California Just Made It Easier for Churches to Build Homes. There Are 170,000 Acres in Play

• Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 4, known as “Yes in God’s Backyard”
• Churches and nonprofit colleges can skip most local permits and environmental review to build affordable housing
• A UC Berkeley study found more than 170,000 acres of eligible land
• The law runs from 2024 until 2036

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation allowing churches and other religious institutions to build affordable housing on their land with far less red tape, Fortune reported with the Associated Press on 12 October 2023. The law, SB 4, was written by Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener and is widely known as “Yes in God’s Backyard”.

From 2024, religious institutions and nonprofit colleges can turn their property into affordable housing while bypassing most local permitting and environmental review. The law is set to expire in 2036. A study by the University of California, Berkeley estimated that religious and higher-education campuses across the state hold more than 170,000 acres of land that could qualify.

The measure is part of a wider push in a state that is home to nearly a third of all homeless people in the United States. An earlier streamlining law in force since 2018 had already fast-tracked more than 19,000 homes, about 60% of them affordable. On the same day, Newsom announced where 1,200 tiny homes would be placed across four cities.

“California desperately needs to ramp up housing production, and the Governor’s actions today help put us on a path to achieve that goal,” Wiener said.

The idea behind SB 4 is simple: many congregations own car parks, vacant lots and underused buildings, often in well-located neighbourhoods, and planning rules have made it slow and costly to put homes on them. Jamaica’s churches are among its most significant landowners, and the island faces its own housing affordability squeeze. California’s approach offers one model for how government could unlock church land for housing, and a prompt for Jamaican denominations to take stock of what they own, how it is titled and whether it could serve their communities better.

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