Faith Groups Are Converting Property Into Free and Low-Income Housing

Pastor Jake Medcalf stands in front of newly installed tiny homes at First Presbyterian Church’s parking lot in Hayward, California. Photo by Kimberly Winston.

HAYWARD, Calif. — Rev. Jake Medcalf was working late on a sermon one night when someone knocked on the church door.

It was a homeless man, cold and drenched from the rain. Might the pastor have a blanket for him?

Medcalf found a jacket and a blanket. Then he thought, “Is this really the best I can do? To give my brother, this child of God who has fallen on hard times, a blanket and say, ‘Good luck?’”

Betty Demuro, left, and her daughter Josephine, 5, cut the ribbon on First Presbyterian Church of Hayward, Calif.’s new tiny homes for the homeless. Photo by Kimberly Winston.

It was not. This month, a couple of years after that encounter, Medcalf stood before a microphone at one end of First Presbyterian Church’s parking lot while about 100 people sipped steaming coffee in the chilly Hayward, Calif. morning.

“It takes a village to create compassionate responses like this one,” Medcalf, 42, said, gesturing behind him where six new, completely furnished tiny homes, each perched on a single parking space, waited to greet their first formerly homeless residents — most of them working people who used to live on the local streets. 

“In our community we have major issues to tackle,” Medcalf continued. “We have brothers and sisters destined to life on the streets because we refuse to engage in creative and compassionate ways. Tiny homes is just one solution, but to me today it is proof that when we gather as a village and say ‘Not in my neighborhood will we let people live on the streets,’ we can figure it out. Amen. That is my faith tradition living itself out.”

Rev. Jake Medcalf stands inside a tiny home. Photo by Kimberly Winston.

“People are more important than parking spaces.”

- Rev. Jake Medcalf

Later, he added, “People are more important than parking spaces. That’s what we think.”

That philosophy is catching on around the country. Faith communities and interfaith coalitions from Washington to Texas, New York to California, are dedicating portions of their property to permanent or long-term homes for the homeless. Experts on homelessness and housing say this movement could make faith communities crucial to solving California’s — and maybe the nation’s — homeless crisis.

“I think faith groups are absolutely critical to solving homelessness,” said Kathleen Piriano, executive director of the Episcopal Impact Fund, which grants money to low income housing projects across the San Francisco Bay Area. California, she notes, needs 3.5 million additional homes by 2025. 

“We are not going to do this by building one 3.5 million unit project. It will be a bit here and a bit there and I think churches are uniquely positioned to help. In this secular age they still have some moral authority and we should partner with them if we want to solve what is not just our problem, it is everyone’s problem.”

In California, the homeless crisis is at its most acute. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than 150,000 Californians live out of doors — a 17 percent uptick since 2018. That’s the largest per capita swell of any state other than New Mexico. Homelessness grew by only three percent nationally over the same time period.

In California cities, the problem is amplified. San Francisco’s homeless population grew by 17 percent since 2017, while Los Angeles’ rose by 12 percent. Medcalf’s church in Hayward is sandwiched between Oakland and San Jose, where the homeless populations have grown by 47 and 42 percent respectively in two years. Homeless encampments are now a routine site along California highways and beneath its underpasses. Even comparatively rural areas in Sonoma and Napa counties have experienced homeless encampments of more than 100 people.

Josephine Demuro, spent her fifth birthday this February in her own tiny home. She and her mother previously lived in a car. Photo by Kimberly Winston.

Last year, President Donald Trump called attention to the situation when he claimed — falsely — that San Francisco’s homeless population was polluting the San Francisco Bay with human waste. This month, at a campaign rally in Bakersfield, Calif., the president called the city a “slum” and threatened federal intervention.

“Look what’s happened to San Francisco — so sad what’s happened,” Trump said. “ . . . If they don’t fix it up, clean it up, take care of the homeless, do what they have to do — but clean up their city — the federal government is going to have to step in. We’re going to do it in Los Angeles and San Francisco.”

Around the state, faith communities like Medcalf’s have already taken measures into their own hands:

• In Berkeley, Youth Spirit Artworks has 14 tiny homes dedicated to homeless youth with plans for 100 units in total. Their work is largely powered by donations of money and time from about 30 local Christian and Jewish congregations. Also in Berkeley, All Souls Episcopal Church will soon break ground on a $25 million project that will house 44 low-income seniors.

