A small-town North Carolina church just secured a conditional rezoning for a 30-acre campus expansion that includes transitional housing, vocational classrooms and 12 single-family residential lots, no state law required. Shiloh Truelight Church in Mint Hill filed the petition itself, modelling the project on a partner programme at Greenville Tabernacle Church in South Carolina, according to Inman.
The case sits inside a fast-moving US trend known as Yes in God’s Backyard, or YIGBY, which lets faith-based organisations build housing on land they already own. California passed the first statewide YIGBY law in 2023, requiring 100 percent of units to be affordable to lower-income households; Florida followed in 2025, and Virginia’s Faith in Housing Act, signed in April, eliminates the rezoning step entirely for faith-based and nonprofit developers, effective January 2027. St Petersburg, Florida, became the first city to formally launch a YIGBY programme this year, pairing congregations with technical support to evaluate site feasibility and access funding.
The scale of the opportunity driving the movement is real: faith-based organisations hold more than 2.6 million acres of land nationally, much of it underused, with the potential to support as many as 800,000 new homes, according to Realtor.com. In New York City alone, faith organisations own more than 84 million square feet of land, of which roughly 5.5 million square feet is vacant lots or surface parking, enough for an estimated 22,000 housing units, per a 2025 NYU Furman Center study. A February 2025 assessment by YIMBY Law found the early results more modest than the headline numbers suggest, no projects had yet used California’s law at the time of the report, attributing the gap to affordability mandates, labour requirements and local resistance. Zoning reform clears the legal path; financing and political will still decide what actually gets built.
Jamaica has the same underlying asset sitting mostly idle for the opposite reason. Jamaican churches have lost thousands of acres to squatting and adverse possession precisely because that land sat unmonitored and undeveloped for years, the Moravian Church alone has lost 435 of 500 acres in St Elizabeth. A domestic version of YIGBY, church land formally developed into housing rather than informally lost to it, would turn the same asset from a liability into the solution. Jamaica already has the land titling infrastructure through the National Land Agency and NHT concessionary loans for churches; what it does not yet have is a policy framework, the way California, Florida and Virginia now do, that makes building on that land the default path rather than the exception.
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