A $150,000 Rezoning and a Year of Waiting: Why Church Land Is Slow to Shelter the Homeless

• Wagga Wagga’s homelessness crisis has prompted calls to use faith-owned land for shelter
• Rezoning a place of worship for housing can cost about $150,000 and take nine to 12 months
• A Nowra church set up a 12-bed shelter in four to six weeks and now manages 40 rental homes
• The NSW homelessness minister said the state could also look at its own land

A homelessness crisis in the New South Wales city of Wagga Wagga has renewed debate over how quickly church land can be put to use. The ABC reported on 20 May 2026 that the death of a newborn baby during childbirth in a tent weeks earlier had brought urgent calls for action, including from faith groups.

“This issue has been talked about for a decade, and the response has been extremely slow,” said Vickie Burkinshaw of the Wagga Women’s Health Centre.

Amanda Bailey, chief executive of Faith Housing Australia, said zoning was a major barrier. “When you’re thinking about faith-based land, many places of worship are zoned as infrastructure, which means residential housing is not immediately permissible,” she said. According to the report, rezoning could cost about $150,000 and take nine to 12 months to be approved.

Yet one church showed what is possible. Peter Dover, senior minister at Salt Ministries in Nowra, said its Salt Care service runs a 12-bed emergency shelter and manages 40 rental homes for people who were homeless. “Everyone said it would take us two years to get it going. We got it up and running within four to six weeks,” he said. The state’s Minister for Homelessness, Rose Jackson, said: “We can look at our own land, too. Those solutions are good, but they still take a few months to turn around.”

The story underlines a practical point: churches often have the land and the will to help, but planning rules and costs slow them down. A small congregation cannot easily find $150,000 and wait a year before housing anyone.

In Jamaica, as families rebuild after Hurricane Melissa, churches with spare land face similar hurdles over approvals and costs. The Nowra example shows that a determined congregation working with authorities can move quickly. Jamaican church leaders could press for a fast-track route for emergency and transitional housing on church land, and diaspora churches could help cover the upfront costs that often stop such projects before they start.

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