Strong Towns Need Strong Churches: The Case for Incremental Faith-Based Housing
This article was originally published, in slightly different form, by Strong Towns member Eli Smith on The Faith-Based Housing Initiative Substack. It is shared here with permission. Header image provided by the writer.
In January, Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn wrote an article 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 an extraordinarily long time to complete. It starts with months (or years) of discernment, talking with lawyers and affordable housing consultants, 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 eight-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, North Carolina, 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, North Carolina, promises to build six units for $150,000 each. On the extreme low end, Sacred Settlement in St Paul, Minnesota, 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 doesn't just create resilient places; it also 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 that are 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.
Read more about this compounding effect in “We Need To Crash the Market for Entry-Level Homes.”
“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. While plenty of houses of worship are tinkering and building one-off projects, there has not been a broad-based national movement that shares lessons and advises churches on how to have success with incremental development — at least, not yet. Groups like the Faith-Based Housing Initiative are working to change that and bring about a wave of incremental faith-based housing.
The Faith-Based Housing Initiative connects houses of worship with experts in incremental development, equipping them with the tools to create housing and stronger communities. Through a structured curriculum — including guest speakers, film nights and design workshops — the initiative helps churches take practical steps toward small-scale, locally driven development.
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.
Eli Smith is a senior at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He is studying religion and is currently engaged in a year-long thesis project on faith-based housing. In addition to his academic work, he also writes weekly blog posts for the Faith-Based Housing Initiative. After graduation, Eli hopes to apprentice as a carpenter, with the long-term goal of becoming an incremental developer.
