In 2019, St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral, San Diego’s oldest Protestant church, sold off a portion of its campus to Greystar, a global real estate company. Within three years, something called 525 Olive Apartments arose on that site. While the church retains 6 percent ownership of the property, used for their offices and meeting spaces, the apartment building—“San Diego’s Most Elevated Address”—boasts “organic courtyards,” a “pet spa with grooming stations,” and a “level 20 sky club” complete with a rooftop pool and chaise longues overlooking Balboa Park. Of the 204 apartments, eighteen are reserved for residents making 50 percent or less of the area’s median income. Back at ground level, the church’s 1951 neo-Gothic structure stands in contrast to the glassy $100 million twenty-story tower that looms above.
“We’re basically on the Park Avenue of San Diego,” Rev. Penelope Bridges, of St. Paul’s, told me. “We would have loved to have developed it ourselves and made it all affordable housing, but in the end, we just didn’t think it was the highest and best use of this asset. And for the long-term benefit of the cathedral, to have this income from the money from the sale is giving us a certain amount of financial stability in a time when pledges are dropping.”
We’re basically on the Park Avenue of San Diego,” Rev. Penelope Bridges, of St. Paul’s, told me.
While it may seem like a unique configuration, properties like 525 Olive Apartments are an increasingly common example of the various public, private, and nonprofit actors involved in the creation of affordable housing. This is especially true in high-cost and gentrifying cities and neighborhoods. But this configuration also represents another trend: the renewed involvement of American religious institutions in affordable housing production. From San Diego to New York, churches, mosques, and other houses of worship are trying to house people—and, in the process, to shore up their own finances.
Entering the affordable and supportive housing space from a community-rooted framework is nothing new for churches and other faith-based institutions. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights era and the War on Poverty brought about new federal funding for housing and community development to urban areas; in the 1970s and ’80s, however, the federal government promoted austerity, which in turn prompted the systematic disinvestment from minority communities. The new created community development corporations (CDCs), which were created to meld community action with market principles, initially had federal support, but were soon left to address issues in their neighborhoods without government resources. In particular, predominantly African American churches, which have long served as an engine for community development, increasingly took on the role of tackling dire housing needs in their neighborhoods.
In the early 1980s, a coalition of New York City churches facing disinvestment and abandonment petitioned the city, under the banner of East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC), to create home ownership opportunities for low-income people in their neighborhoods. Eventually dubbed the Nehemiah Homes, EBC created nearly three thousand homes, generating an estimated $1.5 billion in wealth for their owners.
Faith-based community development efforts like EBC’s remain popular today, with majority–African American congregations significantly more likely to promote social services than their white counterparts. A 2001 report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that 14 percent of CDCs nationwide were faith-based, with nearly 1 in 5 of roughly 260,000 congregations surveyed participating in affordable housing development or programs, and almost 40 percent promoting housing/shelter programs for unhoused people.
The 1970s and ’80s saw widespread disinvestment in urban neighborhoods, and today’s housing crisis is clearly worse still, ballooning into a national shortage in which death comes by a thousand cuts: short supply, rapidly increasing rents, low construction rates, high construction costs, stagnant wages, high mortgage rates, the loss of affordable housing, NIMBYs blocking new housing, the closure of psychiatric hospitals, high rent burdens, physical and behavioral health issues, and institutional investors jacking up prices.
To tackle this wide-ranging crisis, cities need more homes—lots of them, and fast. Beyond mere supply, cities also need regulation to make sure that the new housing isn’t all for more affluent buyers and renters. The private market is failing to serve the needs of low and middle-income renters, as is the state. The federal government has retrenched from funding and providing public housing, leaving cities and states to their own devices. At present, no state in the country has enough affordable supply for extremely low-income renters. These factors have made housing—and affordable housing in particular—a bipartisan and national crisis.
The housing problem is exacerbated by the fact that we largely rely on the private market, deregulation, and tax breaks to construct new affordable housing, instead of publicly funding it. This approach translates to cities often acting as brokers rather than providers of affordable housing, usually through trades in the land use code. For instance, the affordable apartments that made up 9 percent of the total units at 525 Olive were a result of San Diego’s inclusionary zoning laws, according to which a developer can trade a subset of affordable units or pay into a fund in exchange for a “density bonus,” which effectively gives developers the right to build higher in exchange for meeting a city’s minimum affordability requirement.
