Churching NIMBYs: Creating Affordable Housing on Church Property

Abstract

In recent years, faith communities across the United States have begun to create affordable housing on church property, inspired by sincerely held religious beliefs. Some are building microhomes behind their houses of worship. Others are converting residences once used by religious ministers—from rectories to abbeys to convents—into units for seniors and low-income families. Still others are repurposing their vacant schools, church parking lots, and undeveloped parcels of land for denser multifamily structures, from townhouses to apartment buildings. Within housing-advocacy circles and among faith communities, these continent-wide efforts to create affordable housing on church property have manifested an affirmative declaration: “Yes, In God’s Backyard.”

Legal scholarship and popular media have extensively documented the affordable-housing crisis. In particular, scholars and commentators have underscored the pernicious role of exclusionary zoning in strangling housing production, ultimately sending regional housing prices skyward. When faith communities create affordable housing on church property, much of which is located in residentially zoned areas, they seek something other than fair market value. Some might call it “charity” (tzedakah) or “discipleship,” a commitment to “welcome the stranger” or to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Faith communities seek theologically and morally sound uses for their underutilized property, but often struggle to overcome the regulatory and financial hurdles of adaptive reuse. Local governments can incentivize redevelopment that benefits the wider community, growing their affordable housing supply. But their mutual benefit does not exempt faith communities from challenge when they choose to redevelop church property for affordable housing. Neighbors may seek to thwart faith communities from introducing denser, multifamily residential structures in their backyard, relying on land-use restrictions designed to prohibit less costly forms of housing. When they succeed, these challenges from NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) neighbors can limit both housing supply and the free exercise of religion.

This Feature thus proposes a novel response to exclusionary zoning: religious liberty. Where sincerely held religious beliefs inspire faith communities’ efforts to create affordable housing, these communities can assert constitutional and statutory free exercise protections against land-use decisions that obstruct denser, less expensive, multifamily developments on church land. This Feature also explores municipal and state legislative reforms that lower the barrier where faith communities struggle to overcome the regulatory and financial hurdles of adaptive reuse and demonstrates the breadth of potential for affordable housing on church property, drawing on public sources and a novel data set to map parcels owned by Roman Catholic dioceses in Chicago, Illinois and Oakland, California across municipal zones.

Regardless of how faith communities came to own property within their limits, or why faith communities seek to repurpose property within their limits, most local governments need property within their limits to create affordable housing. And faith communities are willing partners in their endeavor.

Keywords: Property, Land Use, Housing, Zoning, Real Estate, Law and Religion, Religious Liberty, First Amendment, RLUIPA, State and Local Government, Faith Communities