Key Players & Topics In This Article
East Austin: East Austin is the quadrant of Austin that, generally speaking, is east of IH-35.
Foundation Communities: Austin-based nonprofit focused on affordable housing issues and construction.
Austin churches answer prayers for affordable housing – by building it themselves
Thursday, March 27, 2025 by Audrey McGlinchy, KUT
Standing at a pulpit on a Sunday morning in March, the Rev. Daryl Horton of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in East Austin prayed for a swift approval of building permits. An ask that, as anyone familiar with municipal bureaucracy knows, requires nothing short of a God-given miracle.
“Y’all keep praying for the city as those permits keep going through,” Horton told the hundred-some worshippers seated in pews at his feet. “We’re gonna get it taken care of so we can continue to build what God has called us to build.”
Horton was asking for help ferrying along a planned expansion of the church’s campus on East 13th Street, which will include a gymnasium and exercise center. But over the coming years, Horton will likely need to appeal to his congregation again.
That’s because Mt. Zion is not done building. The church recently partnered with a developer to replace 10 bungalows with 80 apartments on property it owns. The hope is to one day rent these homes to seniors, maybe even church members, at prices they can afford.
Horton’s congregation is all too familiar with the issue of lacking affordable housing. East Austin has been the epicenter of rising home prices in the city. The median value of homes here has doubled in the past decade, faster than prices citywide. Horton estimates half of his congregation commutes to services from nearby suburbs, where many have moved in search of cheaper housing.
“It’s such a tragedy to see how quickly East Austin has changed,” Horton said. “But what a joy it would be for people to be able to spend their twilight years … where they started.”
Mt. Zion joins a growing number of faith organizations in Austin intent on building low-cost housing. As fewer people attend services in person, some religious leaders are taking stock of empty space and wondering if it can be used to fulfill a tenet of their faith: aid those in need.
Many are also considering the revenue they can earn from selling or leasing their land to builders, and how it might help them sustain not only people in need but their own flock.
The trend has been dubbed YIGBY, or “Yes in God’s backyard.” It’s a play on YIMBY, “Yes in my backyard,” which is a response to NIMBY, or “Not in my backyard.” NIMBY is a term often assigned to those wary of building affordable housing near them.
“We are to help those who are less fortunate, those who have fallen on hard times,” Horton said. “That’s part of the dynamic and the heartbeat of what it means to be a person of faith.”
Adults in the U.S. don’t attend religious services as often as they did just two decades ago, according to a Gallup poll. That’s true for almost all major religious groups, including Catholics, Protestants and Hindus.
That is what Brooks Schuelke, a lay leader with the United Methodist Church, observed at one church in South Austin. Ward Memorial Methodist Church was built just south of downtown in 1960 and at its heyday, Schuelke estimates, hundreds of people came to worship weekly.
But by the 2010s, Schuelke said the church’s congregation had dwindled to fewer than 20 people. Church leaders began talking about closing it and in 2019, they started talking to a nonprofit about putting affordable housing on church land.
“Instead of just selling it for the highest dollar, how can we use those resources to serve our mission purposes?” Schuelke said.
Five years ago, the conference that oversees United Methodist churches in this part of Texas entered into an agreement with Foundation Communities, an affordable housing builder in Austin. The organization demolished the church and in its place built 135 apartments. The homes, which opened late last year, are currently rented to people earning low incomes. A small portion of the homes are reserved for families who have lived on the streets.
It was a long process to get from church to housing. Building anything in the U.S. is a notoriously slow process and constructing an apartment building can easily take half a decade. Developers have to secure financing, cities must approve permits and often neighbors are given time to weigh in.
The process can take even longer when it involves a religious organization.
“In any church or synagogue or faith congregation, you have lots of opinions and different views on what to do with land,” said Walter Moreau, executive director of Foundation Communities. “In my experience, the conversations can take years.”
But the lengthy process might be outweighed by location, Moreau said. Churches are some of the oldest institutions in Austin. When many of them were built, the city’s boundaries were much smaller; the edge of Austin in 1950 is now the central city. Which means Moreau can realize a goal he often only dreams of: building low-cost housing smack-dab in the middle of the city.
“To the extent that we’re able to build in Central Austin, in close proximity to schools and jobs and services … that’s really a plus,” he said.
