Putting Faith in Affordable Housing

Some housing experts, including Leslie A. Steen, the District's housing chief, say it's too much to expect the average neighborhood church to do housing in this market. She said that the city doesn't consider houses of worship real players in affordable housing and that they can be most effective through advocacy.

The withdrawal of federal dollars has also forced some innovations. With development now requiring complex funding packages and major legal and tax expertise, a new field of consultants serves congregations interested in affordable housing. A new model of clergy-entrepreneur has emerged as well, people as comfortable with banking and developers as with Bibles and deacons.

Among them is Bennett, a former corporate manager who wrote his doctoral dissertation on churches and economic empowerment. Bennett said he left his position as pastor of First Baptist Church of Deanwood after eight years over disagreements about when and how to buy and develop land for housing.

There are special snags at the intersection of religion and real estate.

Any family can disagree on property, but for a house of worship, it means coming to consensus not only on land values but also on a spiritual mission. Houses of worship, generally exempt from federal taxes and public oversight, are wary of losing those privileges. Clergy members also have to consider whether they are spiritually called, for example, to become a landlord.

"It's not easy if you are pastoring to a family and then they're not paying their rent. That's a tough place to be," said Lisa Trevino Cummins, who worked on housing for the Bush administration's Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

Church and housing haven't mixed well lately at Shiloh Baptist Church in Shaw, where church members and leaders are in a nasty battle about what to do with Shiloh's many properties. In a January letter to the Rev. Wallace Charles Smith, deacon Johnny M. Howard slammed a plan to sell land to fund repairs to a church-run community center.

"Selling real estate in this day and time, when the community is changing, is not wise," Howard wrote. "The use of the property near and around the church can directly and adversely affect the mission of the church."

Pastor Patrice Sheppard of Living Word Church said that when she and her husband started fundraising in the early 1990s for their social service work in Washington Highlands, at the city's southern tip, they used two brochures: one to show churchgoers and one for secular people.

Some Christians she knew were hesitant to be involved with a project that received government funds because they felt they would be scrutinized for any church-state overlap, however slight, she said. "And some people in the church only want to give money to a church organization, not a community organization, even if it's faith-based."

Sheppard and her husband founded a community development corporation in 1998 that is developing 41 condominium units, two-thirds of them affordable.

To tour their 12 properties -- all in Washington Highlands -- is to see how difficult it is to acquire contiguous properties in Washington. On Brandywine, a quiet side street: a small, two-story brick house for transitional housing for women. Around the corner, on Danbury Street: a huge grassy lot where they hope to build townhomes. At the busy intersection of South Capitol and Atlantic: a mini-mall with a chicken-and-fish restaurant, an African hair studio and a dry cleaners, all slated to come down for the 41 condos.

There's disagreement on what prompted the renewed interest in housing among the faithful.

Some observers say today's generation of working homeless has pressed the issue. Others say the Bush administration's faith-based office boosted energy and interest, if not money. Still others say the opposite, that the affordable housing advocates from the '70s and '80s are heavily Democratic and so distrusted the administration that they opted not to work with the federal government.

Wheeler Winstead, a District-based development consultant, said the housing landscape has changed because the whole religious activism landscape has changed.

Thirty years ago, the typical congregation involved with affordable housing was large and liberal, such as Presbyterian or Jewish. Today, many of those congregations have moved to the suburbs, and their priorities might have changed to focus on immigration, for example. The typical congregation involved in housing today is a conservative, nondenominational church, Winstead said. These churches have little hierarchy to slow projects, and as they have grown and gained political influence, they have broadened their focus beyond growth, he said.

The congregations involved in housing are "a different mix," he said. "It's not the congregation of the civil rights movement."