Eli Smith, director of the Faith-Based Housing Initiative, joins the show to talk about churches turning underused land and aging buildings into housing and everyday community spaces. He explains how his team helps congregations understand their property, imagine specific projects, and gain the language and tools they need to work with developers, lenders, and local officials. Eli and Tiffany dig into the tension between commuter churches and a more rooted parish model, and why thoughtful design often leads congregations beyond a standard apartment block toward pocket neighborhoods and shared spaces.
Everybody, welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed. The Strong Towns movement is always inviting us to reimagine what's possible for our towns — what's possible if we rethink the status quo, what's possible if we reconsider the policies governing our decision making.
One area where we can see this at play is in the housing space, specifically the unique overlap between church real estate and affordable housing. Today, I'm going to be speaking with someone who's part of a movement to help churches reimagine their properties and how their excess land can be part of addressing our nation's housing crisis. Eli Smith serves as the director of the Faith-Based Housing Initiative, drawing on his deep knowledge of case studies, best practices, and innovative models within this burgeoning movement. He works with congregations to design and implement housing projects on historically underutilized property. He's also consulted on faith-based housing legislation at both the state and local levels. Eli is a graduate of Dartmouth College, where he studied religion, and he is joining me today for a conversation on the show.
Eli, thank you for taking time to come on the show with me and talk to us about church real estate and housing and all those fun things.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here. Super excited.
For folks who don't know, I'd love to kick this off with you telling us about the Faith-Based Housing Initiative. Tell us about it. What's the vision? What are you hoping to achieve?
As you mentioned in the intro, the Faith-Based Housing Initiative basically exists within this larger context of a faith-based housing movement that's really happening all over the country — coast to coast and everywhere in between. The Faith-Based Housing Initiative really exists to help congregations through that journey to reactivate their underutilized property, and we really come at it from this vision of walkable, mixed-use communities, drawing from a lot of the Strong Towns and New Urbanism philosophy and background.
We're set up to be the missing-middle-focused group within this space. There's this larger movement going on, with faith institutions building everything from huge apartment buildings in major metro areas down to tiny homes, and everything in between. We kind of represent the missing middle — the village scale, pocket neighborhoods, that kind of thing — and we really help congregations build those kinds of walkable, mixed-use communities that enhance people's lives.
I'd like to zoom in a little bit. Walk me through what it's like as a church to be part of this initiative. From talking with you, I know there's an education component, and there's equipping them and preparing them to interact with developers. Can you walk us through that? What's their experience actually like?
It's about a five-month process from start to finish. We take five congregations through this curriculum at a time together, really to build capacity for the faith community across multiple different congregations at the same time — with the goal of planting a seed in a place for this whole faith-based housing movement to really grow in that locality.
We take them through the process in basically two phases. We start with the design school, and then we go into the development school. We actually start with a design charrette up front. A lot of these congregations might have five or ten acres to work with that they've really never looked at previously as an opportunity to expand or to rethink their mission. The reason we start with the design phase is to really help them build a vision for what this project might look like. As with any design, it's probably going to change a hundred times before it gets built, but it's a starting vision to plant a seed in their minds.
We take that design charrette into a development school that we collaborate on with the Incremental Development Alliance. That really just walks them through the development process — learning about pro formas, bank plans, financing, and different types of methodologies and models that faith institutions have used across the country.
At the end of that five-month process, the five congregations will actually build execution plans — a plan that outlines the project they're thinking about. They ultimately have the capacity and the language to enter into the development process from a position of confidence.
Most of the churches you've been able to work with — are they looking at excess land around the church itself, or land they own somewhere else? Are they taking part of their parking lot and trying to convert it into housing? What have you seen?
It's an increasingly diverse number of different scenarios. When the Faith-Based Housing Initiative started a few years ago, a lot of conversation was around excess land — just a field sitting next door, or an oversized parking lot that isn't used other than Sunday mornings from, say, ten to noon.
Lately I'm finding that a lot of congregations are exploring new methods. There's a lot of adaptive reuse happening, though we tend not to touch into that as much — adaptive reuse is so complicated and really difficult. But we're actually finding that there are a lot of congregations that just have aging buildings that need to be scraped, torn down, and replaced. A lot of them are coming into those conversations asking how they can take this rebuilding plan and reimagine that campus to add housing, add a coffee shop or a daycare — really make that space more flexible.
