Catholic Charities Housing began building 63 affordable senior apartments on an empty car park at Denver’s Church of All Saints, with funding from banks, the city, the state and the archdiocese.

Seniors who paid deposits of up to $110,000 for a life-lease retirement project on a Scarborough church’s land protested after the developer went bankrupt, saying refunds reached some church members but not them.

St Monica’s Home for the Abandoned and Elderly, run by the Catholic-founded St Patrick’s Foundation, faced closure in 2023 with four months of funds left, until Minister Desmond McKenzie said the government would step in.

Rev Lilla Martin spent decades in England and the US before returning to build the Allibecca retirement home in Mandeville. At 85, the Anglican priest warned that nursing homes should never operate from rented premises.

Casa de la Fe church in Soundview, the Bronx, is partnering with a developer on an eight-storey building with about 167 affordable studio and one-bedroom apartments for low-income and formerly homeless seniors, with the church rebuilt on the ground floor.

Volunteers from the Shortwood Seventh-day Adventist Church spent nearly two years building a one-bedroom house for Lurlene Lawson in Grants Pen, helped by online donations from members at home and in the diaspora.

More than 100 social homes for older people, a smaller 300-seat church and a primary care centre have been approved on the site of Finglas’s 3,500-seat Church of the Annunciation, part of a national public-private scheme.

The Eira Schader Home for the Aged in Trench Town was run-down and facing closure in 2016 until the National Leadership Prayer Breakfast made it its beneficiary, giving about $550,000 for repairs that drew in other donors.

A letter writer argued that a single 100-person cap ignored the size of Jamaica’s larger churches, describing a 1,000-member congregation that pays staff, supports seniors and runs a home for the aged.

The JN Foundation gave 500 care packages in 2020 to Missionaries of the Poor, whose six homes in Kingston and St Andrew care for about 500 elderly, disabled and vulnerable people, as pandemic donations fell.