This Church Could Be Your Home

CHARLOTTE, N.C.— From East Coast to West, God’s backyard is increasingly part of the solution to the nation’s affordable housing shortage. Whether leasing land to a developer or selling it outright, places of worship have found a strategy that can improve their bottom lines while also benefiting neighbors in need.

Dozens of prominent Black congregations and megachurches pioneered the movement as part of their social-justice mission, particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods where longtime residents are in danger of being pushed out. More recently, white churches have caught the development fever, especially those with dwindling congregations or worn facilities with high maintenance costs. Land rich and dollar poor, these places of worship are looking for new purposes for empty buildings or underused properties that also potentially provide a revenue stream. 

Rutgers University’s Nadia Mian, whose research focuses on the church-affordable housing trend, says the movement is best explained by the intersection of two trend lines: Americans’ plummeting interest in organized religion and the growing housing affordability gap. Later this winter, Mian will publish a database cataloguing faith-based affordable housing developments completed across the country since 2015. She expects the final report will document at least 200 projects that account for about 10,000 occupied units. “That doesn’t count the many that are still in the pipeline,” she says.

Mian emphasizes that her research isn’t designed to influence churches, but to chronicle a new strategy that has shown promise in cities across the country. “Especially in places where land is hard to come by, you need strategies and partners to use the land you have,” she says.

Places of worship often receive assistance from housing nonprofits such as Maryland-based Enterprise Community Partners. Last fall, the nonprofit Southern Urbanism, whose expertise includes affordable housing, launched its own faith-based building initiative to help congregations navigate the complicated work. Donor groups are also jumping on the idea. For instance, the H.E. Butt and Austin Community foundations in October hosted a discussion in Austin about how philanthropy can help congregations adapt church properties for housing.

In Dallas, whose many places of worship have earned it the nickname “Buckle of the Bible Belt,” the construction of affordable housing on unused property is on the minds of a number of forward-thinking congregations in neighborhoods like South Dallas and Oak Cliff.

Churches in the epicenters of the housing crisis—Washington D.C., New York, and California—were first to plant big projects. But fast-growing Charlotte, N.C., has become a national model both in its total faith-based developments and the strategies its City Hall has put in place to spur more construction.

Church projects are responsible for at least 1,500 new units of affordable housing in Charlotte over the last eight years. More than a dozen have been finished or are near completion while at least another 15 to 20 are in development. Some are seeking zoning approval while others are working on financing. Years of stubborn perseverance by individual pastors put the first projects in motion; voter-approved bond dollars pushed them across the finish line.

Most recently, Mayor Vi Lyles created an office within Charlotte’s City Hall dedicated to faith-based initiatives that offers educational boot camps, zoning help, and money to cover fees, surveys, and reports. “Your local government is walking hand in hand with you through this process,” says assistant city director Warren Wooten.

Dallas has the ingredients to emulate what is working in Charlotte: Stakeholders eager to see more affordable housing built, a robust faith community, and an abundance of church-owned property. Dallas County is home to an estimated 2,186 vacant parcels of land owned by faith-based organizations, according to a Child Poverty Action Lab analysis.

Linda McMahon, longtime president of The Real Estate Council and now CEO of the Dallas Economic Development Corporation, says affordable housing construction has long been a hot topic among local churches, but little momentum ever developed for a sustained and unified push to do so.

Enterprise expanded its education efforts to Texas churches in late 2024, and several local congregations interested in maintaining pockets of affordable housing signed up. Those include Cornerstone Baptist, which has purchased nearly four dozen parcels in South Dallas, and the sprawling Concord in Oak Cliff. At the end of the six-month course, they talked about their working concepts at a presentation attended by a handful of community members.

What’s missing in Dallas, McMahon noted, is a single-minded entity “with convener status” to organize and lead the effort locally and consistently assist more church leaders in the work. That’s the role Charlotte’s city governance accepted in 2024.

To better understand Charlotte’s success, I spent a week there interviewing church leaders, developers, and city officials; touring the completed projects and learning their history; and getting to know the neighborhoods in which the affordable housing was built. Whether Uber drivers or elected officials, everyone made the same urgent point early in our conversations: More than 150 people move here every day; if we don’t build more affordable housing, where will they live?  

Charlotte, the 14th largest city in the U.S., is home to more than 943,000 people. North Carolina’s largest city has been an employment magnet, especially since the pandemic. With a growth surge of almost 10 percent since 2020 has come inflated housing demand and higher prices. It’s not unusual to find a 700-square-foot one-bedroom apartment renting at $2,070 a month. 

Much like the situation in Dallas, many of the workers the city depends on can’t afford to live in Charlotte. More than 32,000 affordable housing units are needed to fill the gap for residents who make 80 percent or less of the area’s median income. For a family of four at 80 percent AMI, that’s $89,750; at 30 percent AMI it’s $33,650. (The most recent research in Dallas shows a gap of 39,919 units affordable to households earning at or below 50 percent AMI, a shortage expected to grow over the next 10 years and begin affecting higher earning brackets.)

