Pastor Monique French envisions a thriving neighborhood where residents build wealth through homeownership and reinvest that wealth in their community.
That’s why she and her congregants at Battle Creek’s Washington Heights United Methodist Church are raising money to build 17 homes in one of the Cereal City’s most impoverished neighborhoods. A nonprofit spun off from the historic church has renovated one house already and is seeking money to continue the project.
“It stimulates the community,” French, who also serves as a Calhoun County commissioner, said of her church’s homebuilding efforts. “It revives the hope.”
French’s church joins several around Michigan — in Traverse City, Charlevoix, Grand Rapids, Detroit and beyond — getting into the homebuilding game to help ease a housing shortage that economists say stifles growth by limiting personal wealth and exacerbates the worker shortage.
Michigan has 4.7 million housing units, and state officials say the state needs about 119,000 more to meet demand.
Nearly 1 in 10 of about 1,000 respondents to a Bridge Michigan reader survey on election issues named housing as a top priority, with residents of Detroit, Grand Rapids, Lansing and Traverse City mentioning it most.
Churches have long been involved in homebuilding, but the number of faith-backed projects nationally has accelerated in the last five years as awareness of the housing crisis grew, said Nadia Mian, senior program director at Rutgers University’s Ralph W. Voorhees Center for Civic Engagement, who has studied the issue.
That’s also true in Michigan, said Katie Bach, a spokesperson for the Michigan State Housing Development Authority.
“We are seeing more interest from churches as the housing crisis has become more visible and more urgent,” Bach said in an email to Bridge Michigan. “Housing is drawing in partners across sectors, and faith-based organizations are part of that broader engagement.”
The skyrocketing cost of construction has made it difficult to build affordable housing, meaning many such projects rely on state or federal subsidies, private donations, or investors.
“The limited folks that provide financial support are kind of divided in terms of where they’re putting money,” said Richard Cannon, chief executive officer of Church of the Messiah Housing Corp., an offshoot of a Detroit church that’s built housing in the Motor City since 1978.
‘An ‘all-of-the-above’ approach’
Many churches, after years of shrinking congregations, find themselves with empty buildings and vacant land, said Mian, the Rutgers researcher. As well, churches are often built near community centers, close to transportation, schools and hospitals — prime locations for residential real estate.
Churches already work to help their community, Mian said, making tackling affordable housing a natural fit.
“These are not generally speculative projects,” Mian said. “This is probably like the one property that many of them had that they are going to build on. That faith element, then, really does play a key part in what makes these a little bit different.”
That’s also why advocates say churches need support. Nationally, a movement known as Yes in God’s Backyard — YIGBY, a counter to the “not in my backyard” NIMBY sentiment —aims to spur legislation easing zoning restrictions and providing homebuilding grants to churches. More than a dozen states have introduced or passed some sort of YIGBY-type legislation in recent years, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In Washington DC, US Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, is sponsoring legislation to streamline regulations and set aside $50 million a year for grants in his Yes In God’s Back Yard Act. He said in a statement to Bridge Michigan “we’re going to need an ‘all-of-the-above’ approach.”
Michigan housing advocates highlight California, where lawmakers in 2023 passed a bill allowing churches to bypass most local permitting requirements when building affordable housing on their land.
“We’re really just trying to get a piece of that pie here,” said Lauren Strickland, executive director of Abundant Housing Michigan, a nonprofit that advocates for regulatory changes to make it easier to build homes.
YIGBY legislation hasn’t been introduced in Lansing. Several groups are advocating for it, but nationally, it’s received some pushback for overriding local regulations.
Churches, like other developers, can be hindered by local zoning rules that prohibit residential development in commercial zones, by regulations requiring a certain number of parking spaces, and by permitting requirements that can be difficult for congregants unused to development to work through.
“You have these churches that already have existing properties,” Strickland said. “They may not fit neatly into what the zoning codes say. The back and forth with that, it’s not easy to do.”
‘Partnerships matter’
That’s why partnerships are key to churches’ success, said Cannon, of Detroit’s Church of the Messiah Housing Corp.
Things were easier when his group started in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cannon said: Building was less expensive, grants were less competitive and red tape wasn’t as thick. Churches and small nonprofits — volunteer-driven by everyday folks with other day jobs — aren’t necessarily set up to navigate developments today, he said.
But churches can do it with help. He pointed to a recent project in which a private developer who’d obtained federal funding approached the Church of the Messiah about putting that money toward one of their buildings.
“Partnerships matter,” Cannon said.
In Kent County, the nonprofit developer ICCF Community Homes just raised nearly $13 million to help build 200 affordable housing units — 100 to sell and 100 to rent — on church property throughout the Grand Rapids area by 2030.
Ryan VerWys, ICCF CEO, said churches make good partners not only because of their abundant land and their mission to help the needy, but because they tend to have good relationships with their neighbors, and “that serves as a good launching pad for potential development where there might otherwise be significant pushback.”
VerWys called the YIGBY movement “an exciting trend.
“The housing needs that we’re facing in Michigan — and west Michigan especially — are so big that no one approach is going to solve everything,” he said.
‘Empower people’
In Battle Creek’s Washington Heights neighborhood, French’s housing efforts are part of her church’s plans to make the neighborhood a “hub of hope.”
“As a church, we’re not confined to the four walls of a building,” French said. “We are the church.”
Using a $345,000 WK Kellogg Foundation grant, $200,000 it received from the state housing agency, and $360,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funds it received from the city, the nonprofit formed by the church bought several parcels of land from the city and the Calhoun County Land Bank and plotted out space for 17 new homes.
The first home, an energy-efficient, two-bedroom house with a two-car garage, cost about $250,000 to build, French said. The church put it on the market in spring 2024 for $190,000.
The typical Washington Heights home costs about $96,000 (compared to the $128,000 median home price around the rest of the city). French said the church listed the home below cost to make it more affordable for families but above the area’s median home price to try to drive up property values throughout the neighborhood, generating more wealth for Washington Heights residents.
French said the church is concerned the house hasn’t sold after nearly two years on the market, but she has faith it will sell and the church’ll be able to raise the funds to continue building.
“It’s actually community revitalization,” French said. “We’re just trying to assist people with opportunities for (the neighborhood) to be vibrant again.”
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This story was originally published by Bridge Michigan and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.