At the end of 2019, the San Diego City Council unanimously passed a zoning reform that would make it easier for faith-based institutions to construct affordable housing on their existing parking lots. The initiative was supported by Yes in God’s Backyard, or YIGBY (a play on the terms NIMBY/YIMBY), a cross-sector collective “called to address San Diego’s housing crisis by activating abundant, under-utilized faith community properties suitable for multi-family residential projects.” YIGBY is currently supporting the construction of housing for seniors and veterans at Bethel AME, the oldest predominantly Black church in San Diego.
For the 1,700 or so religious institutions across San Diego County, the upside of faith-based institutions creating affordable housing is threefold: they can virtuously promote the construction of homes in communities they care about, supplement their tithes and offerings through the sale of their land, and subsequently stay afloat as their memberships continue to dwindle.
Municipal efforts to shepherd faith-based institutions into affordable housing development are not limited to San Diego, which the American Bible Society has named the most “bible-minded” city in the not-so-Bible-minded state of California. Since 2021, the city of Seattle has offered a density bonus to faith-based institutions for the creation of income-restricted affordable housing. In New York, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams has introduced the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity plan, which, despite currently facing opposition from low-density communities, would promote “removing obstacles and streamlining outdated rules” to facilitate construction on what the city deems underused space, including faith-based organizations’ land. The NYU Furman Center estimates that faith-based institutions own 92 million square feet of land across New York City, or more than double that of hospital and healthcare facilities.
Over the past few years, state legislators have also been urging municipalities to speed up affordable housing development through the preemption of what have traditionally been local land use controls. A major barrier to municipalities promoting new affordable housing is the ungodly cost of land; finding available, and affordable, plots is often difficult in expensive coastal cities. State governments have now stepped in to help promote places for development. For example, in 2023, California, which has been leading the country when it comes to state level land use, zoning, and housing reform, passed Senate Bill 4, also known as the Affordable Housing on Faith and Higher Education Lands Act. SB 4 provides development standards and a streamlined approval process for the creation of affordable housing on land owned by faith-based organizations and higher education institutions. The Terner Center at University of California, Berkeley estimates that this bill could open over 47,000 acres of developable land on faith-based properties across the state—40 percent more land than the entire city of San Francisco. A bill similar to California’s has been passed in Oregon, and related bills are being proposed in Virginia, South Carolina, Washington, and Maryland.
Today’s housing crisis is clearly worse still,, ballooning into a national shortage in which death comes by a thousand cuts.
In December 2023, the New York legislature introduced the Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act. The bill, currently in committee, would streamline approval processes for affordable housing projects, create a state-run training program that would support faith-based organizations in moving forward with affordable housing projects on their surplus land, and bring tax-exempt faith-based land onto the state’s property tax roles, as faith-based institutions develop affordable housing. According to the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Andrew Gounardes, the legislation was influenced by the California legislation and is being promoted by a coalition that includes the YIMBY organization Open New York and the New York Association for Affordable Housing, the trade association for affordable housing developers across the state.
Gounardes recognizes the bill’s potential for incremental change, while also acknowledging the need for much broader action. “I view this bill as both groundbreaking and also only a drop in the bucket as to what we really need,” he told me. “By some estimates that we’ve been able to put together, anywhere between .5 to 1 percent of land in New York State is owned by some type of faith-based organization. So not a ton, but also, that’s still a lot of land. I think it could potentially have significant statewide implications.” Ultimately, he sees the bill as one piece in the puzzle of a broader effort to unlock state- and city-owned land for critical affordable housing, including through extending development to universities, libraries, and decked over rail yards.
First, though, the bill needs to be passed. Gounardes described resistance from two primary sources: historic preservation groups, and towns and villages concerned about power leaving local hands. While the historic preservation groups are claiming that the bill will result in tearing down historic buildings, Gounardes told me that it does not override any of the historic preservation laws that protect such structures from demolition. As for the towns and villages, the NIMBY contingent is sounding familiar inflammatory and racially coded rhetoric, calling the bill an effort to destroy the suburbs.
