Fred Dodson knows dirt. On a small family farm in the Chestnut Knob community of south Virginia, he learned how to coax vegetables out of the ground that helped feed the family, alongside raising a few chickens and pigs. These days, he still loves to steal away from his job as chief operating officer of the DreamKey Partners nonprofit in Charlotte to work in his home garden. “It’s good therapy,” he says.
DreamKey coaxes a different kind of life-giving resource out of the ground, namely housing for middle- and lower-income seniors, veterans, families and the unhoused. As in farming, DreamKey’s success depends on the right kind of soil — the affordable kind. But it’s getting hard to find. To make its thin-margin deals work, his firm, one of the largest in the state, is adapting.
“Fifteen to 20 years ago, we could find 15 acres that were not contaminated or on a major thoroughfare for purchase for about $1.5 million,” he says. “Now, all we can find are irregularly shaped parcels, smaller and often with some type of contamination. To make the numbers work in our business, we know we have to be creative in what we build and we are. The problem is there just isn’t enough land that fits our economics.”
In response, affordable housing providers are turning more to an unusual source of land for development. Every week, Dodson speaks with church pastors and congregational leaders about what is possible at houses of faith. DreamKey has several such projects at or near the construction phase, plus five or six more in the pipeline. “So many churches are trying to figure out how they are going to survive, and I know market-rate developers are knocking on their doors as well,” he says.
Therein lies the story of a fast-moving national movement. In almost every community, houses of faith occupy well-placed, under-used properties in prime neighborhoods and near schools, transit, and employment centers. As odd bedfellows, church leaders are learning the basics of land development, and affordable housing developers are learning about church governance, polity and finance laced with scriptural and theological motivations.
A front row seat
It’s a journey I’ve been on for more than a decade. I serve Caldwell Presbyterian Church in the Elizabeth neighborhood near uptown Charlotte. In partnership with DreamKey, our church is converting a 14,000-square-foot building that once housed Sunday school classrooms into 21 studio apartments for people coming out of chronic homelessness. To operate the property and offer social services, we are partnering with Roof Above, Charlotte’s largest nonprofit agency working on homelessness. Our neighbors are scheduled to move in around Easter 2025. Meantime, we are learning all we can, as fast as we can, to be good neighbors as our new arrivals gain stability and, where
needed, healing.
The $6 million construction cost is covered by the Caldwell congregation, Myers Park United Methodist Church, a private foundation and city, county, state and federal funding sources. That will enable the initiative, Easter’s Home, to open its doors debt-free. It will provide shelter, plus community and supportive housing to those often hardest to house, people earning 30% to 50% of the area median income, or from $22,300 to $37,100 per individual. Residents will receive free, required case management and connections to services they need to reach their goals.
I never imagined I would be in the housing development business, but in the faith business this might be what we call “providence.” This project calls on my three professions spanning four decades in Charlotte, including business journalism, communications and policy roles at Bank of America’s Charlotte headquarters and the last 17 as a minister at Caldwell, hustling to keep up with its thriving, progressive ministries. That trajectory provided a front-row seat to how two national crises are intersecting.
Too few, too many
Those crises are a deep housing shortage and the upending of the American religious landscape. The former reflects a gap in housing supply heightened by the industry’s sharp downturn amid the Great Recession of 2008-10. More recently, pandemic-driven increases in housing costs, lagging wages and the sheer complexity of building homes that are both affordable for buyers and profitable for builders.
North Carolina’s local governments are scrambling to address a reality in which 1.2 million households, about one in four, are paying more than 30% of their income on housing. In the state’s biggest cities, middle- and lower-income workers in the hospitality, healthcare and trades sectors are moving out of central urban areas to lower-cost suburbs and exurbs. The state needs more than 100,000 new affordable units immediately, industry officials say.
Meanwhile, the peak of Christendom, at least as measured in participation in organized religion, is past. Gallup reports that only three in 10 adults attend worship regularly. Even fewer Americans belong to a church or claim a particular faith. God’s church has adapted for centuries. Now, many churches face questions about how to sustain their property-heavy operating models.
As many as one in three congregations will consider closing their doors over the next 15 years, unable to meet expenses for operations, maintenance, pastor and staff salaries and community outreach. In the 1.7-million-member Presbyterian Church (USA), 100,000 church properties will change hands by 2030, a denominational scholar estimates.
The tumult may free up tens of thousands of acres in prime locations from coast to coast. In general, churches are repurposing their land or under-used buildings for three reasons. Some are caring for neighbors, a theme that echoes through the Judeo-Christian scriptures. A second group is burdened with maintenance costs for leaking roofs, broken HVAC systems, deteriorating parking lots and aging pipe organs that no longer lift a joyful noise. A third group of congregations have dwindled to a remnant of older, tired members. Should the doors close, they still want to leave a legacy of service.
Early adapters
This movement represents a wide range of examples, each with unique contexts and challenges. If you have seen one church housing redevelopment deal, you’ve seen one church land development deal. Each plays out of its own factors and challenges.
