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CAN GOD FIX AMERICA'S HOUSING CRISIS?

“Faith institutions need to wake up and understand that they’re as much in the real estate business as they are in the religion business."

A few years ago, the pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Roanoke, Virginia, came to longtime member Michael Hicks to discuss a difficult subject. Should they close the church, a fixture in the city since the early 1900s, and redevelop the property?

Hicks, the church’s treasurer, had gone to Trinity since the 1950s. He attended its primary school and joined a youth fellowship group in his teenage years. He and his wife, Marsha, married there.

But the financial situation at Trinity, like tens of thousands of houses of worship in the US, had deteriorated over the last few decades. The congregation could barely afford routine maintenance and insurance costs, much less pay to fix the sanctuary’s leaky plaster roof.

“Our building was no longer serving us. It was the master of us,” says Joanna Paysour, the church’s pastor.

Trinity’s members considered selling the church’s annex to for-profit developers. They showed it to non-profits interested in office space. In the end, they found a solution that didn’t feel like an ending but a transition of the property to what Hicks calls “another mission”: affordable housing.

All over the country, religious congregations are struggling to pay the bills for large houses of worship and adjacently-owned properties such as school buildings, parking lots, and cafeterias. Meanwhile, America’s housing deficit is at ~4.5m homes — with urban and suburban areas deploying zoning laws that make construction of affordable housing units particularly difficult.

Could churches and synagogues be a salvation for the housing market?

The potential for 100k churches to close When Hicks grew up in the 1950s, Sunday services at Trinity would often feature standing-room-only crowds of several hundred people.

But by the 1980s, following an exodus of Roanoke residents to the suburbs, the sanctuary had more empty seats than souls in the pew. Covid compounded the situation in recent years, as membership plummeted from ~35 people to ~20 people, post-pandemic.

The same story has played out across many small and mid-sized American churches: attendance has dwindled as populations shift and secularism increases.

But the decline of religious lifestyle in America is only part of the reason many churches, synagogues, and mosques have struggled. Rick Reinhard, who focuses on church real estate and repurposing as principal consultant at the Niagara Consulting Group and Lakelands Institute, says they also face obstacles similar to those faced by small businesses.

Soaring facility and insurance costs: While religious congregations are typically exempt from taxation, their insurance costs have gone up like everyone else’s. Building costs, according to Reinhard, can easily total $7-$10 per square foot annually — as much as $100k for a 10k square foot church...READ MORE, SEE PIX, SHARE 

How is your house of worship holding up? Let us know!