The way so many of these churches were built in the 1950s and 1960s — the ones we're seeing age out — they weren't adaptable. They were one function at a time, and that function really only worked for a few hours a week. So there's definitely a conversation happening around how to right-size these spaces for what the congregation actually needs, but also make them more flexible so they can rent them out during the week or use them for other purposes beyond that single-use purpose.
Tangential to that is also a conversation about reimagining the presence of the church in the city overall. That example of being a church, but also a daycare, but also a coffee shop — it really just creates a whole new way for the community to interact with the church and understand what the church's presence means, rather than it just being a building that people drive by and see folks coming in and out on Sunday, without many touch points for a non-parishioner to interact unless they're ready to attend a service.
To go back to your original question — where we're best set up to work with congregations is on the oversized parcel, where the actual facilities only take up a small portion and they've got excess land on the outer edges that can really be reimagined wholesale to completely transform what that piece of land can do for the neighborhood. It's incredible how much land some of these congregations just have sitting there.
I want to ask you what it's like when you're in conversations with these churches that are considering doing this cohort. Are you finding that they're surprised this is even an option for them? Are they nervous? Are they hesitant — like, churches and real estate, mixing church and money, feels a little awkward? What are some of those conversations like? How are you seeing them evolve, and where are churches in terms of how they're seeing this opportunity?
It's a mix of all of those things, and it can vary so much from congregation to congregation. The through line I've seen is that the question of property — what is our property and how are we using it — is oftentimes one that's been talked about for a long time. This is not the beginning of that conversation, particularly for a congregation that has ten acres. They know they have that land, and there have always been conversations here and there: should we sell some of it and put that money toward something else? There's always been somewhat of a background conversation about what to do with that property.
But so often, most church organizations — faith organizations in general — are not really set up to be in the real estate business. They don't teach real estate at seminary. What other profession so thoroughly ill-prepares somebody to take on a potentially multi-million-dollar asset? Because those conversations have never really had a place to go, they never really take off. People are often having these conversations and saying they should do something with this, but there's not really a structuring mechanism — no clear outlet for where that goes, how it becomes reality, how you turn it into something.
The Faith-Based Housing Initiative acts almost like a convening conversation to structure those conversations and actually move them forward, so that they go somewhere, have an outlet, and become constructive in building an execution plan and clarifying that vision. A lot of congregations are having these conversations in a disparate, unstructured manner — nobody's really getting on the same page — so it's hard to build a longer-term execution plan.
The other thing I'll add is that I think a lot of people are drawn to this. This is why I was originally so drawn to Strong Towns — the ideas of the village, the pocket neighborhood, the mixed community space, the green space, really well-designed communities that lead to bonds and people being connected to each other. A lot of people broadly, and congregations specifically, find that to be a really exciting vision. Once that is clarified and once they're drawn to that vision, they really want to go in that direction.
That's what I was going to ask you next — what are you finding resonates with congregations as you're having these conversations? What really clicks and helps them embrace this as a path forward? I think you're right that casting that vision of what the land could be — not just in terms of money, but in terms of a space where there's more connection happening, and people are feeling less lonely, and even opportunities for them to become more connected to the life of the church — really moves this categorically out of just real estate and money to really shaping a vision for how the church can show up in the community in a different way, while also ideally helping provide housing that our cities so desperately need right now.
A lot of congregations that go down this path, or are going through these conversations in a disparate, unstructured way, end up in a housing conversation that just doesn't excite them. They try to figure out what the options are. They go to their local nonprofit affordable housing developer, maybe they put out an RFP, and oftentimes what comes back is just mediocre, run-of-the-mill apartment buildings that aren't exciting. They don't just want a product that achieves certain market goals — they want more than that.
That's why so much of the good design that we add to the conversation and hope to champion is really important, because it's a mobilizing force. The number of congregations that get excited about a pocket neighborhood is so much larger than the number that get excited about a boring, standard apartment building. If we do this right and really get well-designed faith-based housing spread all over the country, we can really scale that — because so many more people will be excited about it, and we get much better housing that connects people and forms really strong community bonds.
What are some of the concerns you hear? I can imagine concerns around a loss of control — a church that's sitting on its lot knows exactly who's coming there, everyone's bought in. That feels a little different from suddenly being part of building up a whole neighborhood. Similar to how we need to be thinking about cities with less concern about controlling everything, I wonder if that shows up in conversations about real estate development for churches. What are some of the challenges and concerns, and how do you help them work through those?
There's a whole bunch. Obviously, as with anything involving housing, zoning and building codes are always going to be a challenge. But on the congregational side, you're absolutely right that there's often this question of a loss of control. We work best with congregations that are willing to go down this road, and sometimes that means they've already gone through an event — like their boiler giving out — that leads to another type of loss of control. If you try to have a stranglehold on control over the property and the building, sometimes that can be too tight, and you end up losing control anyway, for one reason or another.
