When Pastor Adiel DePano arrived at his latest clerical appointment at the Santa Ana United Methodist Church in 2017, its secondary worship site 5 miles away was a “biohazard,” with frequent fires at neglected buildings and syringes littering the grounds.
Orange County’s homelessness crisis at the time had reached deadly heights, with 193 deaths that year and 203 the year before, the most in a 10-year period. All the while, Santa Ana’s riverbanks and highway overpasses drew flocks of the unhoused.
DePano and his clergy debated selling the hazardous 1.74 acres for $5 million. After all, their own flock had been on the decline for years. But the growing trend of leasing church land to affordable housing developers won them over instead.
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“It was a direct extension of our response to Jesus’ call to love God with everything we’ve got by loving our neighbor,” DePano said.
A housing mission
Deemed Yes in God’s Backyard, the partnership in Santa Ana is part of a growing, multi-denominational mission that advocates say could turn more than 170,000 acres of land in California into housing.
The interest has grown in recent years as local churches identify Southern California housing as a leading social cause as their congregations dwindle.
Doug Gillen, chairman of the board at the Santa Ana church, said the congregation has lost hundreds of members since the 1990s, a trend that continues for Christian denominations around the country.
While the church leased some of its land to a nearby charter school, the building on its unused grounds — which once held Sunday school and Bible study — had fallen to neglect when the homeless moved in. That pushed leadership to look beyond their church walls.
“This was going to be a positive for the larger community,” Gillen said of the housing project. “There were going to be a whole lot of other people who benefited.”
The church-to-housing trend has been bolstered with research and policy. Senate Bill 4 passed in 2023, overriding local zoning restrictions and guaranteeing “by-right” approval of new homes. It also removed California Environmental Quality Act restrictions.
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UC Berkeley’s Terner Center Policy Director David Garcia co-authored a study on the subject, which says the conversion trend has significant benefits for affordable housing developers in California competing for costly land.
“Land for affordable housing is really scarce,” Garcia said. “A lot of the best land goes to market rate developers because they can pay higher prices for it. Partnering with faith based organizations can make a lot of sense for an affordable housing developer who otherwise may have to compete for buildable lands with the broader market.”
He notes the trend is rising, although there is yet to be an official tally of the land partnerships.
In addition, the idea of churches offering up land for housing can reassure residents wary of affordable housing projects, says Tara Barauskas, executive director of affordable housing developer Community Corporation of Santa Monica.
“This can be a good strategy,” Barauskas said. “Church is an anchor in the community. There’s a certain credibility that was helpful for us.”
Community Corporation broke ground on its own conversion project in March and has begun taking names of interested residents ahead of its opening in 2028. The 95-unit complex will house low- to extremely-low-income renters on grounds owned by Culver-Palms United Methodist Church.
The abandoned Santa Ana church site is now home to the 93-unit complex Legacy Square with 33 units for people at a high-risk of returning to homelessness and the remainder aimed at low-income families. The church earns $8,000 a month from the rent, which helps boost its community programming and events.
Besides original stained-glass windows fixed into some walls, the church’s presence is voluntary, offering holiday gift and meal drives and piano lessons to resident children.
Developer National CORE, which received a $25.4 million Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities grant for Legacy Square, oversees residential placement and programming. CORE has built at least two other developments in Orange County in the years since, including Orchard View Gardens in Buena Park on St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church grounds and Santa Angelina in Placentia with the help of Church of the Blessed Sacrament.
CORE said it has several more partnerships on church land in the pipeline around Southern California, but that progress will come down to a church’s finances.
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“Many of the affordable housing funding sources are highly competitive, whether it’s low-income housing tax credits or it’s state sources,” said Alexa Washburn, National CORE’s chief development officer.
Adding that churches should never be financing these projects themselves, she’s had to turn interested groups down due to funding constraints. The Santa Ana church itself was denied state funding when it first applied. The project ultimately took two years to gain approval, two years to secure the financing and two years to build Legacy Square.
Martin Porter, president of project developer Logos Faith Development, builds affordable housing exclusively with churches. One ongoing project is Harvest Tabernacle Bible Church in Southeast Los Angeles, which was split into two phases to bring development to half of its grounds faster. To make way for demolition and construction, congregants shifted to Carson 25 miles away where their pastor leased part of another church.
The first phase features a 56-unit complex housing the formerly incarcerated. Phase 2 has been idled for years. Demolition started before the COVID-19 pandemic and left the church as a pile of rubble as project leaders decide whom to serve next and what funding can be applied toward the phase 2 construction.
Porter, who is also a pastor, said this transition is a deeper challenge for making such partnerships sustainable down the line.
“We have to keep reminding everybody what the vision is when the going gets difficult, when it takes longer to get to permits, when there’s hiccups in the funding and to keep everybody on the same page as it relates to what the vision is and why we got into this in the beginning,” he said.