Strong Towns Need Strong Churches
Why faith-based housing needs a bottom-up, incremental approach
A few weeks ago, Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn wrote an article on his Substack called ‘We Need to Crash the Market for Entry-Level Homes.’ His thesis is a fairly simple one: in order to truly lift ourselves out of the housing crisis, we need a surge in bottom-up, incremental development.
Marohn is right, and his insights are especially relevant to faith-based institutions that are trying to build housing. Incremental development, by its very nature, is locally-driven and bottom-up. Not only does this approach produce stronger, more vibrant communities, but it also creates longer-lasting investments and delivers desperately needed housing units faster. Many of incremental development’s values- localism, quality, and civic pride- align well with those of houses of worship, and faith communities would do well to embrace this model. By doing so, we could see a wave of faith-based housing that complements the broader movement toward incremental development.
Large Projects Won’t Cut It
An incremental approach, Marohn claims, is not slow. In fact, building large-scale developments like towering apartment blocks or expansive subdivisions is the slower approach. Incremental development, on the other hand, is “fast, nimble, and nuanced in a way that scales to our challenge.”
This is as true (if not more true) for faith-based housing projects as it is for general housing development. Most large developments that are undertaken by houses of worship take extraordinarily long. It starts with months (or years) of discernment, talking with lawyers and affordable housing consultants, then fundraising, and applying for tax credits and subsidies. A project like that can take a half dozen years before any permits are approved or ground is broken. Many of these steps are necessary, especially for a large project in a dense urban environment. But it's impossible to deny that they’re slow and expensive.
An 8 story, 144-unit project in Northern Virginia took over a decade and $84 million to complete. That works out to almost $600,000/unit. If not for intense subsidies, this simply would not be ‘affordable’ housing.
Compare that to Caldwell Presbyterian in Charlotte, NC, which converted an unused building to 21 units for less than half the per-unit cost. Another upcoming project at Greater Refuge Church in Durham, NC promises to build 6 units for $150,000 each. On the extreme low-end, Sacred Settlement in St Paul, MN is building tiny homes on church properties for about $35,000.
I’ve written about the issues with this large-scale model before, but Marohn’s article brings in a crucial point. Incremental development is generally cheaper, faster, and more locally-responsive. Those elements make an incremental philosophy far more appropriate for most religious organizations than the large-scale one.
Incremental development not only creates resilient places, but it creates resilient institutions and stronger houses of worship. If we want a broad-based movement of churches across the country getting involved in improving their built environment, we need houses of worship everywhere asking what the next incremental step looks like for them.
Building Incremental Development Expertise
The next point that Marohn makes concerns what he calls the “hockey stick chart.” It shows how an idea gets tossed around before being implemented. It’s experimented with at first, before broad adoption that compounds into widespread change.
“When it comes to bottom-up housing,” he says, “the tinkering phase is done. We know the types of units that can be scaled and we know how to build them. Turning millions of spare bedrooms into low-cost rental units, building cottages in millions of backyards, and building a million starter homes between existing homes and on empty lots are all easy to do. There are people out there doing this work.”
This is true for many small-scale developers, but it isn’t true for faith-based institutions– yet.
Plenty of houses of worship are tinkering and building one-off projects, but there has not been a broad-based national movement that shares lessons and advises churches on how to have success with incremental development.
That’s where the Faith-Based Housing Initiative comes in. We’re connecting houses of worship with experts from the Incremental Development Alliance, Southern Urbanism, Innerblock Design Studio, and Proximity Project, helping them to make the next incremental step forward. Through a four-part curriculum featuring guest speakers, film nights, and design and development workshops, we aim to equip churches with the knowledge and tools they need to engage with the development process effectively. This preparation increases the likelihood that their projects will find success.
We hope that these efforts will ultimately enable faith-based housing to enter the next phase in the hockey stick model, leading to more widespread adoption and creating amazing places that are anchored by religious institutions.
This blog is the launching pad for our Initiative, where we share stories and get the word out. You can find our newly-launched full website at faith-housing.org, where soon we will be signing up cohorts of churches to go through these trainings together. If you’re as excited as we are, subscribe to this Substack, share it with a few friends, and stay tuned for the next step!
Let’s build amazing places together.
Eli Smith is a senior at Dartmouth College studying Religion and Public Policy. He is the Faith-Based Housing Initiative’s Research Fellow.