To go back to the design piece — one of the things that's so powerful and promising about the faith-based housing movement is that it offers an alternative: a constructive vision for what comes next, that's not just responding to the challenges that, frankly, a lot of faith organizations of all stripes are facing right now. This really offers a more constructive vision that gets out ahead of that and creates a different form of visioning and laying out plans for the future of that congregation and of the neighborhood.
I'd love to hear more of your personal story, Eli. How did you find this world — this world of real estate and thinking about cities and neighborhoods as more productive places, places where people feel more connected, more beautiful places? How did you stumble into this?
I grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia. If anybody knows Colonial Williamsburg, it's a kind of strange small town to grow up in. Then I went to college in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is another incredibly odd, strange little small town — in many ways your prototypical quaint New England town. They're both such incredible, walkable small college towns where you see a bunch of people you know when you're walking around.
That really planted this seed in me of that kind of vision of the world — that's just what I expected to find elsewhere. Surprise, surprise, that's not what most of the United States looks like.
When I was in college, I ended up studying religion somewhat by accident, and then about halfway through my sophomore year, I discovered Strong Towns and the broader new urbanism and walkable communities world. It immediately resonated with me, because I realized it was putting words and a voice to a lot of the elements I loved so much about the two places I grew up. I was really attracted to being able to put a pin in exactly what it was I liked about both of those places.
I began essentially looking for a way to bend my religion degree toward this direction, and that pretty quickly brought me down the faith-based housing rabbit hole. I realized I could twist my degree, do a lot of independent study, and really study the faith-based housing movement. I was just trying to collect academic literature and find case studies and do all the things you do when you're studying something in school. I realized pretty quickly that a lot of this faith-based housing movement is not really that well documented, which surprised me immediately — but then I also realized pretty quickly that it was a really great opportunity to do a lot of that documentation myself.
My program and the religion department at my school were very flexible in allowing me to take essentially an entire year to do a lot of that case study collection and research and build out my knowledge of this movement.
What surprised you from your research? Anything in particular stand out to you?
I think we discount how much faith institutions have historically been involved in housing. It's another one of those strange consequences of modern zoning and the separation of our uses into neat little boxes that aren't so neat — we don't realize that a lot of faith institutions in many different capacities have really been involved in housing for about a thousand years.
One of the coolest parts of my thesis was going into the historic origins of almshouses in the United Kingdom, and how this kind of spread across Northern Europe as a really incredible faith-based housing model built about five hundred years ago — really in these small-scale villages that are just gorgeous. Oftentimes some of the most coveted places to live in their cities nowadays, even though back then they were just modest charitable housing. They're really incredible places, and I think they continue to serve as an inspiration for what faith-based housing could be, and can be, and should be today.
That's interesting, because listening to you say that, it feels so different from how most people see the church now. And I don't know — maybe this would be your second thesis — but just tracing the shift from the church in the city, for the city, solving these problems, to now the church outside the city on its own land, very quiet, everyone has to drive there, and it's for a particular community. I'm curious if you have thoughts on that progression. How do we reconcile that? I think a lot of congregations want to be a force for good in their community, but looking back at the last fifty or sixty years, the model that's been handed down has sort of been the commuter model, rather than the presence model — the church right in the neighborhood. I guess the parish model would be the opposite.
Absolutely. So much of that modern post-war development pattern has just been incredibly wasteful in many ways — of resources, of people's time, people's energy — and it stands as a barrier to human connection in so many ways. I don't think that's malicious in any way. Faith organizations were just one player in that larger development pattern, and of course they went along with the times as everybody else did. They thought they were doing the new thing that everybody else was doing.
But we're really starting to see the consequences of that model. When you don't have the same cultural pull that faith institutions had fifty or sixty years ago, it's really hard to get people to show up on Sunday morning. That gives us a bit of a mandate to widen our idea of how faith communities can really interact with their neighborhoods.
In the same way that the suburbanization and adherence to that post-war development pattern happened fifty or sixty years ago, there's this counter-movement happening now — Strong Towns, new urbanism, all of these things toward walkable communities. Faith communities are, just as they were in the 1950s, one player in that larger development story. But I think they also offer a really incredible opportunity to show what the best of that can look like, and to really plant the flag and say: this is how we want to interact with our community — not one day a week, but seven days a week. This is what kind of space we want to create, whether it's an explicitly religious space or just a dog park — we want to see people hanging out with each other, knowing each other, having formed a really solid sense of community, not just a bedroom suburban community where people drive everywhere and don't know their neighbors.