• In Walnut Creek, St. John Vianney Catholic Church has ten parking spaces available to the homeless nightly. Dozens of congregations across the state have similar programs, many with financial and material support from smaller congregations with no suitable space of their own to donate. Also in Walnut Creek, St. Paul’s Commons, a project of an Episcopal church, includes 44 housing units for low income residents on church property.

• In East Palo Alto, about three dozen churches have expressed interest to city managers in erecting some form of low-income housing on church property.

• In San Diego, an interfaith group called YIGBY, or “Yes in God’s Back Yard,” is proposing placing converted shipping containers on church-held land to house the homeless and low-income residents. Organizers visualize ten to 30 similar projects across San Diego County.

That activity is reflected across the country. A Christian non-profit in Austin, Texas, has a 51-acre community of tiny homes and trailers that includes a movie theater and a prayer labyrinth, and a Nashville, Tenn. interfaith group built six tiny homes and plans an adjacent community center for homeless families and youth. Another interfaith network in Olympia, Wash. erected 30 tiny homes, a communal kitchen, laundry, showers and garden and has a waiting list for their next phase of homes.

Faith groups are showing so much interest in building low-income housing that a cadre of businesses has developed to assist them.

At New Way Homes, a nonprofit impact investment fund in Oakland, five of its eight current housing projects are with faith-based organizations. For Genesis Worship Center, an historic African-American non-denominational congregation in West Oakland, there are plans to convert an entire wing of unused classrooms into affordable housing, and at East Oakland’s Center of Hope Community Church a vacant school building is slated for retrofitting into two dozen affordable housing units. 

Dino Adelfio, New Way’s housing director, fields at least one call a week from a house of worship looking to convert property into housing. He says congregations need “a lot of will and mission” to complete any kind of housing project — a safe parking program, tiny homes or affordable housing units — but that such projects can be widely duplicated.

“I am a firm believer that religious organizations can provide a massive source of affordable housing,” he said on a walk through Center of Hope’s sunny but empty classrooms. “And I think over time that leads to less homelessness.”

At DCG Strategies in Dublin, Calif., CEO Landis Graden said 60 percent of the real estate firm’s business comes from houses of worship hoping to convert property into housing. The public benefit corporation has received calls from faith communities in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Atlanta and North Carolina and has expanded its work from Northern to Southern California. 

Many congregations, Graden said, are land-rich but people poor — the result of a building boom in the 1950s, when worship attendance hit an all-time high before diving to the present day’s all-time low.

“Churches are sitting on almost the last developable land and if the churches form public-private partnerships they could have a tremendous impact” on the homeless and housing crises, Graden said. “The added benefit is that churches are service organizations so they can offer a lot of help not on the government dime. It is a whole, untapped volunteer base and it works well.”

That was on display in Hayward, where First Presbyterian Church members pitched in with money, time, sweat equity and even cupcakes for bake sales to build the tiny homes. There were multiple community partners on the project, which cost about $260,000 to complete, and about 50 families and individuals applied for residency. No church membership or religious affiliation was required. 

Patricia Soares is the new resident of unit one, where a painting of orange and yellow flowers and a vase of white ones were ready to greet her after the ribbon cutting. Soares, who is 66, is a senior caregiver, but found herself homeless and living out of her Jeep for almost three years, much of it in the church’s overnight “safe parking” program initiated before the tiny home project.

Patricia Soares, left, lived in her Jeep for more than two years. Now she prepares to spend her first night in her new tiny home at First Presbyterian Church in Hayward, Calif. Photo by Kimberly Winston.

“I just thank God for everything that has happened in my life right now,” she said as she was handed her keys. “ I just never gave up. God knows it was a struggle, but the worst part was the cold. The cold was so brutal.”

Soares and the other residents of the new tiny homes may stay for 18 months and will pay a graduated rent starting at $200 and increasing to $800. At the end of their stay the church will hand that money back to them — about $6,000 — to put down on a more permanent place to live.

The majority of First Presbyterian’s 300 members love the sense of purpose the church’s homelessness ministry has brought, but a few left because of it. That does not phase Medcalf, who has even bigger plans. In the next couple of years he hopes to tear down the church’s mid-20th century sanctuary and outbuildings and erect a 199-unit affordable housing complex. The ground floor — it’s foundation — will be a new, 21st century church.

“So when the Bible says ‘love your neighbor,’ all we have to do is take an elevator,” he said.

Kimberly Winston is a freelance religion reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and more. She is the recipient of the Religion News Association’s 2018 award for best religion reporting at large news outlets.