The governing body of United Methodist churches in Central Texas decided it was important to maintain ownership of their land just south of the river, and agreed to lease it to Foundation Communities for 99 years. If organized religion sees a comeback in the next millennium, Schuelke says, leaders have the option to rebuild a church.
“If we sold it outright, we’d never be able to return to the community,” he said.
For now, the lease payments will help fund church activities throughout Central Texas. When a church loses members and their tithes, owning low-cost housing can be a way to make up the difference.
St. Austin’s Catholic Parish has owned land near the University of Texas at Austin for more than a century. Many of the church’s buildings were built in the 1950s and 1960s. Repair costs have piled up.
“The bricks were falling off the face of our church,” said Christopher Kennedy, a longtime St. Austin’s parishioner. “The reality of continuing to try to put Band-Aids on things that have been lacking maintenance for so many years was just unrealistic.”
In 2016, church leaders, including Kennedy, began talking about how they could keep up with maintenance costs and also expand the school they run. They decided to free up an acre of the church’s land on Guadalupe Street. Nearly a dozen developers submitted proposals for what could be built on this spot in West Campus: a drugstore, a movie theatre, a grocery store.
Instead, the church decided to build housing. In 2020, St. Austin’s agreed to lease the land to Greystar, the largest apartment owner in the country. Just like the United Methodist church, St. Austin’s would continue to own the land and lease it long-term to a residential developer.
The church received an upfront lease payment from Greystar for $5 million. Kennedy said the rest of the company’s rent payments are expected to cover a substantial part of the church’s costs over the 99-year lease. Kennedy and another parishioner have since started a consulting business to help churches in Austin and across the country work with developers to build housing.
The apartment building, which opened last year, rises nearly 30 stories above the Catholic church. About one-fifth of the bedrooms are rented at reduced rates to tenants, many of whom are university students.
That includes Miranda Farias, a senior at the University of Texas at Austin. She moved into the building last year and said she pays about $1,200 a month to share a two-bedroom apartment. Rents at a complex nearby start at about $1,350 a month.
Farias did not know the land underneath her apartment building was owned by a Catholic church. She said her parents raised her as Catholic, but she no longer attends mass.
“(My parents) love that I live right next to a church,” Farias said.
One hope, Kennedy conceded, is that students may wander past mass one day and find themselves a practicing Catholic the next. Having more people living near a church, faith leaders said, could help them fill up pews.
“We’re not shy about playing our church bells after the 7:30 mass on a Sunday morning,” Kennedy said, “after a Saturday night out.”
Religious institutions have an established history of helping those struggling to afford or find housing.
Each day at St. Martin’s Lutheran Church in downtown Austin, Rev. Ellen Williams set out brown paper bags full of snacks for people living on the streets: applesauce, crackers, canned sausages. The church also makes hygiene bags, which include bars of Irish Spring soap, a Colgate toothbrush and a comb.
But several years ago, Williams and others decided they wanted to do more.
Worship attendance had fallen from thousands of people to 300 a week, Williams said. One of the church’s parking lots was rarely full. What if they built low-cost apartments for seniors there? Plus, Williams said, they “could use the money.”
St. Martin’s, along with a local developer, planned to build 83 apartments, the vast majority of which would be rented to seniors at prices they could afford. But as can happen with affordable housing projects, the plans fell apart last year. The church applied for but was denied federal tax credits. Without this tax break, Williams said, they wouldn’t be able to finance the housing.
“It’s disappointing,” she said. “We’re taking a little break to figure out what’s next.”
Some government bodies have done what they can to make building housing on church land more feasible. In 2023, California passed a law allowing church leaders the right to build housing on their land without having to seek changes to local zoning rules.
Similar bills have been introduced in legislatures in Arizona, Minnesota and now Texas. Republican state Sen. Mayes Middleton from Galveston has filed Senate Bill 854 this legislative session, which would effectively accomplish the same thing as the California law. Faith leaders told KUT this would theoretically make it easier for them to build.
Regardless of any changes to state law, Rev. Horton in East Austin might still have to plead for prayers for speedy permits. But he’s hoping that in two years he’ll be able to leave the Sunday pulpit, walk the couple blocks to East 12th Street and look up at an apartment building. There, he imagines dozens of people living in housing they can afford – well into eternity.
“Part of what I’m thinking about is the future,” he said. “I want to be able to, as a leader, leave something in the legacy of Mt. Zion that is self-sustaining.”
This story was produced as part of the Austin Monitor’s reporting partnership with KUT.
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