Religious groups statewide are looking for ways to combat the rising costs of housing and the demand for more affordable options.
Darrell Brooks is one of the faith leaders acting on his community’s desire to address the housing crisis.
Brooks is the chief executive officer of the Beulah Land Development Corporation in New Haven. It’s associated with the local Beulah Heights First Pentecostal Church.
The church has established more than 50 affordable apartments and homeownership opportunities there in the last 30 years, Brooks said.
“We do ministry, and so housing is something that we did not do,” Brooks said. “Faith really guides our principles. Faith guides why we do this work.”
New Haven’s Dixwell and Newhallville neighborhoods were previously filled with homeowners and people invested in their community, Brooks said.
“Over time that changed drastically, and people began to disinvest in their community,” Brooks said. “As a result of that, blight and disrepair and crime was rampant.”
Beulah was one of several faith-based organizations that recently spoke at a virtual seminar about the intersection of faith-based groups and affordable housing.
Several religious communities have rallied around the issue of affordable housing in recent years. Tiny, temporary housing sprang up in the backyard of a Catholic organization in New Haven and in Hebron there are plans for a mixed-income housing development on church land.
While some groups, like Beulah, construct housing, others advocate for their community’s housing needs.
“We are not the housing experts, but we are the folks who when congregations say, all right, ministry is important, but we want to make concrete, long term, systemic change. How do we do that? That's where we sort of come in and help,” said Cori Mackey, executive director of the Center for Leadership and Justice.
The Hartford-based nonprofit helps mobilize nearby religious communities, advocating for zoning changes and legislation that would increase housing.
“We've supported some statewide efforts, legislative efforts, but what we found is that so many of our members have this sort of deep desire to see affordable housing happen,” Mackey said. “We really just knew so very little about how you actually get to affordable housing.”
A new toolkit guiding religious organizations to help establish and advocate for housing could help. It was recently released by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), a nonprofit that connects local groups with funding to complete community improvement projects.
“It's about creating the building blocks for understanding,” said Ruth Jones Nichols, the group’s national executive vice president. “We work to frame the issues first and foremost, related to housing supply and the crisis across America, particularly for low to very low-income households.”
Across the U.S., faith-based organizations own a significant portion of land. In New York City, more than 92 million square feet of land across the city’s five boroughs is owned by faith groups, Jones Nichols said.
“The reasons why there is a lack of affordable housing, whether it's rising construction costs for materials, labor and land that make it difficult to build affordable homes, zoning and regulatory barriers in some communities,” Jones Nichols said.