The dozen or so church projects span a variety of income levels. At one end is Easter’s Home, an old education building next door to Caldwell Presbyterian’s sanctuary that has been retooled into 21 studio apartments for the chronically homeless in a historic neighborhood near downtown. The city’s largest provider of homeless services, Roof Above, will operate the property and provide various social services. On the upper end of affordable are several hundred for-sale homes that will soon sprout on 30 acres behind The Park, an 8,000-member congregation near Charlotte’s western edge. 

“If you’ve seen one church housing deal,” Caldwell pastor John Cleghorn says, “you’ve seen one church housing deal. No two are alike.” He speaks with authority, after a year researching his 2024 book Building Belonging, which explores the faith-based housing movement nationwide and provides a primer for places of worship to get involved.  

What ties the Charlotte work together, Cleghorn says, is that all the churches could have sold their property to the developer willing to write the biggest check. Instead they worked in partnership with affordable housing specialists. Making these deals work is akin to “stitching clouds together,” says Fred Dodson, with nonprofit developer DreamKey Partners, whose church work includes Easter’s Home. “Even if there was such a thing as a perfect deal, I warn congregations this is a five to 10 year process.”

DreamKey, originally called the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership, was founded in 1989 to create affordable housing and stabilize neighborhoods. 

None of the developments would have been possible without the city’s 25-year-old Housing Trust Fund, which voters have kept stocked with bond dollars. Most recently, bond funding grew from $50 million in 2018 to $100 million in 2024. While the designated city dollars are just part of the overall capital stack, they provide the gap financing that allows developers to price apartments at lower rates that are affordable to more earners.

Pastors and developers say the city’s help goes deeper than the housing fund—they credit Charlotte for having their back on the deals. “This is a city that gets things done and tries not to let too much of the talking and task forces take over,” says Lee Cochran, with Laurel Street Residential. “Hopefully that doesn’t change over time as we get bigger.”

DreamKey and Laurel Street, which focus on affordable and mixed-income housing, say about 10 percent of their units are church-based developments. “And that number is growing,” says Dodson, DreamKey’s executive vice president. “We are in discussions with 10 to 15 more churches right now.”

Since Laurel Street partnered with St. Paul Baptist Church more than a decade ago on the city’s first major faith-based housing project, the development team has been approached by more than 20 churches, Cochran says. “Not all of these conversations turn into projects, but many will,” he says.

Peter Wherry, senior pastor of The Field Charlotte, previously known as Mayfield Memorial Missionary Baptist Church, also credits what he calls the city’s “proactive political leadership.” Its municipal government doesn’t always get things right, he said, but “they are right there beside people who are serious about creating affordable housing.”

The Field moved decades ago into what was then the middle-class, mostly Black neighborhood of Hidden Valley, an enclave of 1950s ranch homes. Crack arrived in the 1990s, when a gang known as the “Hidden Valley Kings” terrorized the community. “If you look, you can probably still dig up the Cops episode that featured our so-called notorious neighborhood,” Wherry says. 

The church fought back by buying land adjacent to its sanctuary and shutting down the crack dens on the lots. Over the next 20 years, Hidden Valley stabilized and transformed into a working class neighborhood—with higher-priced development encroaching on all sides. The Field’s response, with the help of the Housing Trust Fund, was to use its accumulated land to maintain a pocket of affordability.

In partnership with DreamKey, the church opened Sugaree Place next door to its sanctuary in 2023. Like other faith-based developments in the city, Sugaree is run by a property management firm. “That’s not a job for the church,” Wherry says.

The 51 apartments, with 9-foot ceilings, balconies, and custom interior buildouts, are reserved for those earning between 30 to 80 percent of the area’s median income. Wherry says residents include bank tellers, firefighters, and senior citizens who previously were couch-surfing in the neighborhood. “It created a grand address for people whose only sin is being poor in one of the richest cities in the country,” Wherry says. 

Successes such as Sugaree Place led Charlotte’s elected leaders to consider what bigger role the city could play to potentially spark even more projects. “When it comes to our elected officials and our philanthropic leaders and our business leaders, when they hear that there's a need in the community or there's a new way to partner, it's always a resounding yes,” says the city’s Wooten, who oversees affordable housing.

Mayor Lyles established the Faith in Housing office in 2024 to provide faith-based organizations with tools and resources for every step of the planning and construction process. The new program’s first summit drew more than 300 people representing about 100 places of worship. “We wanted to gauge interest and the response was astonishing,” says Council member LaWana Mayfield, who leads the initiative. “It was like, ‘My church has 17 acres. How do we get started?’”

Last year, Mayfield secured $430,000 in the city budget for Faith in Housing, which includes funding to contract with national nonprofit Enterprise to bring its formal training curriculum for churches to Charlotte. The first cohort of 12 interested parties was announced in October.

