God's Landlord: The Church Housing Movement Trying to Solve America's Home Shortage

The Problem: More Than 4 Million Homes Short

The United States is facing a housing shortfall of more than 4 million homes, according to reporting by The Guardian. Increases in rental costs have outpaced general inflation for several years, pushing homeownership out of reach for millions of households and placing intense pressure on renters at every income level.

At the same time, an unlikely resource has been sitting largely dormant in neighborhoods across the country: land owned by churches, synagogues, and other faith-based organizations — much of it underutilized as congregations shrink and age.

In Massachusetts alone, a joint analysis by the Lynch Foundation and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy identified at least 4,850 vacant parcels of land owned by faith-based organizations statewide. Lynch Foundation Executive Director Katie Everett said at a forum hosted by the Citizens' Housing and Planning Association that if just half of those parcels were developed for housing, they could generate 500,000 new homes and $60 million in annual tax revenue for Massachusetts alone.

What Is YIGBY?

The movement to develop faith-owned land into affordable housing has acquired its own nickname: YIGBY, or "Yes in God's Back Yard" — a deliberate play on YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard), the broader movement advocating for more housing construction.

The core premise is simple: many religious organizations already own land in high-demand urban and suburban areas. If they can cut through zoning barriers and financing complexity, that land becomes an enormous untapped source of affordable units.

Valerie White, the senior executive director of the New York-based office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) — one of the country's largest community development organizations — explained the financial logic to The Guardian. "Affordable housing project financing is very complex and it's extremely expensive," White said. "So if you already have the space and you're just building a structure on top of it, it changes the cost dramatically."

LISC has helped broker relationships between churches and housing developers across the country to advance YIGBY projects.

Real Projects Already Delivering Units

YIGBY is not a theoretical movement — projects are already open and occupied.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, Little Rock AME Zion Church sat on a mostly empty parcel for nearly a decade before the congregation approached the city with a development proposal in 2018. About six years later, the completed project — called Varick on 7th — opened 105 apartment units, with half designated as affordable housing. The Rev. Dr. Derrill Blue, a pastor at Little Rock, told The Guardian that the church's longstanding community relationships made the project viable: "Little Rock has been a staple in this community for years addressing needs, not just affordable housing. So we knew, because we had a longstanding relationship in this First Ward community, that this could be the next avenue we could take to address a community need."

The demand for completed projects is clear. Steven Robinson, a deacon at Bethany Baptist Church in New York who has spent more than three decades involved in housing projects across the city, told The Guardian that the waiting list for one of the church's senior housing facilities in Harlem currently exceeds 800 people.

In New York's East New York neighborhood, the Christian Cultural Center partnered with the Gotham Organization in 2016 to redevelop the megachurch's 10-acre parking lot. The city approved the final rezoning in November 2022. The resulting development, Innovative Urban Village, is expected to cost approximately $1 billion according to Gotham's website, with construction completing in 2031. Bryan Kelly, president of development at the Gotham Organization, told The Guardian the project also aims to ensure that East New Yorkers are not displaced by rising housing costs in the surrounding area.

In Massachusetts, the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston created its Planning Office of Urban Affairs (POUA) in 1969 specifically for housing development. To date, POUA has created 3,200 homes, with another 1,500 in the pipeline, according to POUA Real Estate Director Shaina Korman-Houston. A current project in Brockton — redeveloping 19 acres that include the Convent of the Sisters of Jesus Crucified — will produce 106 affordable apartments and 15 affordable condominiums in its first phase.

The Zoning Wall

Despite the potential, zoning restrictions have proven the most persistent obstacle. Korman-Houston said POUA spent a decade working on the Brockton project before breaking ground — primarily because of the time required to change zoning before even applying for state funding. She told MassLive that if YIGBY legislation had been in place from the start, the timeline could have been reduced by at least five years, with lower legal costs, lower construction costs, lower interest rates, and deeper affordability in the finished units.