In Charlotte, newcomers often say there seems to be a church on every corner. Founded by sturdy Scots-Irish Presbyterians in the early to mid 18th century, and later the hometown of the Rev. Billy Graham, Charlotte considers itself a “city of churches.” Today the city is a microcosm of the faith-in-housing movement.
Black congregations showed the way, spurred by the destruction and displacement of 1960s urban renewal. For decades the center of life for more than 1,000 Black families, the downtown Brooklyn neighborhood was bulldozed with unflinching support from elected officials and the city’s elite. Years later, central city Black churches vowed to control and steward their land to forestall a repeat of displacement.
In the 1980s, near the old Brooklyn neighborhood, Grace Emmanuel Baptist built Emmanuel Homes, a community
of 50 affordable apartments in the shadow of Charlotte’s growing skyline.
In 2017, St. Paul Baptist Church, having also been displaced from the central city, built a village of 121 affordable rental and for-purchase units, for those earning no more than 60% of the area median income. The church hired Laurel Street Residential and gained capital from one of the first infusions from Charlotte’s voter-approved Housing Trust Fund.
Next to its sanctuary, Little Rock AME Zion Church partnered with the city to build 105 apartments in uptown Charlotte, half affordable and half rented at market rates. The property is co-owned by the church and Laurel Street.
In north Charlotte, Mayfield Memorial Baptist Church withstood years of neighborhood change, gang violence and adjacent privately owned housing renting out bedrooms for $1,000 a month or more. Prevailing against some neighborhood opposition, the church partnered with DreamKey to open Sugaree Place last year. Rents run from about $400 to $547 a month for residents earning 30% of the area median income.
Greater Bethel AME Church in north Charlotte sold a wooded, 9-acre tract to the local Habitat for Humanity chapter at a below-market price, opening the way for more than two-dozen, for-sale affordable homes.
More recently, predominantly white churches with spacious grounds have stepped in. In northeast Mecklenburg County, Newell Presbyterian Church sits on 10 acres, near rows of tract housing that cover what had been rolling fields of corn and other crops. Newell plans a village of about 50 for-sale homes for those earning 60% to 80% of the area median.
Other congregations bring capital. Covenant Presbyterian in the city’s Dilworth neighborhood, with no extra land of its own, has funded hundreds of affordable units with various partners while investing about $5.5 million. Its partners include the Greater Bethel AME land transfer.
In the Triangle metro area, a range of innovative faith partners are also asserting a “Yes in God’s backyard” attitude instead of “Not in my backyard.”
As it planned a new church campus, the small Chapel Hill congregation of The (Episcopal) Church of the Advocate partnered with Pee Wee Homes for three tiny homes on about 5,000 square feet of land. They provide transitional housing for the unhoused. The units share a parking lot and utilities with the congregation.
In east Raleigh, Milner Memorial Presbyterian Church was demolished and is making way for 156 affordable units for people aged 55 and older. The nonprofit housing developer DHIC worked with the church, the regional office of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and developer Brightspire to create a legacy on Milner’s 4.6-acre site. Leasing began this fall.
In suburban Cary, Greenwood Forest Baptist Church plans 80-plus affordable rental units on its property.
In Fuquay-Varina, Juniper Level Missionary Baptist Church is exploring its property potential, as is First Baptist-Raleigh.
Complications, complexities
Even with the high demand for more accessibly priced housing, and churches’ urgency to chart their futures, the movement faces a range of hurdles that stall prospective projects.
Developers say congregations often jump in without discerning which population they feel called to serve and whether there is enough revenue to make the project feasible. Partners say they sometimes learn, after months of effort, that they have been working with a church representative who lacks the authority to make decisions or that a congregation hasn’t really reached consensus.
There are various ecclesiastical governance structures: the Roman Catholics, United Methodists and Episcopalians tend to have clear lines of authority, while Presbyterian and Lutheran governing bodies often entrust land to individual churches but retain ownership and final control. Baptist and other independent churches often have clear autonomy.
“This movement of churches developing their land is like a no-brainer. They support the mission of the church and serve ‘the least of us,’” says Yolanda Winstead, CEO of DHIC, Raleigh’s largest nonprofit housing developer. But the concept’s novelty and congregations’ inexperience mean “we are building the plane while we are flying it,” she adds
Each deal requires a unique equation of collaborators. On the business side, lawyers, architects, contractors, engineers and other professional services are needed. Developers often deliver most of those elements. But in other cases, assembling the right partners can be a lengthy, exhausting process. Few congregations have members or leaders with the expertise or stamina for the five or 10 years required to see some projects through. When partnerships form, they can face fierce neighborhood opposition that can stymie plans for years.
Some proposed initiatives that look promising on paper don’t pan out. The members of Asheville’s First Baptist Church shared a dream of partnering with the YMCA to develop a new “front door” to its prominent campus. The partners planned affordable housing in the shadow of its spectacular, Beaux Arts-influenced, but costly-to-maintain domed sanctuary.