The city also has begun a pilot program to assist places of worship that need zoning changes for their projects. By “sponsoring” the rezoning work, the Faith in Housing initiative will save the churches the cost and inherent difficulties in navigating the process. “We're also expediting that rezoning so that they don't have to wait the same time lengths that the regular developers have to do,” Wooten says.

Additionally, the city is working to get grant funding for specific needs, such as environmental reports. “For those churches that want to run fast, by the time they're done with that cohort, they’ll have a project that they can actually come to the city with,” Wooten says.

Charlotte also is working with state officials to determine what it might be able to do at the local level to smooth the zoning path for faith-based development. North Carolina is among the states considering legislation similar to what California passed in 2023, enabling houses of faith to use their property for affordable housing “by right,” regardless of local zoning restrictions. (Similar legislation in Texas stalled at the committee level last year.) 

For places of worship less certain about how they want to proceed, the Faith in Housing team will open another track in the spring. A church may need 15 hours of consultant time to look at their property and prepare a report; they may need an elevation report or an architecture expert. “We want to make sure there are options for everyone interested to get in the door,” Mayfield says. “We don’t want any church taken advantage of with some ‘oh, I’ve got a deal for you’ but we don’t want them scared of the process.”

One of the affordable housing projects already open in Charlotte is visible from the large windows of the city conference room: The five-story Varick on 7th opened in 2024 by Little Rock A.M.E. Zion Church in partnership with Laurel Street. It is located on the edge of downtown amid a mass of apartments and townhouses that resembles Dallas’ Uptown. Half of the 100 or so units are designated for 80 percent AMI or below and the other half are market rate, a pricing arrangement similar to how Dallas structures its affordable housing projects through an entity called a public facility corporation.

Erik Torgusen, who helps run the restaurant across the street from Varick on 7th, says he’s glad for people, such as those working in the service industry downtown, to have a place to live. “I know some people who live there and it’s changed their lives immensely,” he said. “It’s a good apartment. It’s built right, not just a crappy throw-up.” 

Half a mile from Varick on 7th, in the heart of downtown, First United Methodist Church has preliminary sketches in hand for a project that would require tearing down two of its buildings to build about 300 units of mixed-income housing, pairing market-rate apartments with those at several tiers of affordable rent. 

“This is a 100-year-old building,” says senior pastor Valerie Rosenquist. “We joke about it being held together in certain places with bubble gum and tape and it's not that far-fetched. The costs are enormous.”

To remain a robust institution, Rosenquist says, the congregation needs a church that is both structurally and financially strong. As the project’s co-developer, the church will receive a portion of the venture’s income. Affordable housing is also part of the mission of this church, a place that welcomes unhoused neighbors to store their belongings near the pastor’s office each day before they go to work. 

In addition to the churches working with developers to transform their land into housing sites, several Presbyterian and Methodist congregations have made million-dollar investments in other projects that have added hundreds more affordable units. Other churches have helped out by selling their acreage at below-market prices to Habitat for Humanity.

While Charlotte’s faith-based affordable housing projects often initially face community pushback, opposition tends to dissipate before the final votes. According to the city’s Mayfield and Wooten—and neighbors I spoke with while walking the blocks around the developments—because the churches are deeply invested in the communities, there is less concern than if outside developers had led the projects. 

“The churches have demonstrated their commitment to the affordable housing mission and the people it serves, not just to the development,” Mayfield says. 

The faith-based projects are aimed at different levels of income and often designed and marketed for specific demographics—senior citizens, young first-time wage earners, and parents seeking stable shelter for their kids. What binds the churches’ work into a single mission is its grounding in a large-scale, life-changing response to “love thy neighbor.” 

Charlotte City Hall knows no one solution will solve its shortage of affordable housing, and faith-based initiatives account for only a fraction of the needed units. But Wooten suggested considering success not in numbers but through the lives of individual children. Providing safe, clean, and affordable places for households earning a modest amount of money creates a generational change. Each new housing unit pokes a stick into poverty’s spinning wheel, and the children in that home have the chance to not just survive, but thrive.

“That’s what we’re doing with this [Faith in Housing] initiative and why it is so critically important,” Wooten says, “and why I hope I get to continue to do it until I retire.”

COMING NEXT WEEK: The Lab Report will publish an in-depth look at two of Charlotte’s faith-based affordable housing projects: The first large development, opened by St. Paul Baptist in 2018, and Newell Presbyterian’s 50 for-sale townhomes, set to break ground by early spring.

Sharon Grigsby is the co-founder and senior writer of The Lab Report. [email protected].

We’ll send a new story to your inbox every Wednesday. Have a friend who would appreciate it? We’d love for you to forward this email to them.

The Lab Report Dallas is a local journalism project published by the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL). Its newsroom operates with editorial independence.

© 2025 Child Poverty Action Lab. All rights reserved.