Church pews are sitting empty. Can they become affordable housing?

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Church attendance has long been in decline. Now churches and elected leaders are trying to turn underused church land into housing—but developers face obstacles.

The Rev. Chris Deacon delivers a Sunday service at Northwood Presbyterian Church in Silver Spring, Md., on Jan. 21, to a crowd that totaled 19 people. One attended online, he said. Northwood Presbyterian Church is, in a sense, a kind of home. People have gotten married in the cinder block building. They’ve sat with their kids in the pews and watched the Rev. Chris Deacon deliver sermons beneath the stained-glass cross for years.

Many states and cities have set goals of building tens or hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units within a decade. In the D.C. region, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, a group of lawmakers and other leaders set aof 320,000 new housing units between 2020 and 2030, at least three-quarters of which should be affordable to low- or middle-income households. To meet this goal, the region would have to build an average of more than 65 affordable units every day this decade.

But construction costs aren’t the only thing that can upend a project. Housing developments can also draw opposition from neighbors concerned about noise, traffic and parking, known by their critics as “not-in-my-backyard” groups. “Ambitious NIMBYs can delay a project almost indefinitely because eventually the developers are just not going to be able to afford to do it,” Dworkin said.

 

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