In 2017, Born Again Church in Nashville held a community charrette, bringing residents together to discuss what they wanted, and did not want, as development pressure increased around the congregation’s land, according to Urban Land Magazine. We weren’t trying to go into debt to do something else and put this burden on our membership, pastor Hockett said. Instead, the church asked how it could connect with the city and development partners to solve the problem together.
That process led to Northview Housing Development, a 55-plus active senior community built in partnership with Urban Campus and Core and The Clear Blue Co, designed with energy efficiency, indoor air quality, aging-in-place features and future solar infrastructure built in from the start, according to Horne, one of the project’s planners. A separate Nashville project on faith-owned land, led by developer Nelson, includes solar panels, a green roof, community garden space and backup power planning.
The legal and financial terrain is not simple. Affordable housing frequently costs more to build than market-rate housing once layered financing, regulatory requirements and long-term affordability commitments are factored in, and federal and state protections for religious institutions can intersect in complicated ways with zoning and tax credit financing. Aron Thompson of the Urban League of Middle Tennessee has developed a 101, 201, 301 framework specifically to help congregations navigate that complexity step by step rather than all at once.
The Nashville approach differs from the mandate-driven state laws spreading elsewhere, California, Florida, Virginia, in one important way: it started with the congregation itself asking what the community actually needed, before any legislation existed to streamline the process. For a church weighing its own underused land, that sequencing, listening first, building second, may matter as much as whichever legal pathway eventually gets used.
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