In the seven years since Claremont Lutheran Church spearheaded the first “Yes In God’s Back Yard” (YIGBY) policy in San Diego, the phenomenon of repurposing underused religious property into housing has reached a cultural tipping point. At least ten states have passed or proposed a bill loosening zoning and development regulations for religious properties seeking to develop housing. Numerous counties and cities have launched supporting initiatives, and federal YIGBY bills are currently under consideration in both houses of Congress. This shifting cultural and regulatory landscape presents church property stewards with new opportunities to direct church assets toward solving crucial societal needs. At the same time, the YIGBY moment falls short of its full potential if it fails to open up a broader conversation about systemic barriers to housing affordability and the cultural, even spiritual, significance of the fact that worshiping congregations seem so strategically placed to overcome them. Both as a matter of long-term public policy and in a mode of faith, it’s worth asking if there is something about faith communities’ way of relating to land that is of relevance to society beyond the convenient convergence of their large land holdings with their charitable missions.
Faith-based organizations have obvious appeal as protagonists in addressing the housing crisis. Three major barriers to housing provision in this country include a lack of undeveloped land in residentially desirable areas; a financialized housing sector whose economic mechanisms seem locked in decades-long cycles of increasing unaffordability; and local politics that limit new development both through restrictive zoning regimes and prohibitive public consultation processes. Worshiping congregations are well-placed to address all three. Church properties are almost always strategically located, and often include significant open space, addressing the first barrier (land access). Worshiping congregations lack the profit motives that limit which projects others in the housing development ecosystem are willing and able to take on, thus addressing the second barrier (financing). Finally, worshiping congregations hold social capital that makes it politically feasible to grant them exemptions to prohibitive development regulations, thus solving the third problem (zoning).
Each of these premises bears further scrutiny, but even if each turns out to be true, what lessons is broader society drawing from this discovery? Is the encounter with the potential of houses of worship to solve the housing crisis “edifying” for society at large, or are we simply cashing in on a one-time supply of cultural and economic “chips” in exchange for a one-time infusion of housing? Without attention to this broader relevance, the YIGBY moment risks backfiring as a matter of public policy. A bill that loosens restrictive zoning requirements only for faith communities could imply that securing the conditions under which a society can consistently meet the need for housing is a voluntary project for do-gooders, while the rest of us carry on with our rational, self-interested lives. This mistakes the case. Access to housing is a central social and political question, not a localized crisis for the Church and other humanitarian actors to solve alone. Ensuring that natural resources like land serve the common good, rather than enriching a few, is a grave matter of justice and of public, civic responsibility.
Indeed, the relationship to land and its potential to meet human need that YIGBY bills ascribe to faith communities is not only a supernatural relationship–one motivated by Christ-like love, a sort of exception to the natural order of things that makes the first last and the last first, which would motivate a community to house and serve society’s most vulnerable. It is, crucially, that. But it is also a natural relationship, one motivated by justice to correct deviations from the natural order of things. Some such deviations might include the concentration of wealth in a few hands when others lack the means of subsistence, or the privileging of the rights of owners to extract profit over the rights of users to meet their basic needs from natural resources. If people of faith can help solve the housing crisis, it will not only be because they are motivated by divine mercy and charity to offer something the market alone won’t provide. It will also be because they persist in seeing reality as it truly is, including the economy’s essential orientation to the human person.
The YIGBY moment, then, affords the Church an unusually conspicuous opportunity to demonstrate what is possible when a society treats land and buildings primarily as a means to meet human need and as an arena for personal and communal development. This vision of things challenges policies and practices that treat land and buildings primarily as investment assets, whether on the household level, through exclusionary zoning policies that outlaw new development in the name of protecting incumbents’ property values, or through financial practices that reduce homes to assets backing tradeable and increasingly derivative investment instruments.
On both of these points–zoning and finance–it should not come as a surprise that Christians tracing out their faith’s implications for real estate would find themselves to be fellow travelers with people of good will already at work in these arenas. On the zoning front, housing advocates and zoning reformers across the country have been taking aim at barriers like height and bulk limitations and parking requirements for decades. What if, rather than simply turning the dials a bit for faith-owned land, as many of these policies do, we were to question the apparatus itself, and the values it is engineered to protect? Indeed, some zoning reform bills are looking beyond faith-owned land to recognize the ways in which development regulations meant to protect existing property values have created a system in which even the market is not allowed to supply housing it otherwise would. Faith communities, their vast developable land, and their community goodwill have given this broader zoning reform movement a new opening. It behooves each side to see the other as an ally in this unique moment.
If religious communities can be a silver bullet to break through land use policies that have stifled equitable development since the Second World War, can they do the same for the distortionary financial incentives that have driven up housing prices beyond a sustainable level? As Strong Towns’ Chuck Marohn and others have pointed out, federal housing policy since the Great Depression has had the effect of reframing a house as primarily an asset backing an investment–whether for a household, a bank, or a network of investors holding mortgage-backed securities–rather than as shelter. When this is the case, housing affordability–low cost of housing–is directly at odds with the interests of household and institutional wealth, which require housing costs to rise continuously. Here as well, strategies considered by reformers outside the Church find resonance with Catholic social teaching. There are investment, lending, taxation, and incentive practices that more equitably distribute capital’s power to support personal and communal development, and strategies that lead inexorably to greater wealth concentration and disempowerment. The Church should make common cause with efforts to develop more locally responsive investment and lending instruments, to eliminate economic rent-seeking in the real estate sector, and to channel unearned growth in property values toward public benefit.
The encounter of the “Yes In My Back Yard” constituencies with the Church is more than an opportunity for residential infill development. It is an opportunity for the authentic and transformative witness of the Church in the world, and is thus a call to an examination of conscience for our society at large. Rather than treating faith communities as exceptions to “the prevailing disorder” (to borrow Emmanuel Mounier’s phrase), the YIGBY moment invites us to reorder the economics of land and buildings toward human flourishing. Rather than granting churches exemptions from dysfunctional laws, we have an opportunity to write development regulations that work. This is long-term, complex work, but even in the near term, as YIGBY policies take effect, partnering with faith communities exploring reuse of their land invites the world of real estate development and investment into a renewed encounter with its own deepest purpose: meeting human need, and realizing human potential. May we take up that invitation to the full.