After two years of work to form an agreement, church leaders announced in April that the deal would not go forward. “It appears Project Aspire would take a long time to mature into something financially plausible and acceptable to all parties.
Our church’s needs are more immediate and waiting to make decisions is no longer possible,” church leader Scott Hughes wrote to the congregation.
In other cases, local governments and elected officials prove unready or unwilling to say yes in God’s backyard.
Three years ago, Wesley Community Development, a Huntersville-based group affiliated with the United Methodist Church, connected Park Street UMC and Kernersville-based Ridge Care Senior Living, a developer of senior living communities. Park Street sits on nearly 5 acres and is close to downtown Belmont, a former textile town that is a popular Charlotte bedroom community. Since the pandemic, the 285-member church is seeing new life in membership and ministry, says the Rev. David Hiatt. Still, church leaders realize that giving patterns have shifted dramatically as younger generations make financial pledges that amount to a fraction of those in the baby boom cohort.
The partners developed plans for a 100-apartment senior community on two acres of the campus, filling a housing gap in Belmont. Income from the development would increase the church budget by 20%, Hiatt says, allowing it to meet current expenses and expand its mission outreach. Both partners saw a bright future and a chance to offer the town a needed addition.
“This piece of property just checks all the boxes for what a senior living community needs,” says Ridge Care Chief Operating Officer Marc Maready. “It would have all that seniors of a range of income levels would want and more. Seniors don’t want to be relegated to bingo and book clubs anymore. This site is a 10-minute walk from everything happening in Belmont.”
But as Belmont experienced the growth many had long sought, political winds shifted and the city changed some zoning regulations. The change brought into question the height of the building that the project needed to be profitable. Sufficient support among Town Council members disappeared.
One year and more than $100,000 in expenses for Ridge Care later, the partners still believe the project is what Belmont needs. They have altered the plan to make its height less visible. “We have a grassroots campaign to say senior housing is important and that this gives our city something we don’t have, and we desperately need,” Maready says. “Everyone we talk to in Belmont says senior housing is needed. The planning staff has said that this is the best possibility for it. We recognize they are doing their best to protect Belmont. But that doesn’t always protect everyone and help the most vulnerable, the people who have to leave town to get the care they need.”
Hiatt is convinced the project could create community between the congregation and the building residents.
“Development for development’s sake is not going to work for the church,” he says. “If a congregation can find something that dovetails nicely with its vision and history and who it’s been, then the church should do it,” Hiatt adds. “Park Street is committed to this …. I also understand Marc has a business to run.”
The Belmont story illustrates the need for agility in public policy. In areas where the housing crisis is the most severe, stakeholders have only recently begun to smooth the way for church-land development partners to navigate the maze of local government requirements.
North Carolina might look westward. California lawmakers passed a bill in 2023, known as the “yes in God’s backyard bill,” to enable houses of faith to use property for affordable housing “by right,” regardless of local zoning restrictions. It paves the way for creative development on 171,000 acres of land statewide on those campuses, as well as colleges and universities.
San Diego acted at the local level, passing zoning reforms that reduced or, in some cases, removed parking requirements for redevelopment for affordable housing. The city removed zoning ordinances tied to church attendance and minimum parking-lot capacities.
Relative to the need, however, most local municipalities are far behind. Monroe-based True Homes, the state’s largest privately owned homebuilder, is working more closely with churches. It has a goal of offering 10% of its annual production of about 2,500 homes, at cost without a profit margin, to those earning 60% to 80% of area median incomes.
True Homes works through two initiatives. Its Doorway to Prosperity program sells new homes at cost for teachers and first responders. Through its foundation, the builder also partners with churches and nonprofits, receiving land for free or at below-market cost, then creating an annuity for the church fed by the development’s ongoing revenue.
Those efforts regularly encounter limited cooperation from local zoning officials, founding partner Mark Boyce says.
“We have invited local governments to expedite zoning and planning approvals and that is an unsolved challenge,” Boyce says tactfully. “We need much more collaboration and commitment by local government and their resolve to get things done. The housing crisis is an exceptional problem that needs an exceptional solution, but these proposals are being treated with the same processes requiring too many approvals.”
North Carolina leaders need to be bold, Boyce says. “Did it really take 150,000 homeless people for California to get to the point of offering creative solutions? They were a day late and a dollar short.
“We have an opportunity to empower the faith community here. This segment of the business is about to explode, working with churches to realize their land is valuable for missional and stewardship objectives,” he says.
Boyce keeps the faith that North Carolina can show leadership in housing. “Individually, we can do good things. Together we can do great things.” ■
Former Charlotte Observer business writer John Cleghorn has written a book about this movement, “Building Belonging: The Church’s Call to Create Community and House Our Neighbors.” Westminster John Knox Press is the publisher.