That offers a really incredible opportunity to plant that flag and show that better way.
Even the conversation about community and how this can change how parishioners experience community can be really powerful as well. If you're showing up in a neighborhood and you've got a pocket neighborhood adjacent to the church, just think about what that could be like — you can walk to that church, but you can also walk to five houses of other people who go to that church. It creates an opportunity to reimagine what community even looks like, rather than the notoriously awkward scheduling of coffee dates. You see someone on Sunday and you're like, I don't know when I'm going to see you next. You try to find a time to have coffee that you both have to commute twenty-five minutes to, and you both want to live out this whole community thing, but it's just hard when you've got kids and commutes and soccer practice.
To me, that's the most exciting thing. If the church is able to see this opportunity as a way to return to more of a parish model — and I don't mean city like New York City, I just mean return to more of a neighborhood presence — I think it could be really powerful for the city and for the neighborhoods around it. But I also think it could be really neat to see how that empowers congregations to live out principles of life together more consistently on a regular basis.
Absolutely. That goes beyond just the faith-based housing context. I think a lot of people might look at this and think that faith-based housing is just for religious institutions — just for the church, whatever — but I think it really sets an example for everybody: religious or not, nonprofit or for-profit, even city government. It can set an example for what a really great community can be.
We're even seeing this in the non-faith-based world, with development like the Cul-de-Sac project out in Arizona, really showing the world what a car-free community could look like. Once you see those examples and you see how excited people are to live in places like that, I really think it inspires people to not feel like we're just condemned to more suburbia.
I know the suburbia conversation is complicated, and retrofitting suburbia feels impossible sometimes. You think about all these challenges — the housing problem, the financing — and it can feel so heavy, like maybe we just have to accept that this is what we have. But the more churches that do this, and the more anyone puts up a development like this, it adds some fire to the hope that maybe there's another chapter for the American city, and this is not the end of the story.
How many churches have you all worked with so far?
This is essentially a bringing together of a bunch of different disparate efforts. We're currently consulting on the design side with a number of congregations in North Carolina — I think it's probably getting up to between five and ten at this point, just doing design work, so that's not the full school process. We're currently launching our first entire cohort of five congregations in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which will take place over the next few months, and that's super exciting. At the same time, we're working with five congregations in Durham, North Carolina as well, doing some basic asset mapping, hopefully as a precursor to a larger cohort school.
Are you finding that most of these congregations are operating in cities or states where there's already housing reform or zoning reform — already getting rid of the need to advocate for zoning changes in order for these projects to happen?
There's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg situation with the policy side of things. My home state of Virginia just passed what's known as a 'Yes In God's Backyard' law, or YIGBY — although word on the street is the terminology should be changed to 'Faith in Housing,' because it sounds less strange. That offers a really incredible opportunity from a statewide reform level to really clarify the rules in many ways, and allows a huge opening for faith institutions to do this. That honestly starts a lot of conversations. A lot of congregations that have been having these disparate conversations find that as this movement grows and as there's more policy reform on the state and local level, it can really act as a mobilizing force for these conversations to get pushed forward into actual projects.
Obviously, in many ways some of the best projects we've seen across the country are coming out of places that have been very progressive with housing reform. One of my favorite examples that's hopefully coming out of the ground in the next few months is out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which has been a really incredible leader with a whole bunch of different urban design and housing reforms. That project is actually a really beautiful pocket neighborhood designed by Eric Kronberg out of Atlanta.
I think that shows that the cities doing really cool stuff in the housing ecosystem are oftentimes the ones that take up the mantle, and the faith institutions there can really run with it the most.
You should have him on the show. What part of this experience do you find churches or congregations are most surprised by? Is it the development side, the design side, or the policy side? Because I feel like that's what you all are really educating them on — here's what you need to know about good design, here's what you need to know about the rules, and here's what you need to know about engaging with developers and the real estate process. What are you finding adds the most value for churches in terms of the problems it's solving or the challenges it's helping them face?
The design side is a really interesting portion of that, because again, so many congregations that start down this path think they just have to do a run-of-the-mill, standard, boring apartment building. It's really incredible to see how that changes when you take the same site and show a completely different site plan that has the pocket neighborhoods, the green space, all of these places — you can just tell they love them and want to see them come to fruition.