While governments may take the lead, from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles congregations are taking it upon themselves to promote affordable housing or provide supportive units for the formerly unhoused. Sometimes, congregations have to fight the government to help people.
The Amistad Catholic Worker House, in New Haven, Conn., a house of hospitality that draws inspiration from the Catholic Worker Movement of the 1930s, has been responding to a growing homelessness crisis in its city. Mark Colville, a resident member and co-founder of Amistad, described the past few years as contentious ones, noting that his organization has repeatedly met opposition from New Haven mayor Justin Elicker in its ongoing efforts to establish more permanent sleeping areas and transitional housing for unhoused people. Mayor Elicker did not respond to my requests for comment.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as rents rose and employment became unstable, New Haven saw a historic rise in street homelessness and an increased demand for Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services’ programs. Though there are debates as to which way the causation runs, the city suddenly had a large unsheltered population with many individuals experiencing mental health and substance abuse issues, which can make it all the more difficult to transition people to more permanent forms of housing. Since then, in their efforts to promote housing as a human right and in the midst of multiple efforts by the city of New Haven at bulldozing and criminalizing tent cities, Amistad progressed from occupying public space across the city, by illegally squatting and unilaterally designating such areas as safe camping sites, to eventually providing land and support for the construction of Rosette Neighborhood Village, a community of “tiny homes” for formerly unhoused people in Amistad’s backyard.
Located in the Hill, a neighborhood southwest of downtown New Haven, Rosette Neighborhood Village now hosts six tiny homes—small, prefabricated living spaces that often are tied to a movement for simpler living—for formerly homeless people. At Rosette Neighborhood Village, the homes are large enough for one or two people each; they have electricity, and residents have 24-hour access to restrooms, showers, and kitchens in Amistad’s main house. The housing was initially erected “ahead of the zoning laws,” as Colville put it, meaning that they constructed multiple units that were not in compliance with city land use codes. In March 2024, residents, advocates, and surrounding neighbors praised the community in front of the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA). BZA granted the community a number of variances to continue operation as temporary shelter. But despite the granted exceptions, in July 2024 the city issued a cease-and-desist letter, based on the expiration of an exemption Rosette Neighborhood Village received from being in compliance with the Connecticut State Building Code.
Colville sees the broader antagonism as an effort by the mayor to gentrify the area around Amistad, a predominantly low-income neighborhood that includes Yale New Haven Hospital. “This is a land grab on the part of this mayor at this point, and he’s really shamed himself,” Colville said. “You know he’s never set foot in the backyard.” The city is instead citing, as a cause for their actions, sanitary and safety concerns. In July 2024, the mayor’s office ordered that the utilities providing electricity to the tiny homes be shut off, referencing how the structures do not meet state building codes for wind, snow, foundation, insulation, or fire-resistance requirements. Amistad Catholic Worker House is holding its ground, promoting the model as a proven example of the benefits of transitional housing rooted in an intentional community. “We all love to promote the slogan of housing first. And I disagree with that,” Colville told me. “At this point, housing first does not work, partly because there is no housing first, and partly because what we need is community first.”
While these efforts are crucial, timely attempts to create more affordable and supportive housing, it is important to reflect on what is lost when faith-based organizations are left to oversee the rent rolls. Some worry that religious landlords may police the morality, or even religion, of their tenants. There is also a broader concern about whether these programs are sustainable, especially for small and cash-strapped institutions.
But perhaps most damning is the ongoing acceptance that the government won’t work to solve the housing crisis. Beyond vague proposals and good but politically unlikely ideas, there is no viable public solution in sight. And while some states and cities are making good-faith efforts to partner with faith-based institutions for the promotion of affordable housing, others simply are not. The clergy are showing up for people struggling to find stable and affordable housing. But the further we rely on community-based organizations—including faith-based institutions—without significant governmental support or financing, the more we are consigned to piecemeal solutions to a huge crisis. The rent is too goddamned high already.