feel the pull to “do something bigger than themselves.”
And the need is great. The United States has a shortage of 2.3 million to 6.5 million homes, according to Realtor.com, a real estate listing site. A different estimate, from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an affordable-housing advocacy group, suggests that there is a dearth of 7.3 million affordable homes for low-income renters.
Faith-based organizations can make a dent in the housing crunch, said Ramiro Gonzales, board chairman of Impact Guild, a community development incubator in San Antonio whose Good Acres program aims to help churches maximize their property for community benefit.
Across the nation up to 100,000 Christian church properties will be sold or repurposed in the next decade, said Mark Elsdon, a minister and developer in Madison, Wisconsin.
By the time Goff arrived at Arlington Presbyterian Church in 2018, Gilliam Place was already under construction.
“Our congregation had begun to ask itself, ‘What’s the point of us?’ ” Goff said. “It’s a big, existential question, and they had the sense that affordable housing was an issue they could do something about.”
The congregants decided to raze their house of worship, sell the land for $8.5 million and build something new. Along the way, the church teamed up with Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing, a nonprofit developer. Gilliam Place has 173 affordable homes, which are rented to 500 people, including Budway.
State and local governments are also recognizing the potential to increase housing stock.
New York state Sen. Andrew Gounardes introduced a bill in December that, he said, would “streamline the process and the way in which religious institutions that want to help contribute to solving the state’s housing crisis will be able to develop affordable housing on their property.” Similar bills were passed in California in October and in Seattle in 2019; lawmakers in Virginia are drafting a bill based on California’s.
For faith-based organizations, this “makes radical common sense,” Bowers said. “Houses of worship are in every community. They often have land in a sea of need — food deserts, affordable-housing deserts. If we can bring these organizations together, we can effect change.”