The Washington, DC area has roughly 800 vacant parcels owned by faith-based institutions which, if converted to multifamily affordable housing, could produce an estimated 43,000 to 108,000 new units, according to a 2019 Urban Institute study cited by the Tax Credit Advisor. Even the low end of that range would more than wipe out the regions rental housing shortfall, which the National Low Income Housing Coalition puts at just over 33,000 units.
You have these neighbourhood anchor institutions, which control real estate, and you have these mission-aligned institutions all over the country, red state, blue state, purple state, urban, suburban and rural, Reverend David Bowers of Enterprise Community Partners told the publication. And they control this underutilised, underdeveloped asset.
Bowers leads Enterprise’s Faith-Based Development Initiative, running since 2006 specifically to close the gap between congregations that own land and developers who know how to build on it, a gap that is more structural than either side’s fault. Churches, mosques and synagogues are mission-driven and deeply embedded in their communities, but most have no in-house development expertise; developers have the expertise but rarely the relationships or trust faith institutions have already built locally.
The DC numbers are not unique to that region. Research from the Urban Land Institute in Benton and Washington counties, Arkansas, found seven square miles of property owned by faith organisations, almost half of it vacant or used for parking, a pattern that holds wherever anyone has actually bothered to measure it. The constraint on turning that land into housing has rarely been the land itself. It has been financing, technical capacity, and a congregation simply not knowing where to begin, exactly the gap initiatives like Bowers’s are now trying to close at scale.
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