The purpose of Harvard Street Presbyterian Church has always extended beyond its pews.
“Partly because we are such an immigrant-based congregation, there’s been a strong emphasis on caring for our neighbors and people in need,” said Bryan Takasaki, a ruling elder at the church.
The Natick property is home to a community garden and food bank. At one point, the church’s Sunday school rooms were even transformed into bedrooms that migrant families called home.
“During that summer, the summer of 2023, we probably hosted about 16 or 17 families for short periods of time,” Takasaki said.
The weeks turned into months for some families. The church installed a portable shower, enhanced their kitchen and lined the empty rooms with bunk beds.
“We helped them to find apartments, we helped them to find jobs, things like that. One of the things that became really apparent was that finding housing was a really major, major problem,” Takasaki explained.
He said that the experience opened the church’s eyes to just how severe the housing crisis had become in the state.
It’s a problem that Harvard Street Presbyterian wants to help fix. For the past 40 years, the church has tried to build affordable housing on its five acres of land.
“It is difficult for a small congregation to stick with it,” Takasaki explained. “Any kind of resistance from neighbors who think it’s a great idea but not here, all those kind of things makes it very challenging.”
The congregation has even had development plans drawn up that revealed there was space for up to 30 units.
However, Takasaki said those plans never came to life due to various obstacles over the years.
Harvard Street Presbyterian is just one of the congregations that has resources that could aid in Massachusetts’ housing crisis.
“We are seeing lots of vacant properties. We are seeing religious communities that are not growing as they used to,” said Katie Everett, the executive director of the Lynch Foundation. “Massachusetts isn’t getting any bigger. We have the existing footprint, so what within that footprint can we do?”
The foundation recently commissioned a study that found religious organizations across the state have more than 20,000 acres of land that could be use to build up to 500,000 units of housing.
The nonprofit is advocating for state lawmakers to pass a bill that would reduce zoning barriers that often make it costly and time-consuming for religious organizations to develop housing.
“For many of these properties, in order to develop in a state like Massachusetts, every city and town has different zoning requirements, so the predevelopment costs can cost millions of dollars and take several years, so it is very prohibitive,” Everett explained.
The Yes in God’s Back Yard (YIGBY) bill would allow religious groups to build multifamily housing on their property without being blocked by local zoning boards.
Similar bills have passed in California, Washington and Maryland.
“Much of those faith-based communities were beacons of hope and brought communities together so to be able to utilize those properties that are very much aligned with the core values of many of these faith communities, it, to us, seemed like a very natural and practical solution to our lack of housing,” Everett said.
Beyond the benefit of adding supply to the housing market, the study also predicted the developments would generate $60 million in annual tax revenue.
“To us, who wins is the state. To us, who wins are the residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and it helps solve a big problem,” Everett said.
Using religious land for housing is already happening, but advocates say this bill and other measures could decrease delays and reduce costs.
One of the projects already underway is in East Cambridge.
“We’re excited to create housing here so that it’s not just the building sitting here dilapidated and not being used,” said Vitalia Shklovsky, a senior project manager with Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH).
POAH is a nonprofit that is working to transform buildings formerly used by the Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish.
For years, the church’s rectory, convent, and school sat mostly unused. POAH broke ground this summer on 46 affordable units.
“There is a desperate need for more housing across the Commonwealth and the Boston area,” Shklovsky said. “Even though there are just 46 units total, I think, it will make a big difference.”
The development is within an area that aims to make affordable housing easier to build and it still took around four years for the project to break ground. That’s why some affordable housing advocates are pushing to loosen the zoning restrictions in other areas of the state.
“The challenge of housing is so extreme that drastic measures need to be taken to really address that,” Takasaki said.
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