Evita Chavez, a senior program officer leading housing projects in LISC's Bay Area office, told The Guardian that many congregations are trying to adapt to both physical and demographic realities: "Their membership is aging, and their membership numbers are declining. They're seeing fewer people show up. There's a lot of folks who are trying to figure out how they can continue to support their mission in a way that's going to continue to serve their communities."

White of LISC noted that community trust in local religious institutions often helps projects advance faster than conventional developments. Churches are institutions the "community knows, they see, and most times, they trust," she said.

Legislation: Bipartisan and Spreading

Several states and localities have already passed YIGBY legislation, and the movement is accelerating.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 4 — the Affordable Housing on Faith Lands Act — in October 2023. The law allows faith-based institutions and nonprofit colleges to override local zoning restrictions to build affordable, multi-family homes. Crucially, the law applies only to land the institution already owned as of January 1, 2024, per Venable LLP's legal analysis.

Florida passed similar legislation the following year with a requirement that at least 10% of new units be designated affordable. Similar laws have been introduced or passed in Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington, according to MassLive.

At the federal level, both the House and the Senate are reviewing bills that would bolster YIGBY projects nationwide, including $50 million in grants specifically for YIGBY developments, according to The Guardian.

In Massachusetts, a YIGBY bill is currently part of a broader housing package under review by the state Senate. In its current form, it would allow religious organizations to build multifamily housing on land they have owned for at least three years, bypassing local zoning, with a requirement that at least 20% of units be designated affordable housing. Housing built under the regulation would be subject to property taxes unless a city or town grants an individual exemption, according to MassLive.

In Minnesota, the state Senate introduced its own YIGBY Housing Act as recently as March 26, 2026, according to the LegiScan legislative database.

The bipartisan interest reflects the scale of the housing crisis, which has proven resistant to political framing. Red and blue states alike are confronting the same structural problem: zoning laws designed in an earlier era are preventing the housing supply from growing fast enough to meet demand.

Why Churches Are Uniquely Positioned

Faith-based organizations hold several structural advantages that conventional developers lack.

First, they already own the land — often in established, walkable neighborhoods where housing demand is highest. Eliminating land acquisition costs fundamentally changes the economics of affordable development.

Second, churches typically have long-standing relationships with the surrounding community, reducing the neighborhood opposition — sometimes called "NIMBYism" — that derails many housing projects before they break ground.

Third, many faith organizations are explicitly mission-driven toward community service, making affordable housing a natural extension of existing work in feeding programs, shelter services, and community health.

The Rev. Blue of Little Rock summarized the logic plainly: "The one thing about our teaching about Jesus Christ is that he always did more than was expected. And that's what my hope is: that whatever we do, our housing will always be more than they expect." (Source: The Guardian)

Emilio Dorcely, CEO of the nonprofit Urban Edge, told MassLive: "Houses of worship are each different, with different issues, different challenges and different potential opportunities. But many, many of them are very mission-focused and are very aligned with the mission and the importance of providing affordable housing."

The Limits

YIGBY is not a silver bullet. White of LISC acknowledged to The Guardian that housing projects involving faith-based institutions are "not immune to the typical zoning and funding obstacles that have historically stymied new housing construction." High interest rates, rising labor costs, and construction inflation continue to squeeze project economics even when land is free.

Some municipal governments have pushed back. A 2025 Congressional Research Service summary reviewed by Rep. Scott Peters' office noted that a trade group representing city and town governments argued that YIGBY mandates would "creat[e] a special privileged class of property owners" and infringe on local zoning authority.

The Charlotte Varick on 7th project, for example, took six years from concept to opening — a timeline that underscores how even well-resourced, community-trusted institutions face a slow-moving development pipeline.

Still, the scale of the opportunity — with nearly 5,000 vacant faith-owned parcels identified in Massachusetts alone — suggests that even partial deployment of this resource could meaningfully move the housing supply needle in a crisis that has so far resisted most conventional solutions.