In our pilot cohort, which was mostly design-focused, in Durham, North Carolina a few years ago — and this is actually a good example of stress-testing, since Durham had just passed a local zoning reform allowing unlimited accessory dwelling units on faith-owned properties — the four congregations that came out to that design charrette had their sites designed alongside them. A lot of them came in thinking they were just going to get a square apartment building with a square parking lot next door, and no other alternatives. They were very shocked when the designers came up with these really just incredible pocket neighborhood ideas. Instantly, the life in their eyes lit up — you could see there was just so much more inspiration from that model.
That's one part we didn't touch on. Do you all partner with designers and architects to come in and show them what's possible with the property they have?
That's one part we didn't touch on. Do you all partner with designers and architects to come in and show them what's possible with the property they have?
For that design charrette, we actually bring in some folks from across the country. Thomas Darity is our main lead designer, and he really is an expert in the style and model inspired by the almshouses and the charitable housing of Belgium and the UK, which I mentioned earlier. He kind of brings that perspective to the design elements.
Are you finding that most churches are interested in doing one particular type of housing? Are they interested in affordable housing, market housing, or more what I'd call charity housing for lack of a better word? Is there one kind of product that emerges more than others?
It's been incredibly impressive to me to see how specific some of these visions can often be. In that pilot cohort in Durham a few years ago, there were actually two congregations that wanted to do long-term medical housing, because Duke University's Medical Center is nearby in Durham. A lot of people end up staying there while waiting for a call to get a heart transplant at a moment's notice, and so they have to be within a certain radius of the hospital. If you're coming from all the way across the other side of the country for that, you don't want to be staying in a bad hotel.
Two of those congregations specifically had visions for long-term medical housing for patients waiting on that, and it's actually not an uncommon thing. A number of congregations in Durham have already bought up one or two small houses in a neighborhood to do exactly that, so this was an opportunity to use the rest of their property for a much larger vision.
We're currently working with two congregations — one on the Outer Banks in North Carolina and one in Salisbury, North Carolina — to do teacher villages. Both are struggling with housing for teachers. The Outer Banks is a low-land island area, and so much of that is vacation rentals that a lot of their teachers have to commute from forty-five minutes away on the mainland. These congregations are really looking to that as an opportunity to serve that particular demographic.
I've seen so many other incredibly specific examples too. The Chattanooga project I mentioned was originally going to be senior housing, and it ended up being multigenerational housing — which I like better. It's both multigenerational and mixed income, so a very specific vision that really forms an entire community and offers a very particular place for people.
Wow, that's so inspiring to hear. I'm glad you were able to share some of those specific examples with us. I think that's a great note to go ahead and wrap up. In closing, I'll ask you the same question I ask all of my guests at the end: tell us a little bit about your town or your neighborhood, and what are a couple of local businesses you like to recommend people check out if they come to visit.
Just a few weeks ago, I actually moved to Richmond, Virginia, which — as I mentioned — I grew up forty-five minutes east of here. So after about five years, this is kind of a big homecoming moment for me. I live in a really beautiful old neighborhood here in Richmond. It's got tons of great corner stores and coffee shops, restaurants, and that kind of thing.
One of my favorite spots is just up the road from me — it's called the Franklin Inn. It's a little neighborhood hole-in-the-wall pub that really reminds me of my time studying abroad in Scotland, and the little neighborhood pub I was a regular at over there. It's got the old wood interior, it maybe seats twenty-five people, it's a kind of dingy little old bar. I frankly never thought I would have a little neighborhood pub like that again after leaving Scotland, so it's nice to kind of have another little hole-in-the-wall spot nearby.
I love that — making me nostalgic for the East Coast. Any other places you like to recommend?
There's also another good spot that's a little bit further away from me — a little ice cream hole-in-the-wall kind of neighborhood spot called Scoops, which happens to be right across the street from a little pocket park here in Richmond. We've got really good alleys, and this little pocket park is inside one of the alleyways. You don't really know it's there if you're just on the street — you kind of have to be a local. It's like a speakeasy park — you go back there, and all of a sudden there are like fifty people sitting out there eating ice cream on a warm summer evening. Just lovely.
Love it. Well, thank you so much, Eli. Thank you for taking the time to come on and tell us all about your work. I really appreciate it, and I'm inspired, and I hope our listeners are inspired too.
Thank you so much for having me.
As to our audience, thank you for tuning in. If there's someone in your community who you think I should have on the show, please let us know using the suggested guest form. We find out about a lot of great people using those submissions, and I'm always so grateful for those of you who take the time to let us know. I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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